 Preface of The French Revolution. The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnson Preface The object of this book is similar to that with which, a few years ago, I wrote a short biography of Napoleon. The main outlines of the revolution, the proportion and relation of things, tend to become obscured under the accumulation of historical detail that is now proceeding. This is an attempt, therefore, to disentangle from the massive details the shape, the movement, the significance of this great historical cataclysm. To keep the outline clear, I have deliberately avoided mentioning the names of many subordinate actors, thinking that if nothing essential was connected with them, the mention of their names would only tend to confuse matters. Similarly with incidents, I have omitted a few, such as the Troubles at Avignon, and changed the emphasis on others, judging freely their importance and not following in the footsteps of my predecessors, as in the case of the capture of the Bastille, the importance of which was vastly exaggerated by early writers on the subject. The end of the revolution I place at Brumaire, a good a date as any, though like all others open to criticism. The present narrative, however, will be found to merge into that of my Napoleon, which forms as natural continuation after that date. R. M. Johnson, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February, 1909. End of preface. The magnitude of an event is too apt to lie with its reporter, and the reporter often fails in his sense of historical proportion. The nearer he is to the event, the more authority he has as a witness, but the less authority as a judge. It is time alone can establish the relation and harmony of things. This is notably the case with the greatest event of modern European history, the French Revolution, and the first task of the historian writing a century later is to attempt to catch its perspective. To do this, the simplest course will be to see how the revolution has been interpreted from the moment of its close to the present day. It was Madame Dostal, under the influence of Conston, who first made Europe listen to reason after the Bourbon Restoration of 1815. Her consideration sur la révolution française, published in 1818, one year after her death, was a bold though temperate plea for the cause of political liberty. At a moment of reaction, when the Holy Alliance proclaimed the fraternity, not of men, but of monarchs, and the direct delegation by divine providence of its essential virtues to Alexander, Frederick William, and Francis, at a moment when the men of the convention were proscribed as regicides, when the word Jacobin sent a thrill of horror down every respectable spinal cord. The daughter of Necker raised her voice to say that if during the stormy years just passed, the people of France had done nothing but stumble from crime to folly, and from folly to crime, the fault did not, after all, lie with them, but with the old regime. If Frenchmen had failed to show the virtues of freemen, it was because they had for so many centuries been treated as slaves. This was in 1818, three years after Waterloo. Madame de Stolle was a pamphleteer. The historian soon followed. Thiers in 1823, Minier in 1824, produced the first important histories of the revolution, the former more eloquent, more popular, the latter more ballasted with documentary evidence, more accurate, more pedestrian, in fact to this day in its negative manner, one of the best general histories of the matter. Both of these writers were too near their subject, and too hampered by the reactionary surroundings of the moment, to be successful when dealing with the larger questions the French Revolution involved. Thiers, going a step beyond Madame de Stolle, fastened eagerly on the heroic aspects of his subject. Envalide was with this emphasis that later under the more liberal regime of Louis Philippe, he continued his work through the epoch of Napoleon and produced his immensely popular, but extremely unsound history of the consulate and the empire. In 1840, the remains of Napoleon were transferred from St. Helena to Paris, and were processionally drawn to the Envalide, surrounded by the striking figures and uniforms of a handful of surviving veterans, acclaimed by the ringing rhetoric of Victor Hugo, who in prose and in verse vividly formulated the Napoleonic legend. And just before and just after this event, so made to strike the imagination and to prepare changes of opinion, came a series of notable books. They were all similar in that they bore the stamp of the romanticism of the 30s and 40s, interpreting history in terms of the individual, but they differed in their political bias. These works were written by Carlisle, Louis Blanc, Lamarctin and Michelet. Carlisle's French Revolution belongs far more to the domain of literature than to that of history. Its brilliancy may still dazzle those who are able to think of Carlisle as no more than the literary artist. It will not blind those who see foremost in him the great humanitarian. He was too impulsive an artist to resist the highlights of his subject and was hypnotized by Versailles and the guillotine just as his contemporary Turner was by the glories of flaming sunsets and tumbling waves. The book is a magnificent quest for an unfindable hero, but it is not the French Revolution. Carlisle's French contemporaries add the note of the party man to his individualistic impressionism. In all three are strong apologists of the Revolution. Lamarctin extols the Girondins, Blanc sanctifies Robespierre, whom he mistakes for an apostle of socialism. Michelet, as enthusiastic as either, but larger in his views and much more profound as a scholar, sees the Revolution as a whole and hails in it the regeneration of humanity. Within a few days of the publication of his first volumes, France had risen in revolution once more and had proclaimed the Second Republic. She then in the space of a few months passed through all the phases of political thought which Thierre, Blanc, Lamarctin, Michelet had glorified. The democratic, the bourgeois, the autocratic republic, and finally the relapse into the empire, the empire of Louis Napoleon. And essentially the histories of the revolution produced by these writers were special pleadings for a defeated cause, springing up in the year 1848 to a new assertion. Under the Second Empire, with autocracy even more triumphant than under the brothers of Louis XVI, they became the gospels of the recalcitrant liberalism of France. Michelet, the gospel of the intellectuals, Blanc, the gospel of the proletarians, de Tocqueville added his voice to theirs, his ancien régime appearing in 1856. Then came 1870, the fall of the empire, and 1871, the struggle between the middle class republic of Thierre and the proletarian republic of Paris. The latter vanquished once more, disappeared in a nightmare of assassination and incendiarism. It was under the impression of this disaster that Ten, set to work to investigate the past of his country, and particularly the great revolution on which all else appeared to be founded. In 1875 and 1894, he produced his Origine de la France Quentin Porrain, which in a sense supplanted all previous works on the revolution. Behind it could be plainly perceived a huge scaffolding of erudite labor and the working of an intellect of abnormal power. But what was not so apparent, and is now only being slowly recognized, was that much of this erudition was hasty and inspired by preconceived opinions, and that Ten's genius was more philosophic than historic. Assuming the validity of the impressions he had formed when witnessing the agony of Paris in the spring of 1871, his history of the revolution was a powerful and brilliant vindication of those impressions. But it is only the philosopher who forms his opinions before considering the facts. The historian instinctively reverses the order of these phenomena. As it was, Ten's great work made a tremendous impact on the intellect of his generation, and nearly all that has been written on the revolution since his day is marked with his mark. His thesis was that the church and the state were the great institutions whereby Bruteman had acquired his small share of justice and reason, and that to hack at the root of both state and church was fatal. It could only lead to the dictatorship of the soldier or to that of the mob. Of these two evils, the former appeared to him the less, while the latter he could only think of in terms of folly and outrage. Ten's conservatism was the reaction of opinion against the violence of the commune and the weak beginnings of the Third Republic, as Michelet's liberalism had been its reaction against Orleanist and Bonapartist middle-class and military dictation. Since Ten's great book, the influence of which is in this year, 1909, only just beginning to fade, what have we had? Passing over Fonsub's considerable and popular history of the revolution, we have Sorrel, l'Europe de la Révolution Française, more historical, more balanced than Ten's work, clear in style and in arrangement, but on the whole superficial in ideas and incorrect in details. Of far deeper significance is the Histoire Socialiste of Jean Jaurès, of which the title is too narrow, Histoire du peuple, or Histoire des classes ouvrières, would have more closely defined the scope of this remarkable work. Here we have a new phenomenon, history written for the labouring class and from the point of view of the labouring class, and although not free from the taint of the party pamphlet, not of the first rank for historical erudition, intellectual force, or artistic composition, Jaurès' history presents the revolution under the aspect that gives most food for thought, and that places it most directly in touch with the problems of the present. Last of all, what of the labours of the professed historian of today? Few of the writers just named could stand the tests rigidly applied to the young men sent out in large