The Days of the French Revolution (3 page)

Then there were seigneurial privileges by which noble landlords exercised control over manorial courts and over hunting rights and by which they enjoyed such
droits
as
droits de colombier
, which ensured that their pigeons were fed at their tenants’ expense, and
banalitès
which ensured them a monopoly of the local corn mill, wine press and oven. These feudal rights, demanded with ever-increasing severity, were often farmed out to lawyers and other experts who squeezed as much profit as they could out of them, who were constantly discovering forgotten
droits
, reimposing obligations, appropriating common lands, planting trees along the edges of peasants’ fields and expelling them from forests. The ‘feudal reaction’, as it came to be called, naturally increased the peasants’ resentment against the social order which made such impositions possible, and which imposed upon them, and upon them alone, the obligation to draw lots for service in the militia.

The nobility were not, however, a unified force, except in their not unjustified belief that their order, by encouragement and patronage as well as by the exertions of some of their members, had made France the most civilized country on the continent of Europe. There was once a time – some considered that the time had not passed – when the nobleman chose to suppose himself the heir of the Frankish invaders, and that the commoner, so far beneath him, was the descendant of those Romano-Celtic peoples, timid and unwarlike, whom his ancestors had conquered. The nobleman had, in fact, been a member of the
noblesse d’épée
who followed the King to war and, as a feudal landowning class, helped him to rule the country in peace. But in more recent times this could no longer be maintained. The Kings of France had not only created a new aristocracy, the
noblesse de robe
, by granting hereditary titles to their Ministers and other useful servants, but had sold these titles, together with public offices, to rich and socially ambitious members of the bourgeoisie. Daughters of these newly ennobled bourgeois families, bringing with them large dowries from their fathers, had married into less
well-off families of the
noblesse d’épée
, while matches were also made between the
noblesse d’épée
and the
noblesse de robe
. Some of the more ancient families, particularly those of the
noblesse de court
, continued to look down upon this new aristocracy from whom they were still distinguished by being allowed certain privileges denied to the
noblesse de robe
such as full membership of the Order of the Holy Spirit, whose blue ribbon the King habitually wore.

Sharp as distinctions were between certain jealous families of the
noblesse d’épée
, the
noblesse de robe
and the
noblesse de court
, the distinctions between the rich and poor nobility were, of course, far sharper still. The nobility as a whole, numbering some 400,000 people in all – about half of whom had acquired their noble status within the previous two centuries – owned about a fifth of the land in France, twice as much as the Church. But, whereas some nobles owned thousands of acres which brought in immense incomes, and some increased their fortunes by speculating on the Stock Exchange, by investing in industry or by developing their estates, others lived and worked on small farms which provided them with the barest of meagre livings. And from these small and often ramshackle farms there was little chance of escape into more profitable enterprises, all but a few of which, such as the glass industry and maritime commerce, were traditionally closed to noblemen. Nor could they escape into the army where – despite the Comte de Saint-Germain’s decree that the price of commissions should be reduced every time they changed hands so as to attract officers of birth rather than fortune – commissions were usually reserved for gentlemen who could afford to maintain themselves in style.

Many noblemen, in fact, were far less well off than the increasingly prosperous urban middle class whom they considered quite as great a threat to their privileged existence as royal absolutism. Yet most of the bourgeoisie – whether in business or in the professions, manufacturers or merchants, doctors or lawyers – were for the most part anxious to break down the barriers that excluded them from aristocratic preserves rather than to destroy the aristocracy that had brought those preserves into existence. For centuries, as Professor Lefebvre has said, ‘the bourgeois, envious of the aristocracy, had
aimed only at thrusting himself into its ranks…This ambition was not extinct…Bourgeois of old stock were frankly proud of their lineage, careful not to form an improper marriage…Nothing was more pronounced than the ordering of ranks in this bourgeois society. The wife of a solicitor was called “Mademoiselle”, the wife of a councillor was “Madame” without dispute, and the wife of a barrister was usually saluted with the same title. Distinctions no less fine were placed between the doctors and the surgeons; the former had entered the bourgeoisie; the latter were knocking at the gates. In short, the bourgeoisie, looked down upon by the high born, copied them as best they could. It has therefore often been thought surprising that this class whose spirit was far from democracy, should have been so imprudent, in attacking the aristocracy, as to strike at the very principle of social hierarchy itself. But the bourgeoisie had its reasons. The abolition of the legal hierarchy and the privilege of birth seemed to it by no means incompatible with the maintenance of a hierarchy based on wealth, function or calling.’ The limitations imposed upon the talents of the bourgeoisie, particularly upon those of ambitious lawyers, were to make them the aristocracy’s most formidable opponents.

If the grievances of the middle classes were social rather than economic, the poorer people in the towns were more concerned about money. It is impossible to generalize about France as a whole: in the late 1780s Bordeaux was a thriving port which to Arthur Young seemed far more prosperous than Liverpool, whereas the silk industry in Lyons was passing through a period of severe depression with over half its looms at a standstill. Yet it does seem evident that French trade and industrial production were generally expanding, even though manufacturing processes were for the most part antiquated with very few factories using steam, and with mines so dependent upon manual labour that coal production was only one-twentieth that of England. But while wages were slowly rising they failed to keep pace with the more rapidly growing rate of the cost of living, and industrial unrest was becoming common. Most master craftsmen and their journeymen still remained on friendly terms: after all, they usually lived under the same roof, sharing the same interests, and, as Professor Hampson has put it, ‘when food
prices rose the journeyman was more disposed to blame the baker, the farmer and the speculator in foodstocks than to demand higher wages’. All the same, master craftsmen were trying to perpetuate ‘their own privileged position at the expense of their journeymen and to confine recruitment to their own families. The journeymen’s attempts to organize themselves and to resort to strike action found the Government on the side of the masters and the municipal authorities – royal edicts prohibited the association of workmen for collective bargaining…The urban population was therefore a prey to deep internal divisions, with some of the wealthier merchants aspiring to become large-scale industrialists, the master craftsmen and journeymen united in resisting the pressure to reduce them to a mere proletariat’ but at the same time sometimes at loggerheads with each other.

