The Revolutionary Temper, page 45
What made this polemic so fascinating for the general public was not its substance—few people could follow it in detail—but its openness. Calonne published his tract as an appeal to the French nation. He agreed that the Crown’s finances could no longer be kept secret, and tried to outdo Necker by presenting his Réponse as his own Compte rendu, more accurate and detailed than Necker’s original. As a minister, he had respected public opinion, he claimed; and as an exile, he sought to win back its support, despite the attacks of libelers.8 In his reply, Necker also invoked public opinion as a force that should determine the direction of affairs.9 The public responded, as Hardy put it, by “devouring” the book. Although published at a huge pressrun of 20,000 copies, it was snapped up so quickly that some booksellers did not even have time to sew the gatherings together, and the publisher immediately began to prepare a new edition. Whether readers got through it all seems doubtful, because journalists and nouvellistes admitted they could not make sense of the baroque detail and statistics. Some, at least, remained unconvinced, but Necker’s argument, as one reviewer remarked, left a general impression of honesty and virtue.10 Riding on a tide of public enthusiasm, Necker came out on top of the debate. But it was the debate itself that mattered most. Two public figures, former directors of the royal treasury, hammered at one another in public, arguing opposite views of state affairs, openly, in print, and in enormous detail—nothing like it had ever taken place.
Openness had been crucial to Necker’s success in floating loans while general director of finances from 1775 to 1781. They were built on “confidence,” the public’s faith that investments would be repaid at the promised rate—that is, in rentes, which by 1781 brought a return of 10 percent. The partial bankruptcy of August 16 damaged public trust so badly that the Brienne-Lamoignon government no longer had the option of raising loans. Far from being limited to the financiers of the rue Vivienne, the collapse of confidence was a matter of public opinion, and only Necker could restore it. He was, Hardy wrote, “the only man who at this moment, according to public opinion, can be the restorer of France.”11
The appointment of Necker transformed the situation. When he assumed office, he found only 419,000 L. in the royal treasury, a derisory amount, according to press reports.12 He revoked the edict of August 16 and declared that all notes on the royal treasury would be paid in cash. He had found sufficient revenue to finance government operations until the meeting of the Estates General, he declared. Once the representatives of the nation came together, they would determine a solution to the financial problem. Meanwhile, the public could be reassured that the direction of state affairs was in good hands. The payment of rentes did indeed resume. Calm returned to the Bourse. Taxes began to be paid as normal, even in the outlying provinces where the resistance to Brienne and Lamoignon had been most violent. Necker held his first public audience in Paris on October 10, and it was a triumph. Parisians from all sectors of society brought their problems to him, and he replied with courtesy and concern, striking a tone of Swiss openness.13
Despite this quick success, Necker had to overcome formidable difficulties. As explained in the last chapter, Lamoignon, backed by influential figures in the court, remained in office after the dismissal of Brienne on August 25, and he persevered with his determination to break the power of the parlements. Although the project for the Cour plénière had been shelved (it, too, was to be resolved by the Estates General), the government had not abandoned the general plan to reconstruct the judiciary. Rumors about a power struggle in Versailles circulated during the first two weeks of September. Parisians heard that a confrontation between Necker and Lamoignon took place at a meeting of the Conseil du Roi on September 3–4, but they did not know what to make of it. It seemed that Necker had prevailed, because he got the Conseil to approve an edict for the recall of the parlements. Yet Lamoignon remained in his position at the head of the judiciary. “Sinister rumors” raised fears of more catastrophes:14 Necker was said to be ill; a new tax would be forced on the country; rentes payments would be reduced by one-third. The lit de justice that had been scheduled for the restoration of the parlements might turn into another coup, which would send the Parlement of Paris back into exile. Finally, however, at 5:00 p.m. on September 14, news arrived of Lamoignon’s downfall, and, as we have seen, Paris erupted in joy.
Of course, the shift in power did not resolve the basic problems. All of them were left suspended, pending the meeting of the Estates General. The fate of the parlements, the payment of the deficit, and the future of the state’s finances would not be settled until the deputies gathered on May 1, the date the king had finally set. Before then, however, a decision had to be reached about the most important problem of all, the nature of the Estates General itself.