numbers of recent years by the universities as technically trained historians. Of these, many have turned their attention to the vast field offered by the revolution, and some have done good work. The trend of modern effort, however, is to straighten out the details but to avoid the large issues, to establish, beyond question, the precise shade of the colour of Robespierre's breaches, but to give up, as unattainable, having any opinion whatever on the French Revolution as a whole. Not but that here and there excellent work is being done, Olar has published an important history of the revolution which is a good corrective to TENS. The Ministry of Public Instruction helps the publication of the documents drawn up to guide the state's general, a vast undertaking that sheds a flood of light on the economic condition of France in 1789. The historians have in fact reached a moment of more impartiality, more detachment, more strict setting out of the facts, and with the general result that the specialist benefits and the public loses. What has been said should explain why it is that the revolution appears even more difficult to treat as a whole at the present day than it did at the time of Thierre and Minier. The event was so great. The shock was so severe that from that day to this France has continued to reel and rock from the blow. It is only within the most recent years that we can see going on under our eyes the last oscillations, the slow attainment of the new democratic equilibrium. The end is not yet, but what the end must eventually be now seems clear beyond a doubt. The gradual political education and coming to power of the masses is a process that is the logical outcome of the revolution, and the joining of hands of a wing of the intellectuals with the most radical section of the working men is a sign of our times not lightly to be passed over from Voltaire before the revolution to Anatole France at the present day. The tradition and development is continuous and logical. It now remains to be said that if this is the line along which the perspective of the revolution is to be sought, this is not the place in which the details of that perspective can be adequately set out. That must be reserved for a history of far larger dimensions and of much slower achievement, of which a number of pages are already written. In this volume nothing more can be attempted than a sketch in brief form affording a general view of the revolution down to the year 1799 when Bonaparte seized power. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Michael Fascio. The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnston. Chapter 2 Versailles. At the close of the 18th century, France had more or nearly reached her growth than any of her great European rivals. She was far more like the France of today than might at first be supposed by an Englishman, American or German, thinking of what his own country accomplished during the 19th century. Her population of about 25 million was three times more numerous than that of England. Paris, with 600,000 inhabitants or more, was much nearer the present day city in size than any other capital of Europe except Naples. Socially, economically, politically, notwithstanding gross abuses, there was great development, and the reformer who remodeled the institutions of France in 1800 declared that the administrative machine erected by the Bourbons was the best yet devised by human ingenuity. Large manufacturing cities and a number of active ports indicated the advent of a great economic period. All this reposed, however, on a very incongruous foundation. Feudalism, medievalism, autocracy had built up a structure of caste, distinction and class privileged to which custom, age, stagnation and ignorance lent an air of preordained and indispensable stability. The church, most privileged of all corporations, turned her miracles and her terrors, both present and future, into the most powerful buttress of the fabric. The no-bless supreme as a caste almost divided influence with the church. The two hand in hand dominated France outside the larger towns. Each village had its curée and its seneur. The curée collected as tithes and inculcated the precepts of religion, precepts which, at the close of the 18th century, preached bourbonism as one of the essential manifestations of providence on earth. The seneur, generally owning the greater part of all freehold property, not only weighed as a landlord but exercised many exclusive privileges and applied the most drastic of sanctions to the whole as the local administrator of justice. There were hundreds of devout priests and of humane seniors, but a proportion, conspicuous if small, were otherwise, and the system gave such an opportunity for evil doing that opinion naturally but unjustly converted the ill deeds of the few into the characteristic of the whole class. The culmination of this system, its visible and emphatic symbol, fastened on Paris like a great bloated tumor eating into the heart of France, was Versailles. But compared with class privilege, the church and the seneur, Versailles was a recent phenomenon invented by Louis XIV a little more than 100 years before the outbreak of the revolution. At the beginning of the 17th century the French monarchy had somewhat suddenly emerged from the wars of religion immensely strengthened. Abel Statesman, Henry IV, Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV had brought it out of its struggle with the feudal aristocracy triumphant. Before the wars of religion began the French noble was still medieval in that he belonged to a cast of military specialists and that his provincial castle was both his residence and his stronghold. The struggle itself was maintained largely by his efforts by the military and political power of great nobles, Geises, Montmorences, and others. But when the struggle closes, both religion, its cause, and the great noble, its supporter, sinks somewhat into the background, while the king, the kingly power, fills the eye. And the new divine right monarchy triumphant over the feudal soldier and gladly accepted as the restorer of order by the middle class sets to work to consolidate this success. The result is Versailles. The spectacular palace built by Louis XIV threw glamour and prestige about the triumphant monarchy. It drew the great nobles from their castles and peasantry and converted them into courtiers, functionaries, and office holders. To catch a ray of royal favor was to secure the guild edging of distinction and so even the literature, theology, the intellect of France, quickly learned to revolve about the dazzling sun king of Versailles, Louis XIV. Versailles could not, however, long retain such elements of vitality as it possessed. It rapidly accomplished its work on the feudal aristocracy, but only at a great price. With Louis XIV gone it began to crumble from corruption within, from criticism without. Louis XV converted the palace into the most gorgeous of brothels and its inmates into the most contemptible and degraded of harlots and pimps. The policy of France, still royal under Louis XIV, was marked by the greed, lewdness, and incapacity of Richelieu and Dubois, of Pompadour and Dubéry. When the effluvious corpse of Louis XV was hastily smuggled from Versailles to the Cathedral of Saint-Denis in 1774, that seemed to mark the final dissolution into rottenness of the bourbon Versailles regime. That regime already stank in the nostrils of public opinion, a new force which for half a century passed had been making rapid progress in France. The great religious and military struggle of the 16th and 17th centuries had in one direction resulted in enhancing the prestige and crystallizing the power of the French monarchy. In another direction it had resulted in establishing even more firmly the new intellectual position of Europe, the spirit of inquiry, of criticism, of freedom of thought. The Roman or supreme doctrine of authority had been questioned and questioned successfully. It could not be long before the doctrine of bourbon authority must also be questioned. Even if French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the throne of Louis XIV, the closing years of the century were marked by the names of Leibniz, Bale, and Newton. The mercurial intelligence of France could not long remain stagnant with such forces as these casting their influence over European civilization. The new century was not long in. The regent, Philippe of Orleans, had not long been in power before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control her literature. A new rebelet with an 18th-century lisp, Montesquieu, by seasoning his Le Thré-Person with a sauce picante, compounded of indecency and style, succeeded in making the public swallow some incendiary morsels. The king of France, he declared, drew his power from the vanity of the subjects, while the pope was, quote, an old idol to whom incense is offered from sheer habit, unquote. Nothing stronger has been said to this day. A few years later, in his Esprit des Lois, he produced a work of European reputation which eventually proved one of the main channels for the conveyance of English constitutional ideas to the thinking classes of France. An even greater influence than Montesquieu was Voltaire. He exercised an irresistible fascination on the intellectual class by the unrivaled lucidity and logic of his powerful yet witty prose. He carried common sense to the point of genius, through the glamour of intellect over the materialism of his century, and always seized his pen most eagerly when a question of humanity and liberalism was at stake. He had a weak sides, was materialistic in living, as in thinking, and had nothing of the martyr in his composition. Yet after his fashion he battled against obscurantism with all the zeal of a reformer. He was, in fact, the successor of Calvin. But since Calvin's day Protestantism had been almost extirpated in France, so that the gradual growth of the spirit of inquiry, still