Revolution! France – Chapter 9 – The Brick Chronicle

Having successfully helped the Americans break free from the power of a king so they might establish an egalitarian republic devoted to the cause of liberty, the Marquis de Lafayette returned to his native France in 1785 to find its people still divided along age-old lines into three distinct estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. At their head was a monarch whose dynasty stretched back eight hundred years: Louis XVI. The thirty-year-old king was married to an Austrian princess named Marie Antoinette.

The royal family and their court lived in opulence at the Palace of Versailles twelve miles outside Paris. Six percent of the national budget went toward the expenses of maintaining the king and queen’s lifestyle. Louis XVI was an introvert who disdained travel and whose main joy in life was hunting—an activity to which he devoted many hours three times a week or more. The grounds surrounding the palace were kept well-stocked with deer, wild boar, and swallows, which the king hunted on horseback or on foot with his pack of hunting dogs.

The king’s other interests were studying from books and locksmithing. In an attic room above his living quarters, he enjoyed tinkering with and constructing his own sets of locks and keys. On one occasion, he entered his private workshop to find his beloved instruments and machinery in disarray due to an incursion of rambunctious cats who lived on the palace roof. He chased after one feline intruder with a blacksmith hammer, which he brought down swiftly on its head. Only later did the king discover that he had killed the queen’s beloved pet, Mademoiselle Grimalkin.

On the night of their arranged marriage, fifteen-year-old Louis and fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette were followed into their bedchamber by a large retinue of the court. An archbishop blessed the nuptial bed before King Louis XV handed his grandson a nightgown and the Duchesse de Chartes handed a gown to the young bride. But to the embarrassment of the court and disappointment of the people of France, the marriage would not be consummated that night, or any night for the next seven years.

Rumors spread and illegally published pamphlets mocked the failure of the royal couple to procreate in extremely graphic verse, asking, “Can the King do it? Can’t the King do it?” The queen’s unsatisfied-by-the-King sexual urges were the subject of many popular satires of the early 1780s in which she was portrayed as an insatiable nymphomaniac prone to masturbation, lesbian flings, and adulterous encounters with noblemen and clergy. Five hundred and thirty four copies of the highly pornographic Historical Essay on the Life of Marie Antoinette were burned by the hangman at the Bastille, yet the document remained widely distributed in Paris.

In reality, though the queen surrounded herself with admirers, she was most likely quite chaste. Louis XVI had been born with a medical condition making sex painful if not impossible, and it was not until a visit from Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, that the king was convinced to have a minor surgery to correct the issue. Soon after, the royal couple celebrated the birth of a daughter and then two sons born in 1781 and 1785. A second daughter, born in 1786, did not survive infancy.

With the national budget having been driven massively into debt by the 1.3 billion livres in military and financial support sent to the Americans, the queen was criticized as a spendthrift with a taste for gold and diamonds, a love of gambling, and an obsession with wearing the latest fashions at her extravagant weekly balls, all-night parties, sumptuous banquets, and outings to the theater, opera, ballet, and galleries. The public soon dubbed the unpopular queen “Madame Defecit.”

Catholicism was the officially established religion of France at the time, and the members of its clergy were a division known as the First Estate. Though comprising less than 1 percent of the French population, they owned 10 percent of the land, were exempt from all taxes, and were supported by a 10 percent tax on the commoners, usually paid in crops by the peasantry. While most local parish priests remained relatively poor, the church’s wealth accumulated at the top of its hierarchy among ostentatious bishops who came from long-established noble families. Protestants were a persecuted minority in France and not allowed to worship in public.

The nobility was France’s Second Estate, comprising 2 percent of the population, but owning 20 percent of the country’s land. The nobility originated as a hierarchy of feudal lords who offered military service to the king and presided over fiefdoms where they policed and taxed the peasantry. Membership in the nobility was hereditary, but certain expensive offices within the government could be purchased, which conferred nobility on the holder. Enjoying a monopoly on top positions in the government, the army, and the judicial courts, the nobles formed an aristocracy that controlled much of the country’s wealth and power.

The other 97 percent of the population formed the Third Estate, or commoners. A small subset of this group were wealthy, educated merchants, lawyers, traders, and businessmen, but the great majority were poor peasant farmers or urban wage-earners. An astounding 40 percent of the French population was penniless and subsisted on begging, charity, or crime. The vast majority of the tax burden fell on the Third Estate, too. Peasants were also subject to the corvée—compulsory unpaid labor maintaining roads—which took them away from work on their farms.

