Liberty or Death

The French Revolution

Peter McPhee

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780300219500
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

A strinking account of the impact of the French Revolution in Paris, across the French countryside, and around the globe The French Revolution has fascinated, perplexed, and inspired for more than two centuries. It was a seismic event that radically transformed France and launched shock waves across the world. In this provocative new history, Peter McPhee draws on a lifetime's study of eighteenth-century France and Europe to create an entirely fresh account of the world's first great modern revolution—its origins, drama, complexity, and significance. Was the Revolution a major turning point in French—even world—history, or was it instead a protracted period of violent upheaval and warfare that wrecked millions of lives? McPhee evaluates the Revolution within a genuinely global context: Europe, the Atlantic region, and even farther. He acknowledges the key revolutionary events that unfolded in Paris, yet also uncovers the varying experiences of French citizens outside the gates of the city: the provincial men and women whose daily lives were altered—or not—by developments in the capital. Enhanced with evocative stories of those who struggled to cope in unpredictable times, McPhee's deeply researched book investigates the changing personal, social, and cultural world of the eighteenth century. His startling conclusions redefine and illuminate both the experience and the legacy of France's transformative age of revolution. "McPhee…skillfully and with consummate clarity recounts one of the most complex events in modern history…. [This] extraordinary work is destined to be the standard account of the French Revolution for years to come."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

CHAPTER ONE

PATCHWORKS OF POWER AND PRIVILEGE

FRANCE IN THE 1780S

LOUIS XVI MADE HIS CEREMONIAL ENTRANCE INTO REIMS FOR HIS coronation in June 1775 in a massive new carriage weighing one and a half tonnes and costing at least 50,000 livres, about seventy times the annual stipend of most parish priests. The panels of the carriage were decorated with the lily symbol of the Bourbon family (the fleur de lys), the coats of arms of France and Navarre, and gold statuettes, as befitted the Rex Christianissimus.¹ The governor of the province of Champagne, the Duc de Bourbon, presented Louis with the keys to the city. Dressed in purple velvet and ermine, he was anointed in the cathedral with drops of the holy oil used in Reims in 496 to baptize Clovis, the first king of the Franks (Fig. 1). Louis swore to protect the Church and to exterminate heretics; in turn the archbishop enjoined him to give charity to the poor, to set an example to the rich, and to keep the peace. The twenty-year-old king was later joined by Queen Marie-Antoinette, aged nineteen, and laid hands on 2,400 sufferers from scrofula (a tuberculous disease of the lymph glands in the neck) who came forward to be cured of the ‘king’s evil’ by his touch.

Across eight centuries the Bourbon monarchy had stitched together a huge kingdom, the largest in Europe outside Russia. It was a patchwork of privilege, everywhere marked by the accretions of history and custom. From the languages spoken by the king’s subjects to the laws and courts that regulated their behaviour, from the systems of provincial administration to the structures of the Church, from levels of taxation to systems of weights and measures, every dimension of public life bore the imprint of eight centuries of state-building and compromise with newly incorporated provinces. Privilege was endemic. Not only did particular towns and provinces enjoy privileged status, for example, in levels of taxation, but across the kingdom the corporate privileges of the Church and nobility determined how their members were taxed and judged, and in turn how they taxed and judged others.

The two most important characteristics the inhabitants of eighteenth-century France had in common were that 97 per cent of them were Catholic and all were subjects of Louis XVI, ‘by the grace of God, King of France and of Navarre’. The awe-inspiring palace at Versailles, with its seven hundred rooms and garden facade of 575 metres largely completed under Louis XIV by 1710, was redolent of the might of a monarch with absolute powers and responsible to God alone for the well-being of his people. His successors Louis XV and Louis XVI continued the display of majesty.

But France in the 1780s was a society in which people’s deepest sense of identity was attached to their particular province or pays. While Louis’ distant predecessor Francis I had required through the 1539 edict of Villers-Cotterêts that all Church records and legal and administrative documents be kept in French, the reality was that in daily life only a minority of the monarch’s subjects used a form of French that would have been intelligible to him. Across most of the country French was the daily language only of those involved in administration, commerce and the professions. Members of the clergy also used it, as well as Latin, although they commonly preached in local dialects or languages. Several million people in Languedoc spoke variants of Occitan; Flemish was spoken in the north-east; German in Lorraine. There were minorities of Basques and Catalans along the Spanish border, and perhaps one million Celts in Brittany. When the Abbé Albert, from Embrun in the southern Alps, travelled westwards through the Auvergne, he noted:

I was never able to make myself understood by the peasants I met on the road. I spoke to them in French, I spoke to them in my native patois, I even tried to speak to them in Latin, but all to no avail. When at last I was tired of talking to them without their understanding a word, they in their turn spoke to me in a language of which I could make no more sense.²

Even in the northern half of France, local dialects of French—‘parlers’ or, more pejoratively, ‘patois’—varied between regions.