proceeding below the surface, had brought it to a point beyond Protestantism. It was atheism that Voltaire stood for, and with a vast majority of the people of France from that day to this the alternative lay between rigid Catholicism on the one hand and rigid atheism on the other. The innumerable shades of transition between these extremes, in which English and German Protestantism opened a pioneer track, remained a sealed book for them. In his Letters on the English published in 1734, Voltaire dwells less on the constitutional than on the religious questions. Liberty of Conscience is what he struggles for, and he discerns not only that it is more prudent to attack the church than the state, but that it is more essential. Religion is at the root of the monarchical system, even if the 18th century ruler is apt to forget it. And the church gives Voltaire ample opportunity for attack. The bishops and court aides are often enough skeptics and libertines, although every once in a while they turn and deal a furious blow to maintain the prestige and discipline of their ancient corporation. And when, for a few blasphemous words, they send a boy like the Chevalier de la Barre to the scaffold to be mutilated and killed, Voltaire's voice rings out with a full reverberation of outraged humanity and civilization. He believed that the revolution, which he likes so many others foresaw, would begin by an attack on the priests. It was the natural error of a thinker, a man of letters, concerned more with ideas than facts, with theology than economics. Above all, things Voltaire stood out as a realist in the modern sense of the word. And if he detested the church, it was largely because it represented untruth. He did not deflect opinion to the same extent as his great contemporary Rousseau, but he represented it more. And of the men of the revolution, it was Robespierre, who reigned less than four months, who stood for Rousseau, while Bonaparte, who reigned 14 years, was the true Voltaire. Just at the side of Voltaire stood the Encyclopedists led by Diderot and D'Alembert, the great work of reference which they issued penetrated into every intellectual circle, not only of France but of Europe, and brought with it the doctrines of materialism and atheism. However, much they might be saturated with the ideas of church and state in the robin-burban form, many of its readers became unconsciously shaken in their fundamental beliefs and ready to question, to criticize, and when the edifice began to tremble, to accept the revolution and the doctrine of the rights of the common man. Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert were at heart essentially aristocrats. For them the common man was an untrustworthy brute of low instincts, and their revolution would have meant the displacement of an aristocracy of the sword by an aristocracy of the intellect. Rousseau stood for the opposite view. To him it was only despotism that degraded man. Remove the evil conditions and the common man would quickly display his inherent goodness and amiability. Tenderness to our fellows or fraternity was therefore the distinctive trait of manhood. The irrepressible exuberance of Rousseau's kindliness overflowed from his novels and essays into a great stream of fashionable sensibility. During the years of terrific stress that followed, during the butcheries of the guillotine and of the Grande Armée, it was the vogue to be soft-hearted, and even such a fire-eater as Marat would pour libations of tears over his friend's waist-coast at the slightest provocation. In his contract social, Rousseau postulated the essential equality of the governor and the governed. But his sentimental attitude towards man involved the corresponding one towards the deity. Unable to accept Catholicism or even Christianity, he sought refuge from atheism in the arms of the Autre Suprême. It was this supreme being of Rousseau that was to become the official deity of France during the last days of the reign of terror. An influence of a slightly different sort to that exercised by these writers was that of the theatre. The century had seen the rise of the middle class man and his attempts at self-expression. The coffee house and the Freemason's Lodge gave facilities for conversation, discussion, opinion, and the increasing number of gazettes supplied these circles with information as to the course of political events. But the gazettes themselves might not venture into the danger marked field of opinion, and for the fast-growing public, especially in the city of Paris, there was no opportunity for comment or criticism on the events of the day. In a tentative way, the theatre proved itself a possible medium. In 1730 Voltaire produced his tragedy, Brutus. It fell flat because of the lines The audience was too loyal to bourbonism to accept these sentiments. There were loud murmurs, and Brutus had to be withdrawn. As late as 1766, a play on the subject of William Tell was given to an empty house. No one would go to see a republican hero. But from the 60s, matters changed rapidly. Audiences show great enthusiasm over rivalries of art, of actors, of authors, of opinions, and every once in a while, applaud or boo a sentiment that touches the sacred foundations of the social and political order. At last an author appears on the scene, keen, witty, unscrupulous, resourceful, to seize on this growing mood of the public and to play on it for his own glory and profit. These are the types of the adventurers of the revolution, and the first only belongs to the period of incubation and also to the domain of letters. Throne into the war of American independence by his double vocation of secret diplomatic agent and speculator in war supplies, he had espoused the cause of the American people with an enthusiasm that always blazed most brightly when a personal interest was at stake. His enthusiasm for American liberty was easily converted into enthusiasm for the liberty of his own class, and to vindicate that he put Figaro on the stage. The first public performance of the Noice de Figaro in 1784 was the culmination of a three-year struggle. Louis XVI had declared the play subversive, and the author had raised a storm of protest in its behalf. A special performance was conceded for the court, and the Parisian public, irritated at being thus excluded, then raised for the first time the cry of tyranny and oppression. When at last the government in its weakness made the final concession and permitted a public performance, the demand for seats was greater than it ever previously been known. The theater was packed. Great lords and ladies sat elbow to elbow with bourgeois and fashionable women, and when Figaro came on and declaimed against social injustice, the opposite parties in the house stormed approval or disfavor. Figaro is Beaumarchais, is the lower or middle class man, with nothing but his wits with which to force his way through the barriers which privilege has erected across every path along which he attempts to advance. As the valet of Count Almaviva, he has seen the man of privilege at close quarters, and has sounded his rottenness and incapacity. "'Because you are a grand senior,' he says, "'you think yourself a great genius. But, Monsieur Lecompte, to what do you really owe your great privileges?' To having put yourself to the inconvenience of being born, nothing more. I, with all my ability and force, I who can work for myself, for others, for my country. I am driven away from every occupation.'" That was what the pushing adventurer and witty dramatist had to say, but all through the country thousands of plain, inconspicuous men, doctors, lawyers, merchants, farmers, even here in their a peasant or a noble, the best representatives of the deep-rooted civilization of France, of her keen intelligence, of her uprightness, of her humanity, revolted inwardly at the ineptitude and injustice of her government. As they saw it, the whole system seemed to revolve about Versailles, the abode of the bourbon king, the happy hunting ground of the privileged courtier, the glittering abode of vice and debauchery, the sink through which countless millions were constantly drained while the poor starved, the badge of dishonor and incapacity which had too frequently been attached to the conduct of France, both in war and in peace. The twenty-five millions without the gates gazed at the hundred thousand within, and the more they gazed, the louder and more bitter became their comment. The dimmer and the more tawdry did the glitter of it all appear to them, and the weaker and more half-hearted became the attitude of the one hundred thousand as they attempted by insolence and superciliousness to maintain the pose of their inherited superiority. