The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  The Revolution made better headway in reforming the criminal code. Procedure was made more public; there was to be an end (for a while) to secrecy of examinations and anonymity of witnesses. Prisons ceased to be prime instruments of torture; in many prisons the inmates were allowed to bring in books and furniture, and to pay for imported meals; persons jailed as suspects, but not yet convicted, might visit one another, play games,20 and at least play at love; we hear of some warm affairs, like that of prisoner Josephine de Beauharnais with prisoner General Hoche. The Convention, which had sanctioned hundreds of executions, announced at its final session (October 26, 1795): “The penalty of death will be abolished throughout the French Republic from the day of the proclamation of peace.”

  Meanwhile the Revolution could claim that it had improved the method of capital punishment. In 1789 Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, member of the States-General, proposed to replace the hangman and the axe man with a massive mechanical blade whose fall would separate a man from his head before he had any time to feel physical pain. The idea was not new; it had been used in Italy and Germany since the thirteenth century.21 After some experimental use of the doctor’s knife on dead bodies, the “guillotine” was erected (April 25, 1792) in the Place de Grève (now the Place de la Hôtel de Ville) and then elsewhere, and executions were accelerated. For a time they attracted large crowds, some of them merry, and including women and children;22 but soon they were so frequent that they became a negligible commonplace; “people,” reported a contemporary, “just went on working in their shops when the tumbrils passed, not even bothering to raise their heads.”23 Lowered heads lasted longest.

  2. Sexual Morality

  Between the tumbrils, among the ruins, love and venery survived. The Revolution had neglected the hospitals, but there, and on battlefields and in the slums, charity eased pain and grief, goodness countered evil, and parental affection survived filial independence. Many sons wondered at parental inability to understand their revolutionary ardor and new ways; some of them threw off the old moral restraints, and became careless epicureans. Promiscuity flourished, venereal disease spread, foundlings multiplied, perversions floundered on.

  Comte Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade (1740–1814) came of a high-placed Provençal family, rose to be governor general of the districts Bresse and Bugey, and seemed destined for the life of a provincial administrator. But he seethed and fermented with sexual imagery and desires, and sought for a philosophy that might justify them. After an affair involving four girls, he was sentenced to death at Aix-en-Provence (1772) for “crimes of poisoning and sodomy.”24 He escaped, was captured, escaped, committed further enormities, fled to Italy, returned to France, was arrested in Paris, was imprisoned in Vincennes (1778–84), in the Bastille, and at Charenton (1789). Released in 1790, he supported the Revolution; in 1792 he was secretary of the Section des Piques. During the Terror he was arrested on the false assumption that he was a returned émigré. He was released after a year, but in 1801, under Napoleon, he was imprisoned for having published Justine (1791) and Juliette (1792). These were novels of sexual experience, normal and abnormal; the author preferred the abnormal, and spent his considerable literary skill in defending it; all sexual desires, he argued, are natural, and should be indulged with a clear conscience, even to deriving erotic pleasure from the infliction of pain; in this last sense he became immortal with a word. He spent the last years of his life in various prisons, wrote clever plays, and died in the insane asylum at Charenton.

  We hear of homosexuality among college students during the Revolution,25 and may presume its popularity in jails. Prostitutes and brothels were especially numerous near the Palais-Royal, in the Gardens of the Tuileries, in the Rue St.-Hilaire and the Rue des Petits Champs; they could be found also at theaters and the opera, and even in the galleries of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention. Pamphlets were circulated giving the addresses and fees of houses and women. On April 24, 1793, the Temple section issued an order: “The General Assembly, … desiring to put a stop to the incalculable misfortune caused by the dissoluteness of public morals, and by the lubricity and immodesty of the female sex, hereby nominates commissioners,” etc.26 Other sections took up the campaign; private patrols were formed, and some careless offenders were arrested. Robespierre supported the effort, but after his death the assiduity of the guardians relaxed, the filles reappeared, and prospered under the Directory, when women of wide sexual experience became leaders of fashion and society.

  The evil may have been mitigated by the increasing facility of early marriage. No priest was necessary; after September 20, 1792, only civil marriage was legal; and this required merely a mutual pledge signed before a civil authority. In the lower classes there were many cases of a couple living together unwed and unmolested. Bastards were plentiful; in 1796 France recorded 44,000 foundlings.27 Between 1789 and 1839, twenty-four percent of all brides in the typical town of Meulan were pregnant when they came to the altar.28 As in the Ancien Régime, adultery in the husband was often condoned; men of means were likely to have mistresses, and under the Directory these were displayed as openly as wives. Divorce was legalized by a decree of September 20, 1792; thereafter it could be obtained through mutual agreement before a municipal officer.