In a typical year, between 45 and 60 percent of working people’s income was spent on bread. In years of grain shortages, increased prices could drive this number over 90 percent. The threat of starvation repeatedly lead to the breakout of bread riots and demonstrations in which the poor protested the government’s inability or unwillingness to keep the price of bread under control. The harvest of 1788 was ruined by a summer hailstorm that devastated crops in many regions and had such large hailstones that horses were killed as they grazed in the fields.

After being lavishly fêted by the king and queen at Versailles, Lafayette traveled to the province of Auvergne where he returned to his boyhood home for the first time in ten years. There he was aghast at the sight of starving peasants who begged him for food, money, clothing, and to keep them from being evicted from their homes. Finding that his family’s own granaries were overflowing, he ordered three thousand bushels distributed to the poor. When his overseers pointed out that high prices had made it the best time to sell his grain, Lafayette rebuked them, saying, “No! Now is the best time to give it away!”

Lafayette thus became one of the few public figures in France revered by both the royalty and the common people. With great resolve, he dedicated himself to working toward bringing republican reforms and free-market economics to his homeland for the betterment of his countrymen. Inspired by the success of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Lafayette penned a pamphlet severely criticizing the powerful government- licensed corporation known as the “Ferme,” which drove up prices by creating artificial shortages and taxing goods each time they crossed a provincial border.

Though this popular pamphlet increased Lafayette’s reputation among the poor, the king and his finance minister Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, who had close ties to the Ferme, claimed they could do nothing against fees and duty rights that dated back to the Middle Ages. The queen had ordered the construction of an uninhabited peasant hamlet on the grounds of Versailles and enjoyed strolling among its thatched-roof houses and artificial stream to the applause of her courtiers. She found peasant life quite devoid of the hardships claimed by reformers like Lafayette and thought that it was, in its simple way, quite pleasant.

Calonne had taken over the nation’s finances from Jacques Necker, who had kept the perilous state of the country’s fiscal troubles concealed by publishing misleading statistics. Calonne continued Necker’s policy of securing massive loans to keep the government afloat amid a sea of debt, but by August 1786, French credit was exhausted and Calonne was forced to inform the king that the monarchy was facing bankruptcy. The way out of the crisis, proposed Calonne, was to immediately enact huge cuts in government spending and sweeping revenue reforms aimed at the wealthiest classes, including a universal land tax and a stamp tax.

The king backed Calonne’s plan, but for these measures to be registered into law, they would first need approval by the French high courts. Comprised solely of members of the nobility, the courts were habitually averse to any financial reforms that would strip away the privileges of their own estate. So to garner the needed support, Calonne advised the king to call an Assembly of Notables consisting of a handpicked set of princes, archbishops, mayors, magistrates, and other illustrious members of the nobility. The king hoped to appeal to their sense of honor and patriotism in order to endorse Calonne’s reforms. The 144 selected members convened before the king on February 22, 1787.

Discussion and debate proceeded for weeks. A faction of nobles, lead by Lafayette, were willing to press the king’s reforms even farther than proposed, but a majority took issue with the new taxes. Those who still believed in the cooked numbers supplied by Necker refused to supply more revenue for Calonne to squander. Calonne’s credibility was quickly undermined by his own notoriously opulent lifestyle and his involvement in a shady land speculation scandal. On April 8, the king dismissed Calonne, and in Paris, crowds seeking a scapegoat for their miseries burned effigies of the disgraced finance minister at Pont Neuf.

By May, the Notables were at an impasse concerning new taxes, their only consensus being that they lacked authority to approve them on behalf of the people. Frustrated by their inaction, Lafayette stood before his fellow nobles and suggested it was time for the king to convoke the Estates General. At previous times in the history of the French monarchy, this large body of representatives from all three estates of the realm had been temporarily convened in times of crisis. Fearing that such an assembly might now be used to permanently usurp power from the throne, the king rejected the notion and dismissed the Notables back to their homes.

In fall of 1787, George Washington sent Lafayette a copy of the just-completed United States Constitution. Further inspired to bring about such republican reforms in his own country, Lafayette helped organize an informal “constitutional club.” Its progressive-minded members included the prominent mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet; the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly; champion of the poor, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld; and the enlightened clergyman Abbé Sieyès. In Paris, as the US minister to France, Thomas Jefferson also attended the meetings of what he considered the country’s “real patriots.”