France was characterized by diversity and contrast in every way. Topographically it ranges from the highest mountains in Europe—Mont Blanc at 4,800 metres and the Pyrenees at 3,000 metres—to the broad, flat plains of the Paris basin, and the rugged landscape of the Massif Central (Map 1). Agricultural practices were equally diverse, as were the habitats of the mass of people, from the tightly clustered villages and small towns, or bourgs, of the south to the isolated hamlets and scattered farms in the west and north-west. The regional diversity of landscape, architecture and produce so loved by tourists today was then far more marked and complex. It was within this diversity that the drama of the decade after 1789 was to be enacted.

More than twice as many people now live in France as in the eighteenth century. But the countryside of the 1780s would have seemed very crowded to us, for this was predominantly a rural society in which most people tilled the soil and consumed its produce directly. Ten times as many people worked the land as do today. Only two persons in ten lived in towns with a population of more than 2,000. Instead, most people inhabited the 40,000 rural communities or parishes with, on average, a population of about 600.³

It was this rural population that underwrote the costs of the three pillars of authority and privilege in eighteenth-century France: the monarchy, the Catholic Church (or ‘First Estate’ of the realm) and the nobility (the ‘Second Estate’). The taxes of the royal state, the tithes paid to the Church, and the feudal dues levied by seigneurs together amounted to anywhere between 15 and 40 per cent of peasant produce, depending on the region. And more people were seeking to extract a living from the soil than ever before. Despite the ever-present threat of harvest failure, after 1750 a long series of adequate harvests disturbed the demographic equilibrium of births and deaths: the population increased from perhaps 24.5 million to 28 million by the 1780s.⁴

Most of rural France was characterized by subsistence polyculture: that is, a system of family labour that sought to produce a wide range of plant- and animal-based foodstuffs and clothing. Only in fertile regions close to large cities—for example, the Brie and Beauce near Paris—could owners or renters of substantial farms concentrate their enterprise on a single commodity such as wheat. Most communities had complex economies that mixed production for a local urban centre with subsistence agriculture for local needs.

Two contrasting communities at opposite ends of the kingdom typify this complexity. In the small village (population 280) of Menucourt, just twenty miles north-west of Paris, the large estate of the seigneur Chassepot de Beaumont was used to grow cereal crops for the city. The peasants in Menucourt were also involved in working wood from the chestnut trees to the south of the village into wine-barrels and stakes; others quarried stone for new buildings in Rouen and Paris. This market-oriented activity was supplemented by a subsistence economy on small plots of vines, vegetables, fruit trees (apple, pear, plum, cherry) and walnut trees, the gathering in the forest of chestnuts and mushrooms, and the milk and meat of sheep and cows. As in villages everywhere in France, people plied several trades: for example, Pierre Huard ran the local inn and sold bulk wine in Menucourt, but he was also the village stonemason.⁵

Different in almost every way was the village of Gabian, thirteen miles north of Béziers, near the Mediterranean coastline of Languedoc. Indeed, most people in Gabian could not have communicated with their fellow subjects in Menucourt for, like most Languedociens, they spoke Occitan in daily life. Gabian was a large (770 inhabitants) and important village, with a constant supply of fresh spring water, and since 988 its seigneur had been the Bishop of Béziers. He spent little time there, but extracted a maze of seigneurial dues from the community, including one hundred setiers (a setier was here about eighty-five litres) of barley, twenty-eight setiers of wheat, 880 bottles of olive oil, eighteen chickens, four pounds of beeswax, four partridges and a rabbit. Reflecting Gabian’s ancient role as a market centre between the mountains and coast, its inhabitants also had to pay the bishop one pound of pepper, two ounces of nutmeg and two ounces of cloves. Whereas Menucourt was linked to wider markets by its cropping, timber and quarrying industries, Gabian’s cash economy was based on extensive vineyards and the wool of one thousand sheep, which grazed on the stony hillsides that ringed the village. A score of weavers of the sheeps’ wool worked for merchants from the textile town of Bédarieux to the north.⁶