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Even under such conditions, the bourbon monarchy might have survived much longer had it not failed badly at one specific point. Napoleon himself declared that it was in its financial management that the Anchon regime had broken down, and although for a long period historians chose to accentuate the political and social aspects of the revolution, of recent years the economic has been the point of emphasis. And it was to consider a financial problem that the state's general were summoned in 1789, while most of the riots that broke out in Paris that same year were due to scarcity of food. The editors of the Encyclopedia had not neglected economic questions and had given much employment to a number of writers who ranked as economists or as physiocrats. Among the men most interested in such questions were Kessne, the physician of Maudame de Pompadour, Turgot, the ableist minister of Louis XVI, and the Marquis de Mirabeau, father of a more famous son. They concerned themselves, among other things, with theories of agriculture largely based on the conditions of their country. With her large population France could, with difficulty, produce sufficient food for her people. The wheat which she did produce was brought to market under extremely bad conditions of distribution and of payment. The century witnessed what appeared to be an endless succession of short crops and consequent famine. Doing these conditions as a whole, the economic thinkers concluded that the foundations of the state must repose on agriculture, and they quickly voiced a demand that there should be encouragement for the production of wheat and free circulation. Towards the end of the reign of Louis XV, the effect of these economic doctrines began to be felt. Several efforts were made to remove the restrictions on the circulation of wheat. These efforts, however, proved unavailing until after the meeting of the state's general, and that largely because of the powerful interests that were concerned in maintaining the wheat question as it then existed. The conditions were curious and are of great importance in their relation to the outbreak of the revolution. Wheat had become the great medium of financial speculation. It was an article that came on the market at a stated period in large quantities, though in quantities which experience showed were rarely sufficient to meet the requirements of the succeeding twelve months. The capitalist who could pay cash for it, and who had the means of storing it, was therefore nearly certain of a moderate profit, and a famine occurred of an extravagant one. That capitalist of necessity belonged to the privileged classes. Frequently religious communities embarked in these ventures, and used their commodious buildings as granaries. Syndicates were formed in which all varieties of speculators entered, from the bourgeois shopkeeper of the provincial town, to the courtier, and even the king. But popular resentment, the bitter cry of the starving, applied the same name to all of them. From Louis XV to the inconspicuous monk, they were all a capoeur de blé, corners of wheat, and their profits rose, as did hunger and starvation. The computation has been put forward, then in the year 1789 one-half of the population of France had known from experience the meaning of the word hunger. Can it be wondered if the curse of a whole people was attached to any man of whom it might be said that he was an a capoeur de blé? The privileged person, king or seneur, bishop or abbot, levied feudal dues along the roads and waterways, so that a boatload of wine proceeding from Provence to Paris was made to pay toll no less than forty times en route. He owned the right of sitting as judge in town or village and of commanding the armed force that made judgment effective. Where he did not own the freehold of the farm, he held oppressive feudal rights over it, and in the last resort reappeared an official guys as one of an army of officials whose chief duty it was not so much to ensure justice, good government or local government, as to screw more money out of the taxpayer. Chief of all these officials were the king's attendants working under the authority of the Contrallaire General de Finances. The Contrallaire was the most important of the king's ministers and had charge of nearly all the internal administration of the kingdom. He not only collected the revenue, but had gradually subordinated every other function of government to that one. So he took charge of public works, of commerce and of agriculture, and directed the operations of an army of police, judicial and military officials, and all for the more splendid maintenance of Versailles, Trinon and the courtiers. In the provinces he was represented by the intended. This official's duties vary to a certain extent with his district or generalité. In administration France showed the transition that was proceeding from feudalism to centralized monarchism. Provinces had been acquired one by one, and many of them still retained local privileges. Of these the chief was that of holding provincial estates, and where this custom prevailed, the chief duty of the estates lay in the assessment of taxes. Where the province was not paix d'état, it was the intendant who distributed the taxation. He enforced its collection, directed the maritisserie or local police, sat in judgment when disorder broke out, levied the militia, and enforced road-making by the corvée. Thirty intendants ruled France, and the modern system with its prefects is merely a slight modification devised by Napoleon on the great centralizing and administrative scheme of the bourbon monarchy. The taxes formed a somewhat complicated system, but they may, for the present purpose, be grouped as follows. Taxes that were farmed, direct taxes, the gabel, feudal, and ecclesiastical taxes. In 1697 had begun the practice of leasing indirect taxes for the space of six years to contractors. The fermiers generaux. They paid in advance and recouped themselves by grinding the taxpayer to the uttermost. They defrauded the public in such monopolies as that of tobacco, which was grossly adulterated, and they enforced payments not only with harshness and violence, but with complete disregard for the ruin which their exactions entailed. The government increased the yield of the fermé in a little less than a century from 37 to 180 millions of lirés or francs, and yet the sixty farmers continued to increase in wealth. They formed the most conspicuous group of plutocrats when the revolution broke out and were among the first victims of popular indignation. Of the direct taxes the most important in every way was the taille. It brought in under Louis XVI about 90 millions of francs. It represented historically the fundamental right of the French monarch to tax his subjects delegated to him by the estates of the kingdom in the 15th century. By virtue of that delegated power it was the royal council that settled each year what amount of taille should be levied. It was enforced harshly and in such a manner as to discourage land improvement. It was also the badge of social inferiority for in the course of centuries a large part of the wealthier middle classes had bought or bargained themselves out of the tax, so that to pay it was a certain mark of the lower class or roture. Tailleble, rotureux, were terms of social ostracism impatiently borne by thousands. Other direct taxes were the capitation bringing in over 50 millions, the dixième, the don gratuis. But more important than any of these was the great government in direct tax, the monopoly on salt, or gabelle. Exemptions of all sorts made the price vary in different parts of France, but in some cases as much as 60 francs was charged for the annual quantity which the individual was assessed at. That same individual as often as not earning less than five francs a week. So much smuggling, fraud and resistance to the law did the gabelle produce. That it took 50,000 officials, police and soldiers to work it. In the year 1783, no less than eleven thousand persons, many of them women and children, were arrested for infraction of the gabelle loss. Last of all the tithe and feudal dues were added to the burden. The priest was maintained by the land. The seniors' rights were numerous and varied in different parts of the country. They bore most heavily in the central and northeastern parts of France, most lightly in the south, where Roman law had prevailed over feudal and along most of the Atlantic coastline, as in Normandy. These feudal dues will be noticed later in connection with the famous session of the state's general on the 4th of August 1789. In all this system of taxation there was only one rule that was of universal application, and that was that the burden should be thrown on the poor man's shoulders. The clergy had compounded with the crown. The nobles or officials were the assessors, and whether they officiated for the king, for the provincial estates or for themselves, they took good care that their own contributions to the royal chest should be even less proportionately than might legally be demanded of them. And after all the money had been driven into the treasury, it was but too painfully evident what became of it. The firm year and the favorites scrambled for the millions and flaunted their splendor in the face of those who paid for it. The extravagance of the court was equaled only by its ineptitude. No proper accounts were capped because all but the taxpayers found their interest in squandering. Under Madame de Pompidou, the practice arose that orders for money payments signed by the king alone should be paid in cash and not passed through the audit chamber, such as it was. Pensions became a serious drain on the revenue and rapidly grew to over 50 millions a year at the end of the reign of Louis XVI. They were not and frequently granted for ridiculous or scandalous reasons. And, in the case of Ducrest, a hairdresser to the eldest daughter of the comtesse d'Artois, who was granted an annual pension of one thousand seven hundred francs on her death, the child was then twelve months old, or that of a servant of the actress Clarion, who was brought into the oil debut one morning to tell Louis XV the doubtful story about his mistress. The king laughed so much that he ordered the fellow to be put down for a pension of six hundred francs. With its finances in such condition, the Bourbon monarchy plunged into war with England in 1778, and for the satisfaction of York Town and the independence of the United States, spent one thousand five hundred millions of francs, nearly four years' revenue. At that moment it was estimated that the people of France paid in taxation about eight hundred millions annually, about one half of which reached the king's chest. But the burden of debt was so great that by 1789 nearly two hundred and fifty millions were paid out annually for interest. To meet this situation the government tried many men and many measures. There were several partial repudiation of debt. The money was clipped much to the profit of importers from Amsterdam and other centers of thrift. Necker made way for Calonne, and Calonne for Necker. But these names bring us to the current of events