40
The Cruelest Winter
IN NOVEMBER 1788, Parisians began to follow a new index to their misery. Having watched the price of bread increase from its normal level of 8 sous for the four-pound loaf to 12 sous 6 deniers, they also fixed their sight on the temperature: 7 degrees below freezing on November 26. Not that ordinary people had thermometers. They felt the cold in their bones, while the sophisticated consulted different kinds of devices, most of them calibrated to the Réaumur scale. In today’s measures, minus 7 Ré (Réaumur) comes to 16 degrees Fahrenheit and to minus 8.75 Celsius.
There was also a heavy snowfall on November 26—an early start to winter. Reports on the temperature circulated in newspapers and by word of mouth. Hardy entered them nearly every day in his diary along with information on the price of bread and other necessities such as coal.1 Paris was buried under a heavy snowfall on December 6–7, when the temperature sank to minus 10 Ré (9.5 Fahrenheit) and the price of bread rose to 13 sous 6 deniers. By then the Seine had frozen over. People crossed it on foot, although at first some fell through the ice and drowned. Frozen corpses were found in the streets. Several storehouses full of coal in the faubourg Saint Honoré caught on fire and burned for eight days, forcing up the cost of heating.
The price of all kinds of food in addition to bread increased drastically. A group of smugglers managed to drive a herd of sheep into Paris, where they could sell mutton at half the normal price (6 sous per pound instead of 12). Parisian butchers got the police to intervene, but a crowd drove the police agents away after a street battle. A few days later, the police arrested smugglers attempting to sell underpriced poultry. Soldiers were stationed in marketplaces to prevent rioting, and rumors circulated that three hundred bakeries had closed owing to the fear of violence as bread prices continued to escalate. Water mills along the Seine could not operate because the river remained frozen solid, cutting back on the supply of flour. It became impossible to wash laundry in the Seine and to fetch water from it. Although carts loaded with goods commonly crossed the river, a man leading a horse fell through the ice and disappeared on December 14.
Constant snow and a bitter north wind added to the misery. On December 15 thermometers registered minus 12 Ré (5 degrees Fahrenheit), and the price of bread had risen to 14 sous. At least 80,000 workers were unemployed, according to Hardy’s estimate. The police hired some of them to clear snow from the streets at rates of 10 to 18 sous per day, although much of the city remained impassable to carriages and difficult to navigate by foot. Driven by hunger, the poor took to begging, and the beggars became aggressive. There were many reports of thefts and muggings. A favorite technique, according to one newssheet, involved a group: a mugger would fell a pedestrian and flee; then his companions would pretend to come to the victim’s rescue and, while hovering over him, remove his purse. On December 16, the police arrested a gang of twenty-seven thieves in the center of the city at the rue de la Huchette. By this time, Parisians commonly said that the winter was the coldest that had ever occurred.
The snow kept falling, accumulating on roofs and clogging streets. Just before Christmas there were signs of a thaw, but on New Year’s Eve the temperature fell to the lowest point ever recorded, according to scientists in the Observatoire who consulted a mercury thermometer: minus 18½ degrees Ré. (minus 9.6 Fahrenheit)—colder than the coldest days of the notorious winters of 1740 and 1709. Increasing numbers of half-dead, starving people were carried to the Hôtel-Dieu, which functioned more as a hospice for the dying than as a hospital and contained only 1,210 beds. Despite the cartloads of bodies, fifty to a cart, taken every night for burial in the unmarked ditches of the Cimetière de Clamart in the faubourg Saint-Marcel, the Hôtel-Dieu could no longer absorb any more of the poor at the end of the first week in 1789.
