The Bourbon Kings of France (27 page)

The basic ritual of Louis XIV’s court was still observed, with
Lever
and
Coucher
, daily Mass and dining in public. Everything that the King ate, even in private or between meals, was tasted by an ‘Officer of the Goblet’ for fear of poison. Hézecques tells us that though only very ancient noblemen bowed to the State Bed when Louis was not in it, even the youngest and most modern courtiers backed to the wall when he approached, shuffling their feet in the hope of attracting their sovereign’s attention. Even those on intimate terms could only address him in the third person: ‘Has the King had good sport today?’ ‘Has the King caught a cold?’

Yet fewer and fewer people bothered to go to court. This was largely the fault of the Queen, who had no use for anybody outside her own set. The Duc de Lévis remembered that, ‘Except for a few favourites, chosen by caprice or intrigue, everyone was shut out; rank, service, interest, high birth, were no longer sufficient to procure admission to the royal family’s circle.’ In consequence many noblemen began to consider presentation at court a waste of time. The Duke tells us that Versailles became ‘no more than a little provincial town which one visited reluctantly and left as quickly as possible’. Even so, the pomp and ceremony remained as splendid as ever—Châteaubriand says that those who did not know Versailles before 1789 have no conception of true magnificence.

According to the Comte de Ségur, by the 1780s, ‘from one end of the kingdom to the other, opposition had become a point of honour.’ Opposition meant different things to different people, even if the vast majority of educated Frenchmen subscribed to the Enlightenment and considered the
Ancien Régime
ruinously inadequate. Noblemen envied the power which the English ruling class had gained after their ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and, for all their love of Rousseau, had little taste for equality. Unfortunately for them,
égalité
was to be one of the French Revolution’s great slogans; by Louis XVI’s reign the sharp difference which once existed between the classes had been eroded; many an
haut bourgeois
was infinitely richer and more polished than some titled country booby squire, but the law denied him the status, privileges and opportunities which belonged to nobility alone. There was also the psychological factor, that artificial gap between noble and bourgeois, which gave rise to deep resentment. At the same time, because of the aristocratic counter-revolution, social mobility was far less in the later eighteenth century than it had been during its early years.

The dissatisfied bourgeois—businessmen, doctors, architects, lesser lawyers, minor civil servants and all the other professional people—had small concern for the miserable lot of the peasants. Throughout the countryside, hatred of the nobility was growing. Because of the economic depression, landowners were increasingly short of money in the 1780s and resorted to what has been called ‘the seignorial reaction’; not only were long-forgotten feudal dues exacted once again and the
corvée
extended, but common land was expropriated. Lawyers busily disinterred old title deeds and terrorized peasants with their documents. In consequence there was a vast increase in the already large numbers of indigent rural poor, while bad harvests drove even the most stolid peasant into a fury of resentment at the lord of the manor’s greed.

Yet, despite all Michelet’s horror-stories about the Bastille, the government was far from harsh. Someone asked the nonagenarian Duc de Richelieu—he did not die until 1788—if life had changed. The Duke replied that under Louis XIV people had not dared to even speak, that under Louis XV they had whispered, and that now they spoke out loud. As Tocqueville points out, Beaumarchais’s brief imprisonment shocked Paris far more than the persecution of the Huguenots in the previous century.

When Louis first read Beaumarchais’s
Le Mariage de Figaro
in 1781—he read it aloud to Marie Antoinette—he cried out ‘Detestable’, complaining that, ‘That man makes fun of everything which should be respected’, and forbade the play’s performance. For two years Beaumarchais campaigned to save his play, giving readings and enlisting support from very important personages like Artois. The play tells how a
grand seigneur
, Count Almaviva, plots the seduction of a servant girl and how her fiancé—his valet, Figaro—joins with the Countess in thwarting the Count’s attempt to revive the
droit de seigneur
. Throughout, the valet’s superiority over the nobleman is emphasized, and the unfairness of the social order—‘You nobles merely take the trouble to be born’, Figaro tells the Count. Eventually the King gave way to the popular clamour, and the play’s first night on 27 April 1783 was a
succès de scandale
, cheered to the echo by the glittering audience whom the author ridiculed so subtly; some spectators realized its implications, but the fashionable world ignored them. Beaumarchais at once published a mocking pamphlet, whereupon he was arrested and sent to the St Lazare prison; the public outcry was so enormous that he was released after only twenty-four hours.