that resulted in the convocation of the state's general by Louis XVI, and that must be made the subject of another chapter. Please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jeffrey Wilson, Ames, Iowa. The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnston. Chapter 4 Convocation of the State's General Louis XVI, grandson of Louis XV, came to the throne in 1774. He showed some but not all of the characteristics of his family. He was of sluggish intelligence and extremely slow not to say embarrassed in speech. He was heavy in build and in features. His two great interests were locksmithing, which he had learned as a boy, and running the deer and the boar in the great royal forests, Saint-Germain, Fontaine-Blot-Rambouillet. He had all the bourbon insouciance and would break off an important discussion of the council from indifference, incompetence, or impatience to go off hunting. Worst of all for an autocrat, he had not in his nature one particle of those qualities that go to make up the man of action. Decision, energy, courage, wholeheartedness. In this he represented the decay of his race. Surfitted with power, victim of the system it had struggled so long and so hard to establish. At the best he had flashes of common sense, which unfortunately for himself he was never capable of translating into deeds. He was full of good intentions, of a certain underlying honesty and benevolence, all rather obscured by his borish exterior and manners. Like his ancestors, he ate and drank voraciously, but unlike them he did not care for women. He even showed some indifference for his wife at first, but later, when she bore children, he appeared to the public in the character of a good father of the family. In that and some of his other traits he had elements of popularity, and he remained in a way popular almost to the moment of his trial in 1792. Maria Antoinette of Austria, his wife, was a very different mold, and in her everything made for unpopularity. She had begun under the worst auspices. The French public detested the Austrian alliance into which Madame de Pompidour had dragged France, and had felt the smart of national disgrace during the seven years war, so that a marriage into the Habsburg-Lorraine family after the conclusion of that war was very ill received. To make the matter worse, a catastrophe marked the wedding ceremonies, and at a great illumination given by the city of Paris, a stampede occurred in which hundreds of lives were lost. The Austrian princess, Lothrichien as she was called from the first, did not mend matters by her conduct. Until misfortune sobered her and brought out her stronger and better side, she was incurably light-headed and frivolous. She was always on the very edge of a faux pas, and her enemies did not fail to accuse her of frequent slips beyond the edge. The titled riffraff that had adorned the Louis XV du Barricourt was swept out on the accession of the young queen, but only to be replaced by a new clique as greedy as the old, and not vastly more edifying. Richelieu and de Guillon only made way for Lausanne, the Polignaxe, and Vaudreuil, and if it was an improvement to have a high-born queen Ruel Versailles instead of a low-born courtesan, the difference was not great in the matter of outward dignity and especially of the expenditure of public money. Millions that cannot be computed for lack of proper accounts were poured out for the queen's amusements and for the queen's favorites, men and women. It was the contrôleur whose function was to fill the court's bottomless purse. Under this strain and that of the American war, a man of humble origin but of good repute as an economist and accountant was called to the office, the Geneva banker, Jacques Necker. For three years he attempted to carry the burden of the war by small economies affected at many points, which produced the minimum of result with the maximum of friction. Finally, in 1781, the queen drove him from office. Necker himself provided the excuse by the publication of his Contrandu, a pamphlet which first put the financial crisis fairly before the public. All that the public knew up to this time was that while the court maintained its splendor and extravagance, the economic and financial situation was rapidly getting worse. There was no systematic audit, there was no budget, there was no annual account published so that the finances remained a sealed book, a private matter concerning the King of France only. But here, in Necker's pamphlet, was an account of those finances that revealed to a certain extent the state of affairs and which was even more important that constituted an appeal to the public to judge the King's administration. Louis was furious at his minister's step and not only dismissed him but banished him from Paris. From 1783 to 1787, the finances were in the hands of Calonne whose management proved decisive and fatal. His dominant idea was that of a courtier, always to honor any demand made on the treasury by the King or Queen. To do less would be unworthy of a gentil yam and a devoted servant of their majesties. So Calonne, bowing gracefully, smiling reassuringly, embarked on a fatal course, borrowing where he could, anticipating in one direction, defaulting in another, but always and somehow producing the Louis necessary to the enjoyment of the present moment. He reached the end of his tether towards the close of 1786. It was during Calonne's administration that occurred the famous affair of the diamond necklace. It was a vulgar swindle worked on the cardinal de Rouen by an adventurist, Madame de la Motte Valois. Trading on his credulity and court ambitions, she persuaded him to purchase a diamond necklace, which the Queen, so he was told, greatly wished but could not afford. Marie Antoinette was personated in a secret interview given to Rouen and Madame de la Motte got possession of the diamonds. Presently the jewelers began to press Rouen for payment and the secret came out. The King was furious and sent Rouen to the royal prison of the Bastille while Madame de la Motte was handed over to the legal procedure of the Parliament of Paris. This incident created great excitement and was much distorted by public report. It left two lasting impressions, one relating to Madame de la Motte, the other to the Queen. The adventurist was too obvious escape boat to be spared. While Rouen was allowed to leave the Bastille after a short imprisonment, the woman was brought to trial and was sentenced to public whipping and branding. Her execution was carried out in bungling fashion and at the foot of the steps leading to the law courts when Antoinette's voice was to reverberate so loudly in his struggle with so-called justice ten years later, a disgraceful scene occurred. The crowd saw La Motte struggling in the hands of the executioners and rolling with them in the gutter, heard her uttering loud shrieks as the branding iron was at last applied to her shoulders. The impression produced by this revolting spectacle was profound and was heightened by the universal belief that Marie Antoinette was not less guilty in one direction than Madame de La Motte had been in another. The outbreak of slander and of libel against the Queen goes on accumulating from this moment with ever-increasing force until her death eight years later. A legend comes into existence, becomes blacker and blacker, and culminates in the atrocious accusations made against her by Abert before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Messalina and Semiramis are rolled into one to supply a fit basis of comparison. And the population of Paris broods over this legend, and when revolution comes, makes of Marie Antoinette the symbol of all that is monstrous, infamous, and cruel in the system of the Bourbons, makes of her the marked victim of the vengeance of the people. Meanwhile, Calonne was struggling to keep his head above water, and in the process had come into conflict with the Parliaments or corporations of judges. At last, in 1786, he went to the King, admitted that he had no money, that he could borrow no more, and that the only hope lay in fundamental reform. He proposed, therefore, a number of measures, of which the most important were that money should be raised by a stamp tax, that a land tax should be the foundation of the revenue, and that it should apply to all proprietors, noble, cleric, and of the Third Estate, with no exceptions. There was no chance, however, as matters stood, of persuading the Parliaments to register decrees for these purposes, so Calonne proposed that the King should summon an assembly of the Notables of France to give their support to these reforms. Here again, although Calonne and Louis did not realize it, was an appeal to public opinion. The monarchy was unconsciously following the lead of the philosophers of the dramatists and of Necker. In January 1787, the Notables assembled to learn the King's intentions, 150 of them, mostly nobles and official persons. In February Calonne put his scheme before them and then discovered to his great astonishment that they declined to give him the support, which was all he wanted of them, and that, on the contrary, they wished to discuss his project and, in fact, held a very diverse opinion of it. In this, the Notables were not factious, they merely had enough sense of the gravity of the situation to perceive that a real remedy was needed, and that Calonne's proposal did not supply it. His idea was good enough in the abstract, but in practice there was at least one insurmountable objection, which was that the land tax could not be established until a cadastral survey of France had been undertaken, a complicated and lengthy operation. Very soon Calonne and the Notables had embarked on a contest that gradually became heated, until finally Calonne appealed from the Notables to the public by printing and circulating his proposals. The Notables replied by a protest and declared that the real reform was economy and that the contrôleurs should place before