  Paternal authority was lessened by the moderate growth of women’s legal rights, and still more by the self-assertion of emancipated youth. Anne Plumptre, who traveled in France in 1802, reported a gardener as telling her:

  “During the Revolution we dared not scold our children for their faults. Those who called themselves patriots regarded it as against the fundamental principles of liberty to correct children. This made these so unruly that very often, when a parent presumed to scold his child, the latter would tell him to mind his own business, adding, ‘We are free and equal; the Republic is our only father, and no other.’ … It will take a good many years to bring them back to minding.”29

  Pornographic literature abounded, and (according to a contemporary newspaper) was the favorite reading of the young.30 Some previously radical parents began by 1795 (as in 1871) to send their sons to schools directed by priests, in the hope of saving them from the general loosening of manners and morals.31 For a time it seemed that the family must be a casualty of the French Revolution, but the restoration of discipline under Napoleon reprieved it until the Industrial Revolution fell upon it with more gradual but more sustained and fundamental force.

  Women had held a high place in the Old Regime through the grace and refining influence of their manners, and by the cultivation of their minds; but these developments were mostly confined to the aristocracy and the upper middle class. By 1789, however, the women of the commonalty visibly emerged into politics; they almost made the Revolution by marching to Versailles and bringing King and Queen back to Paris as the captives of a commune bursting with its newly discovered power.*In July, 1790, Condorcet published an article “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of the State.” In December an attempt was made by a Mme. Aëlders to establish clubs devoted to woman’s liberation.32 Women made themselves heard in the galleries of the Assemblies, but attempts to organize them for the advancement of their political rights were lost in the excitement of war, the fury of the Terror, and the conservative reaction after Thermidor. Some gains were made: the wife, like the husband, could sue for divorce, and the mother’s consent, as well as the father’s, was required for the marriage of her children under age.33 Under the Directory, women, though voteless, became an open power in politics, promoting ministers and generals, and proudly displaying their new freedom in manners, morals, and dress. Napoleon, aged twenty-six, described them in 1795:

  The women are everywhere—at plays, on public walks, in libraries. You see very pretty women in the scholar’s study room. Only here [in Paris], of all the places on earth, do women deserve such influence, and indeed the men are mad about them, think of nothing else, and live only through and for them. A woman, in order to know what is due
her, and what power she has, must live in Paris for six months.34

  III. MANNERS

  Like almost everything else, manners felt the swing of the pendulum to revolt and return. As the aristocracy fled before the leveling storm they took with them their lordly titles, courteous address, perfumed language, flowery signatures, confident ease, and leisurely grace. Soon the suavity of the salon, the decorum of the dance, and the diction of the Academy became stigmata of the nobility, which might incur, for their practitioners, detention as suspect antediluvians who had escaped the flood.35 By the end of 1792 all Frenchmen in France had become citoyens, all Frenchwomen citoyennes, in careful equality; no one was Monsieured or Madamed; and the courtly vous of singular address was replaced by the tu and toi of the home and the street. Nevertheless, as early as 1795, this tutoiement was passing out of style, vous was back in fashion, Monsieur and Madame were displacing Citoyen and Citoyenne.36 Under Napoleon, titles reappeared; by 1810 there were more of them than ever before.

  Dress changed more slowly. The well-to-do male had long since adopted, and now refused to discard, the once noble accouterment of the three-cornered high-crowned hat, silk shirt, flowing bow tie, colored and embroidered waistcoat, full-dress coat reaching to the knee, breeches ending at various levels below the knees, silk stockings, and square-toed buckled shoes. In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety tried to “modify the present national costume, so as to render it appropriate to republican habits and the character of the Revolution”;37 but only the lower middle class adopted the long trousers of the workingmen and tradesmen. Robespierre himself continued to dress like a lord, and nothing surpassed in splendor the official costumes of the Directors, paced by Barras. Not till 1830 did pantaloons win the battle against knee breeches (culottes). Only the sansculottes wore the red bonnet of revolution, and the carmagnole.*