Talleyrand’s claim that anyone who had not lived under the
Ancien Régime
did not know how sweet life could be, has often been questioned. Nevertheless he seems to be born out by Tocqueville. ‘France in those days was a nation of pleasure seekers, all for the joy of life … The upper classes were far more interested in living beautifully than in comfort, in making a name for themselves than in making money.’ It was not only the world of Beaumarchais but of Mozart too, of Gluck and Grétry. Of its popular songs,
Plaisir d’Amour
, with its bittersweet yet simple elegance, conveys perfectly the spirit of the times. Stateliness went hand in hand with simplicity—at court, French country dances alternated with minuets. The fashionable painters, perhaps a little too relaxed, were Mme Vigée Le Brun, Greuze and
‘L’aimable Frago’
(as Fragonard liked to be called), though Neo-classical giants were emerging—the sensation of the Salon of 1785 was Louis David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’. The period’s delightful furniture was also Neo-classical, made by Reisener, Weisweiller, Molitor, Schichtig, and Jacob. Under the influence of Rousseau, clothes were becoming simpler, though no less elegant; men no longer wore wigs but powdered their hair and often wore riding boots and English hunting coats and breeches. Women tried to look like shepherdesses. Furthermore, the eighteenth century had invented the café and the restaurant—by 1785 there were 600 cafés in Paris alone. Even the life of the poorer classes could be surprisingly gay, to judge from the novels of Restif de la Bretonne, who writes not only of the debaucheries of underworld Paris, but also of the joyous life of the well-to-do peasant household.

In 1783 Yolande de Polignac coaxed Marie Antoinette into persuading the King to appoint Charles-Alexandre de Calonne as Controller-General. He was a most agreeable man in his late forties, handsome, always beautifully dressed and invariably charming, with exquisite taste in pictures (he owned ten Titians), furniture and mistresses: the Duc de Lévis said that he was the only member of the
noblesse de la robe
who knew how to behave like a gentleman. He had had an impressive career in administration, having been an
Intendant
for nearly twenty years, and he was hailed as a new Colbert. Calonne always lived above his means and on being appointed he joked, ‘The finances of France are in a deplorable state and I would never have accepted responsibility for them if my own were not in an equally shaky condition.’ His policy was original, to say the least. He believed, ‘A man who wants to borrow must appear to be rich; to seem rich one has to impress by lavish expenditure.’ Calonne had no problems with Marie Antoinette, who was enchanted by him (whatever her loyal Mme de Campan may say to the contrary). When the Queen made one of her demands for an enormous sum of ready cash, he replied, ‘If it is possible, Madame, it is already done; if it is impossible it shall be done.’ He levied no new taxes. His method was the same as Necker’s—simply to borrow.

Yet outside matters of finance, Calonne was surprisingly imaginative. He tried to encourage a French industrial revolution on the English model, and—with Louis’s support—suggested to a number of rich noblemen that they invest in mines and factories. But like his master, the Controller-General had no understanding of the way in which Pitt in England was able to dispose of a national debt far larger than the French deficit, by means of a sinking fund.

Two years after Calonne’s appointment, the monarchy was badly shaken by the comic opera affair of the Queen’s necklace. A seedy young adventuress (and occasional prostitute), the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois, had been ‘befriended’ by the Cardinal de Rohan, Prince-Bishop of the fabulously rich see of Strasbourg and Grand Almoner of France. This ornament of the boudoirs was a handsome, womanizing fop in his forties, straight out of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, whose boundless conceit was matched only by his fatuity. His conduct as French ambassador in Vienna had been so scandalous that the Empress Maria Theresa had actually asked for his recall; later, as a friend of Mme du Barry, he had offended the Queen. However, Louis de Rohan had ambitions of becoming a second Richelieu, and was convinced that only Marie Antoinette’s disfavour stood between him and the highest office. Somehow Mme de la Motte persuaded the Cardinal that she had the Queen’s ear; the Countess arranged an ‘interview’, in the park at Versailles on a moonless night, Marie Antoinette being impersonated by a young prostitute from the Palais Royal, dressed in white, who bore a striking resemblance to her and who gave him a rose. Rohan was completely taken in. His pliability was in part due to the influence of the self-styled alchemist, magician and prophet, Count Cagliostro, who had thoroughly bemused this useful patron and had ‘foreseen’ a woman in white transforming the Cardinal’s life.