them proper accounts. This proved the end of Calonne. His position had long been weak, he now toppled over and was replaced by Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse. Loménie was an agreeable courtier and well liked by the Queen, but he was also a liberal and encyclopedist and a member of the Assembly of Notables. He succeeded in getting the approval of that body for a loan of 60 million francs and then on the 1st of May 1787 dissolved it. The new minister had, however, come to the opinion that his predecessor's program was the only possible one and as soon as he had got rid of the Notables, his late colleagues, he attempted to get the Parlement of Paris to register the new laws. The Parlement resisted and popular discontent became a serious feature of the situation. The Chancellor, La Mognon, was burnt in effigy by the mob. In July 1787 the Parlement of Paris demanded that the state's general of the kingdom should be assembled. For a whole year the struggle between the judges and the ministers grew hotter and hotter. The arrest of Déprémenile, one of the leaders of the Parlement in May 1788, led to severe rioting in Paris and only the energetic use of police and troops saved the situation. Not only did the provincial parliaments support that of Paris in its resistance to the court but the provinces themselves began to stir and finally a month after Déprémenile's arrest a large meeting at Grenoble decided to call together the oldest states of the province the province of Dauphiné. This was almost civil war and threatened to plunge France back into the conditions of two centuries earlier. The government ordered troops to Grenoble to put down the movement. The commanding general, however, on arriving near the city found the situation so alarming that he agreed to a compromise whereby the estates were to hold a meeting but not in the capital of the province. Accordingly at the village of Vizier on July 1st of July several hundred persons assembled representing the three orders nobility, clergy, and third state of the province and of these it had been previously agreed that the third estate should be allowed double representation. The leading figure of the assembly of Vizier was Jean-Joseph Mounier. He was a middle-class man a lawyer upright intelligent yet moderate who felt the need of reform and who was prepared to labor for it. He inspired all the proceedings at Vizier and as secretary of the estates had the chief part in drawing up its resolutions. These demanded the convocation of the state general of France pledged the province to refuse to pay all taxes not voted by the state general and called for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment on the king's order the warrant known as the letter de cachet. The effect of the resolutions of the assembly of Vizier through France was immediate. They were simple, direct, and voiced the general feeling. They also indicated that the moment had come for interfering in the chronic mismanagement of affairs. So irresistible was their force that Loménie de Briennes and the king accepted them with hardly a struggle. The minister was now at the end of his borrowing powers and in the month of August his tenure of power came to a close. Before leaving office he suspended payments and issued a decree convoking the state's general for the first of May 1789. He was succeeded by Necker. It was unfortunate for the Bourbon monarchy that at this great crisis a king and a minister should have come together both lacking the initiative both lacking courage and yet not even sympathetic but on the contrary lacking mutual confidence and refusing one another mutual support. And while Louis lacked executive vigor so Necker tended always to lose himself in figures in details, in words, in fine sentiments and to neglect the essential for the unimportant. Necker was well intentioned but narrow and merely followed the current of events. From all parts of France advice and representations reached him as to the conditions under which the state's general should be convoked. Their last meeting had been held as far back as 1614 so that there was naturally much uncertainty on questions of procedure. Partly to clear this, partly to find some support for his own country, Necker called the Notables together again. They met in November and helped to settle the conditions under which the elections to the state's general and their convocation should take place. The old constitutional theory of the state's general was that it was an assembly of the whole French nation represented by delegates and divided into three classes. Thus it was tribal in that it comprised every Frenchman within its scope and feudal in that it formed the caste distinctions noble clergy people. In other words it afforded little ground for comparison with the English parliament. The point at which it approached it nearest being in the matter of the power to vote the taxation levied by the crown. But this power the state's general had lost so far back as the 15th century. This fundamental conception entailed another which was that the delegates of the nation were not members of a parliament or debating assembly but were mere mandatories charged by the electors with a specific commission which was to place certain representations before the king. This meant that in the stage previous to the election of these delegates the electors should draw up a statement of their complaints and a mandate or instructions for their representatives. This was in fact done and many thousands of cahiers as they were called were drawn up all over France in which the demands of as many individuals or corporations or bodies of electors were stated. These were summarized into three cahiers for each province and eventually into three one from each order for all France. And these last three were in due course presented to Louis the 16th. As a source of information on the economic and social condition of a country the cahiers are the most wonderful collection of documents available for the historian. Many of them have been more or less faithfully published and at the present day the French government is liberally helping on the work of them public. But in a work of this scope it is impossible to go at length into the state of affairs which they depict. Only the most salient features can be dealt with. First then it must be said that the cahiers present at the same time remarkable uniformity and wide divergence. The agreement lies partly in their general spirit and partly in the repetition of certain formulas published throughout the country by eager pamphleteers and budding political leaders. The divergence can be placed under three chief heads. The markedly different character of a great part of the cahiers of the clergy from those of the other two orders provincial divergence and peculiarities of local customs demands for the maintenance of local privileges. Of the last class Marseille a port with many historical privileges affords perhaps the most extreme example. The uniformity is to be seen especially in the general spirit of these complaints to the king. One feels while reading the cahiers the unanimity of a long-suffering people anxious for a release from intolerable misgovernment. More than that anxious to have their institutions modernized but all in a state of complete loyalty and devotion to the king and to all that was wise and good and glorious and beneficent that he still seemed to represent. The illusion of Bourbonism was at that moment so far as surface appearances went practically untouched. The noblesse and the clergy conducted their elections by means of small meetings and chose their delegates from among themselves. Sia Itta elected as its representatives men of the upper middle class and professional class. The lower classes ignorant and politically untutored were unrepresented and accepted tutelage with more or less alacrity more in the provinces less in Paris. But in addition a small number of men belonging to the privileged orders sought and obtained were. C.A.S. and a few other priests Mirobo and a few other nobles were elected to the states general by the third estate. C.A.S. of powerful mind a student of constitutionalism terse and logical in expression had made a mark during the electoral period with his pamphlet what is the third estate his reply was it is everything it has been nothing it should be something this was a reasonable and forceful exposition of the views of the 25 millions Mirobo of volcanic temperament and morals with the instinct of a statesman and the conscience of an outlaw greedy of power as of money with thundering voice ready rhetoric and keen perception turned from his own order to the people for his mandate he saw clearly enough from the beginning that reform could not stop at financial changes but must throw open the government of France to the large class of intelligent citizens with which her developed civilization had endowed her the outstanding fact brought out by this infiltration of the noblesse and clergy into the third estate was clear the deputies to the states general whichever order they belong to were nearly all members of the educated middle and upper class of France part of the deputies of the noblesse stood for class privilege and so did a somewhat larger part of those of the clergy but a great number in both these orders were of the same sentiment as the deputies of the third estate they were intelligent and patriotic Frenchmen full of the teaching of Voltaire and Rousseau and the Frenchmen convinced by their eyes as well as by their intellect that Bourbonism must be reformed for its own sake for the sake of France and for the sake of humanity End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of the French Revolution this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Jeffrey Wilson Ames, Iowa The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnston Chapter 5 France Comes to Versailles At the beginning of May 1214 representatives of