The temperature rose to zero Ré. (32 degrees Fahrenheit) on January 10. Although snow continued to fall, it melted rapidly, making the streets still nastier. The first rain since September poured down on January 18, when a thaw set in, but the price of bread, driven by the shortage of grain and flour, rose to 15 sous by February 4. The Parlement and police intervened to cap it at 14 sous 6 deniers, provoking a threat by bakers, who could not clear a profit at that rate, to close their shops. Detachments of the Watch (the guet à pied and the guet à cheval) were sent to keep order in marketplaces, because a popular revolt was expected to occur. According to one rumor, the royal princes were hoarding bread in order to provoke an uprising that would force Necker out of office. According to another, Necker himself was the hoarder, and he was supported by the king in the hope that they could exploit the rise in prices to rescue the state’s finances. After noting the reports on conspiracies, political agitation, bread prices, and weather, Hardy concluded that a “horrible revolution” looked inevitable.2 Yet Paris did not explode. Perhaps it was exhausted—and it was buried again on March 9 by another heavy snowfall, followed by still more on March 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, and 19. It was the longest, coldest, cruelist winter anyone had ever known.
PART SEVEN
The Eruption of the Revolution, 1789
41
Summon the Nation
THE ESTATES GENERAL must be summoned. Whatever their feelings about the rise and fall of ministers, Parisians agreed on that basic demand. The Parlement had called for the convocation of the Estates General in a declaration of July 6, 1787, and it had reiterated that demand several times as evidence of its commitment to the cause of the nation. Yet its exhortations lacked substance. They expressed a vague expectation, shared by the general public, that the assembled nation, whatever that meant, would bring the current conflicts to a happy conclusion, whatever it might be. Somehow, a new order of things would come into existence.
The public began to see the issues more clearly as the Parlement of Paris redefined its position during the spring of 1788. In its declaration of May 3, drafted by d’Éprémesnil, the Parlement redefined the kingdom’s fundamental laws in a way that would virtually make France into a constitutional monarchy, and at the same time it renounced its claim to act as a surrogate for the Estates General by consenting to taxes. But it left hanging the question of how the Estates General would be composed, and that issue exposed it to an accusation raised by the government—namely (as explained in chapter 33) that the Parlement intended to establish an “aristocracy of magistrates” by dominating the new constitutional order.1 That argument, however, was drowned in the charges of despotism and the frenzy produced by the siege of the Palais de justice.
While struggling to install the Maupeou-type judiciary, the government tried to win support by announcing on July 5 that the Estates General would indeed meet and that the public was invited to submit information about how it should be organized. By then, however, the Brienne-Lamoignon ministry had aroused so much hostility that the announcement got a cool reception. So many rumors swirled through Paris, according to Hardy, that no one knew what to believe, and some suspected the government of adopting a delaying tactic, designed to appease the public while the ministers attempted to find a way around the fiscal crisis.2
Nonetheless, the appeal for information touched off a new wave of pamphleteering. Pamphlets had proliferated “under the cloak” since March. From July onward, the flow turned into a flood, and a limited, undeclared liberty of the press opened up a public discussion of what, in practice, the Estates General ought to be. Although a royal edict of August 8 set May 1, 1789, as a firm date when the Estates General would convene, the public remained skeptical of the government’s intentions. It was not until Brienne’s ouster on August 25 that Parisians saw the meeting of the Estates General as a momentous event, certain to take place in the near future.3
At that point, the question of the Estates General’s composition became urgent, and the public’s attention turned increasingly to an answer provided by the provincial estates of Dauphiné, which had met in Vizille during the insurrection at Grenoble. The “model of Vizille,” as it became known,4 would require that the number of deputies from the Third Estate equal those of the first two and that voting take place “by head”—by counting the votes of individuals in a single assembly rather than by estates meeting separately. Proclamations from the assembly in Vizille circulated widely in Paris, and they were followed by manifestoes from later meetings of the Dauphiné estates, which demanded a doubling of the number of deputies from the Third Estate. “Doubling” and “by head” became the rallying cry of a movement to turn the Estates General into a “national assembly.” In fact, the term “national assembly” had been widely used before the collapse of the Brienne-Lamoignon ministries. Other words—“patriot,” “nation,” “people”—filled café conversations, journal articles, and the growing mass of pamphlets, which the government tacitly permitted. The debate they raised was beginning to look like a struggle over power.