A personal insight into this rural world is provided by Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, born in 1734 in the village of Sacy, on the border of the provinces of Burgundy and Champagne. Restif, who moved to Paris and became notorious for his ribald stories in Le Paysan perverti (1775), later wrote down his recollections of Sacy in La Vie de mon père (1779). He recalled the happy marriage his relative Marguerite had made to Covin, ‘a great joker, well-built, a vain country-bumpkin, the great local story-teller’:

Marguerite had about 120 livres worth of arable land, and Covin had 600 livres worth, some in arable land, some under vines, and some fields dispersed in the grasslands; there were six parts of each type, six of wheat, six of oats or barley, and six fallow . … as for the woman, she had the profit of her spinning, the wool of seven or eight sheep, the eggs of a dozen hens, and the milk of a cow, with the butter and cheese she could extract from it. … Covin was also a weaver, and his wife had some domestic work; her lot in consequence must have been pleasant enough.

The simple term ‘paysan’—like its English equivalent ‘peasant’—disguises the complexities of rural society that would be revealed in the varied behaviour of rural people during the Revolution.⁷ The peasantry made up about four-fifths of the ‘Third Estate’ or ‘commoners’, but across the country it owned only about one-third of the land outright. In areas of large-scale agriculture, like the Île-de-France around Paris, farm labourers were as much as half the population. In most regions, however, the bulk of the population were owners or renters of small farms, or sharecroppers, and many of them were also reliant on practising a craft or on waged work. In all rural communities there was a minority of farmers, often dubbed the coqs du village, who were tenant farmers or owners of large farms. Large villages also had a minority of people—priests, artisans, textile workers—who were not peasants at all, but who commonly owned some land, such as the vegetable garden belonging to the priest. The heart of textile manufacturing was also to be found in rural France through peasant women’s part-time work linked to provincial towns, such as sheepskin gloves in Millau, ribbons in St-Étienne, lace in Le Puy, cottons in Elbeuf and Rouen, woollens in Amiens, Abbeville and Bédarieux, and silk in Lyon and Nîmes.

The backbreaking work performed in town and country to satisfy the needs of the household was the bedrock of the entire social order. A rural world in which households engaged in a complex strategy to secure their own subsistence could inevitably expect only low yields for grain crops grown in unsuitable or exhausted soil. The dry and stony soils of a southern village like Gabian were no more suited to growing grain crops than were the heavy, damp soils of Normandy: in both places, however, a large proportion of arable land was set aside for grain to meet both local needs and the requirements of seigneurial exactions and tithes. Consequently, most rural communities had restricted ‘surpluses’ that could be marketed to cities. Far more important to most peasants were nearby bourgs, whose regular market fairs were as much an occasion for the collective rituals of local cultures as for the exchange of produce.

While every provincial town and province had its specific history and institutions, they were all part of a kingdom based on ‘corporations’. Individual occupations, towns, provinces, and in particular the Church and nobility, had corporate ‘rights’ and ‘privileges’ with which the monarchy in Versailles was in perpetual negotiation. In theory, French society mirrored a medieval model in which the three social orders had obligations to pray, to fight and (for the 99 per cent in the Third Estate) to work. The monarchy had long recognized the privileged status of the Church and nobility through, most importantly, separate law codes for their members and tax exemptions. The Church paid only a voluntary contribution (don gratuit) to the state, usually no more than 5 per cent of its estimated annual income of 250 million livres, by decision of its governing synod. Across the century, however, the monarchy had to grapple with the increasing costs of international warfare and empire, and had succeeded in imposing a series of tax levies—the capitation, dixième and vingtième—on the property of nobles. By the 1780s these universal taxes were bringing in more than the taille, the main direct tax on property.⁸ But taxation remained variable across regions and social orders: in Languedoc, for example, noble landowners were now paying 8–15 per cent of their annual revenues in direct taxes, as much as commoners in some areas. In general, however, commoners paid higher rates, and a range of other taxes besides.⁹

Rural communities consumed so much of what they produced that towns and cities faced chronic problems of food supply and in return there was a limited rural demand for their manufactures. Although only 20 per cent of French people lived in urban communities, in a European context France was remarkable for the number and size of its cities and towns. There were eight cities with more than 50,000 people (Paris was easily the largest, with perhaps 650,000 people, then Lyon with 145,000, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes, Lille, Rouen and Toulouse), and another seventy with 10,000–40,000. These cities and towns all had some large-scale manufacturing, but most were domina...