France reached Versailles of these 621 more than half belonged to the third estate and of the 621 more than 400 had some connection with the law while less than 40 belonged to the farming class Little preparation had been made for them. The king had continued to attend to his hounds and horses the queen to her balls and dresses and necker to his columns of figures his hopes and his illusions but the arrival of this formidable body of men of trained intellect in the royal city now that it had occurred at once caused a certain uneasiness As they walked about the city in curious groups it was as though France were surveying the phenomenon of Versailles with critical eye At the very first occasion the courtiers feeling this set to work to teach the deputies of the third estate a lesson to put them in their place On the 4th and 5th of May the opening ceremonies took place processions, mass, sermon, speeches and the court's policy if such it could be called was revealed The powerful engine known as etiquette was brought into play to indicate to the deputies what position and what influence in the state the king intended they should have This was perhaps the greatest revelation of the inherent weakness of Bourbonism The system had, in its decline become little more than etiquette and Louis the 16th seen hard at work in his shirt sleeves would have shattered the illusions of centuries And so, by means of the myriad contrivances of masters of ceremonies and court heralds the third estate was carefully made to feel its social inferiority its political insignificance The third estate noted these manifestations of the court with due sobriety and met the attack squarely. But while on the part of the court this way of approaching the great national problem never attained a higher dignity than a policy of pinpricks, with the third estate it was at once converted into a constitutional question of fundamental importance. Was the distinction between the three orders to be maintained? Was the noble or priest a person of social and political privilege? Or were the deputies of all to meet in one assembly and have equal votes? That was the great question as the third estate chose to state it and translated into historical terms it meant no less than the passing of the feudal arrangement of society in separate castes into the new system of what is known as democracy. Nearly all the cahier of the third estate and many of those of the noblesse had demanded this measure and the third estate on assembling to verify the mandates of its members immediately called on the other two orders to join it in this proceeding. The struggle over this point continued from the 5th of May to the 9th of June before any decisive step was taken. But as the days went by, apparently in fruitless debate, there was in reality a constant displacement of influence going on in favor of the third estate. In the opening session the statement of affairs made by Nekker had left a very poor impression. Since then the ministers had done nothing saved to attempt by a feeble intervention to keep the orders apart. And all the time the third estate was gradually becoming conscious of its own strength and of the feebleness of the adversary. And so at last on the 10th of June CAS moved Mirobo supporting that the noblesse and the clergy should be formally summoned to join the tier and that on the 12th verification of powers for the whole of the state general should take place. Accordingly on the 12th, under the presidency of the astronomer Baye senior representative of the city of Paris, the tier began the verification of the deputy's mandates. On the 13th three members of the clergy, priests, asked admission they were received amid scenes of the greatest enthusiasm and within a few days their example proved widely contagious. On the 14th a new step was taken and the deputies belonging now to a body that was clearly no longer the tier eta voted themselves a national assembly. This was in a sense accomplishing the revolution. So rapidly did the tier now draw the other parts of the assembly to itself that on the 19th the clergy formally voted for reunion. This brought the growing uneasiness and alarm of the court to a head. Necker's influence was now on the wane. The king's youngest brother, the Count d'Artois, at this moment on good terms with the queen and Marie Antoinette herself were for putting an end to the mischief before it went further and they prevailed. It was decided that the king should intervene and should break up the state's general into its component parts once more by an exercise of the royal authority. On the morning of the 20th of June in a driving rain the deputies arriving at their hall found the doors closed and workmen in possession. This was the contemptuous manner in which the court chose to intimate to them that preparations were being made for a royal session which was to take place two days later. Alarmed and indignant the deputies proceeded to the palace tennis court close by the Gers de Pormes and their heated discussion followed. C.A.S. for once in his career imprudent proposed that the assembly should remove to Paris. Mounier, conservative at heart, realizing that this meant civil war, temporized and carried the assembly with him by proposing a solemn oath whereby those present would pledge themselves not to separate until they had endowed France with the constitution. On the 23rd the royal session was held. A great display of troops and of ceremony was made. The deputies assembled in the hall and the king's speech was read. It was a carefully prepared document announcing noteworthy concessions as well as noteworthy reservations but vitiated by two things. The concessions came just too late. The reservations were not promptly and effectively enforced. The king declared that for two months past the state's general had accomplished nothing save wrangling that the time had therefore arrived for recalling them to their duties. His royal will was that the distinction between the three orders should be maintained and after announcing a number of financial and other reforms he ordered the deputies to separate at once. The king then left the hall supported by his attendants and by the greater part of the nobles and high clergy. There followed a memorable scene to understand which it is necessary to go back a little. On the arrival of the deputies at Versailles, they had at once tended to form themselves into groups, messes or clubs for eating social and political purposes. An association of this kind the Club Breton so called from the province of its founders soon assumed considerable importance. Here the forward men of the assembly met and discussed and here filtering through innumerable channels came the news of the palace, the tittle-tattle of Trinon and the Earl de Beuf, the decisions of the king's council. At every crisis during the struggle at Versailles the leaders of the assembly knew beforehand what the king and his ministers thought and what measures they had decided on. All that was necessary therefore was to concert secretly the step most likely to thwart the royal policy and by eloquence, by persuasion, by entreaty to cajole the great floating mass of members to follow the lead of the more active minds. The king's speech on the 23rd of June was no surprise to the assembly and the leaders were prepared with an effective rejoinder. So when Louis the 16th left the hall after commanding the deputies to disperse the greater part of them kept their seats and when Dr. Brésil master of ceremonies noting this, called on the president to withdraw, Bayille replied that the assembly could not adjourn without a motion. The discussion between Dr. Brésil and Bayille continuing Mirobo turned on the king's representative and in his thundering voice declaimed the famous speech which he had doubtless prepared the night before. We are here, he concluded by the will of the people and we will only quit at the point of the bayonet. This, de Brésil withdrew and reported to the king for orders. But Louis had done enough for one day and the only conclusion he could come to was that if the deputies refused to leave the hall the best course would be for them to remain there and there in fact they stayed. Immediately after this scene Necker sent in his resignation. On the morning of the 24th this was known in Paris and produced consternation and a run on the banks. To reassure the public, Necker was immediately reinstated on the basis that Louis should accept as now seemed inevitable the fusion of the orders. On the 25th a large group of nobles headed by the Duke d'Orléans and the Comte de Clermont-Donner joined the assembly and a week later the Assemblée Nationale was fully constituted the three orders merged into one. During the two months through which this great constitutional struggle had lasted the assembly had had a great moral force behind it a moral force that was fast tending to become something more. The winter of 1788-89 had been one of the most important periods of the century. There had been not only the almost chronic shortage of bread but weather of extraordinary rigor. In the city of Paris the Sen is reported to have been frozen solid while the suffering among its inhabitants was unparalleled. As an inevitable consequence of this riots broke out. In January there had been severely the military resources of the government. They continued during the electoral period and were occasionally accompanied by great violence and when the deputies assembled at Versailles there was behind them a great popular force already half unloosed that looked to the state general for appeasement or for guidance. The procedure which the Third Estate and National Assembly to gave this popular force an opportunity for expressing itself. The public was admitted to the opening session and it continued to come to those that followed. From the public galleries came the loudest sounds of applause that greeted the patriotic orator. The Parisian public quickly fell