The question of power appeared as soon as the Parlement resumed its functions. On September 25 it registered a royal declaration convoking the Estates General for January (the date was later modified), and it specified that the convocation would take place “following the form observed in 1614.”5 The implications of that seemingly casual remark did not sink in at first, but word soon spread that in 1614 the three estates had met separately and voted by estate. References to 1614 were then seen as a red flag, warning that the privileged orders intended to dominate the Estates General. The Gazette de Leyde noted that divisions began to appear among Parisians who had been united in their opposition to the Brienne-Lamoignon ministry. A new tone of discord spread through the city, amplified by epigrams, caricatures, and the continuous pamphleteering.
By November, the full implication of the Parlement’s decision of September 25 had been assimilated by the public, and an open debate crystallized around two prescriptions for the Estates General: the model of Vizille vs. the model of 1614. It was fed by pamphlets, most of them hostile to the Parlement. As the atmosphere became more heated, the government had to take a position. Necker sought support by calling back the Notables who had assembled in 1787 and assigning them the task of recommending how the Estates General should be organized.
As in 1787, the public received only sparse reports about what went on behind closed doors in the meetings of the Notables, who were divided into six “bureaus,” each presided over by a member of the royal family. The speeches given at the opening session on November 6 were published and circulated widely, although they revealed little, with the exception of the address by the first president of the Parlement, le Fèvre d’Ormesson, who advocated the 1614 model. Leaks over the next weeks suggested a growing tendency to favor the privileged orders. The Prince de Conti sent a letter to the other Notables warning that the pamphleteering had gone to such extremes that the monarchy itself was threatened. Lafayette, who was frequently advised by Jefferson at this time, spoke up for the freedom of the press, and most of the Notables endorsed the general principle of equality in taxation. But the dominant view, expressed in a declaration of the bureau of Monsieur (the oldest of the king’s brothers), favored the model of 1614. The declaration based its case on historical precedents, citing documents from far-off dates—1355, 1438, 1560. If France were to have a new constitution, the bureau implied, it would be medieval.
As the discussions dragged on and no consensus was in sight, the public lost interest. Finally on December 12, the king dismissed the Assembly in a ceremony that attracted little attention. While the Notables dispersed, however, word spread about a memoir presented to the king by the princes who had directed the meetings. It began: “SIRE, the state is in danger.… A Revolution in the principles of government is being prepared.” It went on to warn about agitation by pamphleteers, a breakdown of order, attacks on feudal rights, and a threat to property in general.6 Copies of the Mémoire des princes circulated in Paris, provoking an angry reaction. At the same time, the Parlement condemned a pamphlet that favored the Vizille model, Délibération à prendre pour le Tiers Etat, to be burned, instructing the public executor to destroy it in private so as to avoid the publicity that would promote its sales.
The Parlement also opened an investigation of another pamphlet, Pétition des citoyens domiciliés à Paris, sponsored by the Six-Corps des marchands, a body that represented the city’s main commercial corporations. The Pétition and a supplementary pamphlet, Mémoire présenté au Roi par les Six-Corps de la ville de Paris, argued that merchants and manufacturers had made enormous contributions to the kingdom since 1614 and therefore deserved a place in the Estates General, even though they had never been represented before, not even among deputies of the Third Estate. Although the pamphlets were anonymous, word spread that the Pétition had been written by a distinguished doctor from the Paris Faculty of Medicine, Joseph Ignace Guillotin (the Guillotin of the guillotine, which he did not invent but championed for causing less suffering than the usual measures of capital punishment). The Pétition made a strong case for the Vizille model by dismissing historical precedents and boldly invoking reason as the basis for establishing equality before the law. To the Parlement, which stood for historically based constitutionalism and had recently expressed sympathy for the Mémoire des princes, this kind of argument sounded like sedition. It was particularly threatening because printed copies of the Pétition began to circulate in late December and were made available by notaries for anyone to sign. The Parlement called Guillotin to the bar, evidently as a first step in a procedure that would lead to his imprisonment. He arrived in the Palais de justice, accompanied by a boisterous crowd of commoners, and defended himself with such eloquence that the Parlement dropped the case. Now a popular hero, Guillotin was feted by the Six-Corps at a grand banquet, and nouvellistes remarked that he was certain to be elected by the Parisians as a deputy to the Estates General.7