The king selected Archbishop Lomenie de Brienne to replace Calonne and act as his chief minister in continuing to push forward modernizing reforms. Over the next sixteen months, Brienne slashed royal spending and succeeded in having measures passed into law by the high courts, which replaced the forced labor of the corvée with a monetary tax and decriminalized Protestant worship. Further liberal reforms outlawed the use of tortures like the crushing boot, thumbscrews, and waterpipes to extract information from prisoners. Breaking on the wheel and burning at the stake, however, would continue as legal forms of capital punishment.

When the king’s proposed land and stamp taxes went before the high court of Paris, they were adamantly rejected. The court echoed the call for an Estates General, noting that “taxes should be consented to by those who bear them.” In response to this affront to the king, Brienne had the court’s most outspoken members arrested. Under the guise of judicial reform, the king then issued edicts abolishing the high courts, replacing them with new civil courts stripped of the power to obstruct legislation. Throughout France, there were protests against the monarchy’s strong-arm tactics, and the high courts in the provinces continued to meet and defiantly declared the king’s new edicts illegal.

On June 7, 1788, Brienne ordered two regiments of soldiers to Grenoble in the southeast of France to assist the local governor, the Duke of Clermont-Tonerre, in arresting the members of the high court. But protesters filled the city streets and blocked the soldiers’ advance. Goading and shouting insults at the soldiers quickly escalated when tiles were thrown down from the high rooftops onto the soldiers below. The commander of one regiment ordered his men to hold their fire even as he himself was struck in the face by a tile. Soldiers from the second regiment, however, shot into the crowd and killed a ten-year-old boy, and a hat maker was fatally bayoneted in the back.

The bloodied clothes of the victims were paraded through the streets, and church bells were rung, summoning peasants from the countryside into the city. Clermont-Tonerre and the soldiers fled, and the riotous crowd ransacked the governor’s residence, looting the wine from his cellars, smashing or burning his furniture in the streets, and shattering his mirrors.

Public outcry continued throughout France for weeks, and by August of 1788, Brienne fully capitulated, reinstating the high courts, setting May 1 of the following year as the date for the Estates General to convene, and then resigning his post. Bowing to public demand, the king returned Jacques Necker to office to oversee the nation’s finances. Necker further endeared himself to the commoners when he announced that at the upcoming Estates General, the Third Estate would be represented by twice the number of delegates as the First or Second Estates. The elections held in early 1789 were open to males older than twenty-five, but a high poll tax effectively disenfranchised the poorer half of the population. In all, 291 nobles, 300 clergy, and 610 commoners were chosen to represent all the people of France.

In the months before the Estates General gathered, class tensions escalated. January saw the publication of the influential pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? by Abbé Sieyès, which answered its own titular question by declaring that “the Third Estate is the nation.” “It is impossible to say what place the nobility and clergy ought to occupy in the social order,” he argued. “This is equivalent to asking what place should be assigned to a malignant disease which preys upon and tortures the body of a sick man.” Popular prints of the time depicted a peasant tiller of the fields bearing on his back members of the privileged estates.

In April, in the midst of a famine that had driven up the price of bread beyond the reach of the poor, a rumor spread in Paris that the wealthy wallpaper manufacturer Révellion was planning to cut worker wages. Despite this being false—Révellion was a liberal committed to the cause of the workers—a crowd of thousands stormed Révellion’s house and factory with shouts of “Death to the rich! Death to aristocrats!” Since his wine cellar contained thousands of bottles, the mob could not even make its way through it all as they looted and burned the premises before the city police force, known as the French Guard, arrived. When the crowd turned its violence on the Guard, the officers opened fire, killing and wounding hundreds.

Riots were not contained to Paris, and the disgruntled mobs also targeted the immensely wealthy members of the First Estate. In Provence, the Bishop of Sisteron barely escaped a stoning. In Toulon, a bishop’s palace was burned to the ground, and in Aix, the archbishop expressed his terror: “The common people in their hatred threaten nothing but death and speak of nothing but tearing out our hearts and eating them.” It was in this atmosphere of national crisis that the 1,200 delegates traveled from across the realm to Versailles to decide the destiny of their nation.

Opening Quote

Opening Quote

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