into the way of making the journey to Versailles to join in these demonstrations and soon transferred them from the hall of the assembly to the street outside. Mirobo, C.A.S., Mounier and other popular members were constantly receiving ovations and soon learned to convert them into political weapons. While members who were suspected of reactionary tendencies especially the higher clergy met with hostile receptions and all this well known both to court and assembly was but a faint echo of the great force rumbling steadily 12 miles away in the city of Paris. The leaders of the assembly did not scruple to use this pressure of public opinion of popular violence for all it was worth and placed as they were it was not surprising that they should have done so. The deputies were only a small group of men in the great royal city garrisoned all the traditions of the French royalty and 5,000 sabers and bayonets besides. It was natural that they should seek support then even if that support meant violence, lawlessness or insurrection. Thus Paris encouraged the assembly and the assembly Paris. The ferment in the capital was reaching fever heat just at the moment that the assembly had won its victory over the orders. The working classes were raging for food. The bankers capitalists and merchants saw in the states general the only hope of avoiding bankruptcy. The intellectual and professional class was more agitated than any other. The cafes and pamphlet shops of the palais royale were daily more crowded, more excited. And on the 30th of June the army itself began to show symptoms of following the general movement. The regiment of French guards was a body of soldiers kept permanently quartered in the capital. The men were therefore in closer touch with the population than would be the case in ordinary regiments. Their commanding officer at this moment was not only an aristocrat but a martinet and he completely failed to keep his regiment in hand. Trouble had long been brewing in the ranks and culminated in mutiny and riot at the close of June. Making the most of the state of Paris many of the mutinous guardsmen took their liberty and refused to return to barracks. Clearly what between the accomplished revolt of the third estate, the incipient revolt of Paris and the open mutiny of the troops, something had to be done. Necker's return to the ministry had been imposed on the court and although his policy of accepting the fusion of the orders was followed his influence really amounted to little. The queen and the comte d'artois soon plucked up courage after their first defeat and took up once more the policy of repression. But as it was now apparently useless to attempt to stem the tide by means of speeches or decrees they persuaded the king that force was the only means. By using the army he could get rid of Necker, get rid of the national assembly and reduce Paris to order. Accordingly the Marshal de Broglie a veteran of the seven years war was put in charge of military matters and an old Swiss officer, the Baron de Besenval was placed in immediate command of the troops. Regiments were brought in from various quarters and by the end of the first week of July the court's measures were developing so fast and appeared so dangerous that the assembly passed a vote asking the king to withdraw the troops and to authorize the formation of a civic guard in Paris. The king's answer delivered on the tenth was negative and peremptory. His troops were to be employed to put down disorder. At this crisis the action of the assembly and of Paris became more definitely concerted. The government of the city had been in the hands of a somewhat antiquated board presided over by a provost of the merchants. It was too much out of touch with the existing movement to have any influence because its impotence so keenly that it would willingly have resigned its power. At the time of the elections to the state's general the government had broken up Paris into 60 electoral districts for the sake of avoiding the possibility of large meetings. These sections as they were called had formed committees and these committees towards the middle of June had been coming together again informally the government's permanence. On the 23rd of that month with disorder growing in the city they had held a joint meeting at the Hotel de Ville the townhouse and the municipality had given them a permanent room there hoping that their influence would help keep disorder under. When on the 11th the news reached Paris that Louis had refused the assembly's demand for the withdrawal of the troops and the central committee of the sections took matters into its hands and voted the formation of a civic guard for the city of Paris. On the same day the king now ready to precipitate the crisis dismissed and exiled Necker and called the reactionary Breteuil to power. On the 12th Paris broke out into open insurrection. It was Camille des Moulins who set the torch to the powder. This young lawyer and pamphletier a brilliant writer a generous idealist almost the only reasoned Republican in Paris at that day was one of the most popular figures in the Parler Royale crowds. On the 12th of July standing on a café table he announced the news of the dismissal of Necker the movement of the troops on Paris and with fashion and eloquence declaimed against the government and called on all good citizens to take up arms. He headed a great procession from the Parler Royale to the Hotel de Ville. The move on the Hotel de Ville had for its object to procure arms. The committee of the sections had voted a civic guard but a civic guard to act required muskets. Besanval were now pressing in on the city and had nearly encircled it. In a few hours Paris always hungry might be reduced to famine and the troops might be pouring volleys down the streets. The soldiers of the French guards siding with the people were already skirmishing with the Germans of the king's regiments for the army operating against Paris was more foreign French and the Swiss and German regiments were placed at the head of the columns for fear the French soldiers would not fire on the citizens. Royal étranger, Reinhardt, Nassar, Esterhazy, Royal allemande, Royal cravate, Disbach such were some of the names of the regiment sent by Louis the 16th to persuade his good people of Paris into submission. No wonder that the crowd shouted when Des Moulins told them that the Germans would sack Paris that night if they did not defend themselves. On the night of the 12th to the 13th Paris was in an uproar. Royalist writers tell us that gun shops were plundered by the mob republican writers that the owners of guns voluntarily distributed them. Besanval lacking instructions from Broye and hesitating at what faced him had done little or nothing but Paris intended to be ready for him if he should act on the following day. On the 13th the disorder and excitement continued. The committee at the Hotel de Ville took in hand the formation of battalions for each section of the city. While Besanval still remained almost inactive at the gates. On the 14th the insurrection culminated and won what proved to be a decisive victory. At the east end of Paris stood the Bastille. It was a medieval dungeon of formidable aspect armed with many cannon and dominating the outlet from the populace faux-bours San-Antoine to the country beyond. One of the mouths of famishing Paris. It contained a great store of gunpowder and a garrison of about 100 Swiss and veterans. The fortress had an evil reputation as a state prison. Although in July 1789 its cells were nearly all unoccupied, popular legend would have it that numerous victims of royal despotism arbitrarily imprisoned lay within its walls. So it was a symbol of the royal authority within Paris, a threat or reckon so to the faux-bours San-Antoine and the free movement of food supplies from the east end of the city, a store of guns and ammunition. For all these reasons the mob undisturbed by Besanval turned to attack it. The first effort was in vain. Although the garrison of the Bastille except its commander the Marquis de Lornais was disinclined with the fire on the mob and was so short of provisions that resistance was useless, the attackers succeeded in little more than getting possession of some of the outbuildings of the fortress. The musketry which the governor directed from the keep proved more than the mob cared to face. But the first wave of attack was soon reinforced by another. From the French regiments of Besanval's army a steady exertors was now setting into Paris through every gate. A number of these soldiers and of the men of the regiment of the French guards were drawn to the Bastille by the sound of the firing and now took up the attack with system and vigor. Ély, a non-commissioned officer of the Queen's regiment gave orders supported by Yulin, Marceau and others. Two small pieces of cannon were brought up and the soldiers and some few citizens formed elbow to elbow. The guns were wheeled opposite the great drawbridge in the face of the musketry and at that the Bastille gave up. Delonné made an attempt to explode his magazine but was stopped by his men. The white flag was displayed the drawbridge was let down and the besiegers poured in. Great disorder followed. Delonné and one of his officers were massacred despite the efforts of Ély and the soldiers. The uproar of Paris was intensified by the victory. At the opposite side of the city there had been another success. The Envalide had been taken and with it 30,000 muskets. With these the civic guard was rapidly being armed under the direction of the committee of the sections. The Hotel de Ville was the centre of excitement and the provost of the merchants having lost all authority was anxious to surrender his power to the new insurrectional government. Late in the evening he too was sacrificed to the violence of the mob and drawn from the Hotel de Ville was quickly massacred by the worst and most excitable elements of the populace. End of chapter 5