It was popular gossip that the Queen had been offered a wonderful diamond necklace by her jewellers at an astronomical price. Mme de la Motte informed the Cardinal that the Queen wanted him to buy the necklace for her discreetly—the commission was confirmed by forged letters. With staggering credulity, Rohan fetched the necklace from the jewellers, telling them that they would be paid in due course, and gave it to the Countess to take to Versailles—her husband speedily sold the stones in London. The theft came to light when the jewellers demanded payment from the Queen, and in August 1785 the Cardinal was arrested at Versailles as he was proceeding, vested for Mass, down the Hall of Mirrors to the Chapel Royal.

Next year Mme de la Motte was sentenced to be branded, but Rohan was acquitted by the Parlement of Paris; his acquittal was seen as a slur on the Queen and also as an example of social injustice. Louis, who was furious, banished the Cardinal to the country, thus heaping even more odium on poor Marie Antoinette, who was entirely innocent. (Later Rohan reformed, spending his last years in something very like sanctity.) Popular suspicions about the Queen’s frivolity—and also her spitefulness—deepened. ‘A nice little smear of dirt on both crown and crozier’, commented an ‘Enlightened’ councillor of the Parlement. None the less, the affair helped to forge an alliance between the clergy and the lawyers who had saved the Cardinal. Mme de Campan, a lady-in-waiting whose memoirs are sometimes a little unreliable, spoke the truth when she said that the Affair of the Necklace marked ‘the end of happy times’. Indeed Napoleon actually considered it to be a partial cause of the Revolution.

By 1786 even Calonne had to realize that a policy of pure optimism alone could no longer suffice. There was an annual deficit which he estimated at 112 million livres. He explained to the hapless King, who had no inkling that things were so desperate, that monies borrowed over the last ten years amounted to the then almost incredible sum of 1,250 million livres (well over £ 50 million in English money of the period). But for all his frivolity, the Controller-General could be both clearheaded and courageous. He proposed a programme of radical reform, derived partly from Turgot, which included a land tax from which no one, not even the clergy, would be exempt. Hoping to obtain as much support as possible, he persuaded Louis to call an Assembly of Notables, which met at Versailles in February 1787. It consisted of 144 persons, but had only twenty-seven representatives from the Tiers Etat (or Commons).

Unfortunately, the Notables were already convinced that the deficit was entirely due to the government’s mismanagement and that the solution was to force the King to share his power with the nobility, who would run things properly. Admittedly, of the 400,000 persons of noble birth in France at that time, most were small country gentlemen with minute incomes (in one case as little as £ 26 a year). But they felt as one with Dukes who possessed annual revenues in excess of £ 100,000 in their determination not to pay taxes.

When the Assembly met, the Controller-General addressed it with admirable frankness. Explaining that there was no way of remedying the deficit other than by taxing the privileged orders, he stressed that most of their rights and privileges would be untouched. The Franco-Irish Archbishop Dillon of Narbonne protested, ‘M de Calonne wants to bleed France; and he is asking the Notables’ advice on whether to bleed her in the foot, the arm or the jugular vein.’ The Assembly demanded to see detailed accounts of national expenditure. The debates became bogged down in a welter of recrimination. Calonne, whom overwork had driven to the verge of collapse, forgot his manners for once and told the Notables that the King would introduce the reforms whether they liked them or not. He enraged the Assembly still further by a clumsy attempt to recruit public support, circulating a pamphlet which attacked the privileged orders and their refusal to pay their fair share of taxes; he asked the King to arrest twenty of the more outspoken Notables. Louis thought he had gone mad, lamenting that Vergennes was no longer alive to help him, and he dismissed Calonne at the end of April. Later, when the Notables informed him that the ex-Controller-General had concealed the true magnitude of the deficit, the King smashed a chair in his rage and roared that he should have had him hanged. Nevertheless, when the Parlement attempted to try Calonne, Louis stopped the proceedings. The former minister fled to England, to live in elegant exile.