The attempts of the King’s Finance Minister, Turgot, to tackle some of the country’s problems were neither reassuring to the people nor welcome at Court where his manner, too, caused offence. He was tactless, high-minded, impatient and touchy; he interfered officiously, so it was said, in departments other than his own. A thoughtless remark of his to the effect that if a woman were to have influence on the King’s decisions it was better that this woman should be Marie Antoinette rather than de Pompadour or Du Barry annoyed both the King, who had attempted to keep his wife out of politics, and the Queen who resented being compared with royal mistresses. Accordingly, in May 1776, having lost the confidence not only of the King and Queen and the Court but of the financiers, the Church and
parlement
, and being considered too much of a
physiocrate
by the interventionists, Turgot was dismissed.

The following year, the Swiss financier, Jacques Necker, the Director of the Royal Treasury, was appointed Director-General of Finance, a post which had to be specially created for him since, being a foreigner, he could not serve on the King’s Council of Ministers, all of whom, unlike himself, were French noblemen; and, being a Protestant, he could not be naturalized. It was the common opinion in Paris – an opinion fostered by his formidably clever and in
extinguishably romantic wife who held sway over a literary salon in their smart house in the Rue de Cléry – that Necker was a financial genius. It was an opinion with which he himself would not have quarrelled. Silent, ponderous and ruminative, with half-closed eyes in a pallid, yellowish face, he seemed to be constantly lost in thought. If any man could bring order to France’s economy, it was maintained, surely it was he. After all, he had made a fortune for himself as a banker in Paris; and a self-made millionaire could scarcely be other than an improvement on the noble Finance Ministers of the past.

At first all appeared to go satisfactorily. The King and his new Minister got on well together, even though Necker’s silences when broken tended to be succeeded by economic speculations, prognostications and lectures of inordinate length. His cuts in Household expenditure at Versailles naturally aroused resentment at Court, where his vanity soon aroused as much antagonism as Turgot’s high-handedness and where he made a particular enemy of the Comte de Provence whose request for over a million
livres
, which he claimed was due from his father’s estate, was rejected. Yet it was generally agreed that these reductions of expenditure at Court were not only necessary but inevitable.

When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, though, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. The various taxes and duties levied in France – the
gabelle
, the
traites
, the
aides
as well as the
capitation
and the
vingtièmes
–were all, as he discovered, subject to variations, exemptions, inequalities in distribution and abuses in collection that made the evils of the system one of the principal causes of social unrest. Yet the increasing expenses of government and public works and the costs of the country’s wars – in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about 2,000 million
livres
–rendered the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy. Necker thought that he had the answer to this problem: arguing that the limits of taxable capacity had already been passed, he proposed to raise the money required by borrowing, on the dubious assump
tion that a swollen public debt would not place an insupportable burden on the country’s finances. He offered generous rates of interest and in order to attract investors published his
Compte Rendu au Roi sur les finances de la Nation
, a grossly optimistic and complacent document which transformed an actual deficit of 46,000,000
livres
into a fictitious surplus of 10,000,000. Although the public at large, having no means of checking Necker’s figures, accepted his pamphlet with satisfaction and bought thirty thousand copies of it within a week, its fraudulence was immediately noticed by most of the King’s other Ministers. ‘It’s about as true as it is modest,’ Maurepas commented when asked what he thought of it. A few weeks later, after a confidential memorandum written by him for the King’s consideration and proposing a limitation of the
parlement’s
fiscal powers had been copied and distributed by his enemy, the Comte de Provence, Necker felt his position so undermined that he demanded admittance to the Council of Ministers. The King refused, and Necker resigned.

Necker was succeeded as Director-General of Finance by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, a cheerful, amiable, red-haired man of forty-seven who had been an
intendant
of Flanders. A collector of pictures and the proud possessor of no less than ten Titians, Calonne had a far more pleasant and easy manner than either Turgot or Necker and was well liked at Court. He became an even more welcome figure there when, soon after entering office, he raised further loans which allowed him to be far less severe with taxes than it was feared he might have been. It was not long, however, before Calonne realized in what a perilous state the country’s finances were and that fundamental and wide-ranging reforms were essential to save them from utter collapse and to obviate the risk of the monarchy collapsing with them. He therefore drew up a detailed programme which included, together with many other less contentious measures of both economic and administrative reform, a new tax on land which was to be imposed without regard to the status of its owners and which would accordingly fall most heavily upon the privileged orders. This tax was to be a permanent one, not requiring registration for renewal by the
parlements
, and would enable the King’s Ministers to disregard the
parlementaires
’ remonstrances which had been the bane
of their previous existence. The apprehensions of the nobility and the clergy that this new tax would prove not only financially burdensome but also the first step towards the extinction of their privileged positions were exacerbated by Calonne’s further proposal that its assessment should be supervised by newly created provincial assemblies where local landowners would have votes in proportion to the amount of land they owned rather than in accordance with their social rank.