  The dress of women was affected by the Revolution’s belief that it was following in the footsteps of republican Rome and Periclean Greece. Jacques-Louis David, who dominated French art from 1789 to 1815, took classic heroes for his early subjects, and dressed them in classic styles. So the fashionable women of Paris, after the fall of the puritan Robespierre, discarded petticoats and chemises, and adopted as their principal garment a simple flowing gown transparent enough to reveal most of the soft contours that charmed the never satiated male. The waistline was unusually high, supporting the breasts; the neckline was low enough to offer an ample sample; and the sleeves were short enough to display enticing arms. Caps were replaced by bandeaux, and high-heeled shoes by heelless slippers. Doctors reported the deaths of gaily dressed women who had been exposed, at the theater or on promenade, to the quickly falling temperature of Paris evenings.38 Meanwhile the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses—Unbelievable male and Marvelous female dandies—labored to win attention by extravagant garb. One group of women, appearing in male attire before the Council of the Paris Communes in 1792, received a gentle reprimand from Chaumette, its procureur général: “You rash women, who want to be men, aren’t you content with your lot as it is? What more do you want? You dominate our senses; the legislator and the magistrate are at your feet, your despotism is the only one our strength cannot combat, because it is the despotism of love, and consequently a work of nature. In the name of that very nature, remain as nature intended you.”39

  Women, however, were sure they could improve upon nature. In an advertisement in the Moniteur for August 15, 1792, Mme. Broquin announced that she had not yet run out of her “famous powder for dyeing red or white hair chestnut or black, on a single application.”40 If necessary, unsatisfactory hair was covered with a wig—made, in many cases, from the cut tresses of guillotined young women.41 In 1796 it was quite ordinary for men of the upper and middle strata to wear their hair long and in a braid.42

  During the first two years of the Revolution the 800,000 population of Paris carried on its usual life, with only incidental attention to what was going on in the Assembly or the jails. Life was pleasant enough then for the upper classes: families continued to exchange visits and dinners, to attend dances, parties, concerts, and plays. Even during the violent period between the September Massacres of 1792 and the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, when there were 2,800 executions in Paris, life for nearly all the survivors went its customary round of work and play, of sexual pursuit and parental love. Sébastien Mercier reported in 1794:

  Foreigners reading our newspapers imagine us all covered with blood, in rags, and living wretched lives. Judge of their surprise when they reach that magnificent avenue in the Champs Elysées, on either side of which are elegant phaetons and charming, lovely women; and then … that magical perspective opening out over the Tuileries and … those splendid gardens, now more luxuriant and better tended than ever!43

  There were games—ball games, tennis, riding, horse races, athletic contests … There were amusement parks like the Tivoli Gardens, where—like twelve thousand others on a pleasant day—you could get your fortune told, buy dispensables in the boutiques, watch fireworks, tight-rope walkers, or balloon ascensions, hear concerts, or put your youngsters on the merry-go-round to play the jeu de bagues (catching the rings). You might sit in an open-air café, or under the pavilion of the Café de Foy, or in a high-class café like Tortoni’s or Frascati’s, or follow the tourists into night spots like the Caveau (Cellar), or the Sauvage, or Les Aveugles (where blind musicians entertained). You could go to a club to read or chat or hear political debate. You could attend one of the complex and colorful festivals organized by the state and decorated by famous artists like David. If you wished to try the new dance—the waltz—just imported from Germany, you could find a partner in some one of the three hundred public ballrooms in the Paris of the Directory.44

  Now (1795), in the subsiding years of the Revolution, some émigrés were allowed to return; hidden nobles ventured from their protective lairs, and the bourgeoisie displayed its wealth in expensive homes and furniture, in jeweled women and lavish entertainments. The people of Paris emerged from their apartments and tenements to sample the sun or the evening air in the gardens of the Tuileries or the Luxembourg, or along the Champs-Élysées. Women blossomed out in their recklessly charming costumes, their pictured fans that said more than words, their gracefully shaped shoes that made concealed feet alluring. “Society” revived.

  But the hundred or so families that now constituted it were not the pedigreed gentry and world-famous philosophes who had sparkled in the salons of pre-Revolution nights; they were mostly the nouveaux-riches who had garnered livres from ecclesiastical realty, army contracts, mercantile monopolies, financial finesse, or political friends. Some scattered survivors from Bourbon days came to the homes of Mme. de Genlis or the widows Condorcet and Helvétius; but most of the salons that opened after the death of Robespierre (Mme. de Staël’s circle excepted) had no talent for brilliant conversation, and lacked the ease that in older times had come from long security in landed wealth. The top salon now was the one that met in the comfortable rooms of Director Barras in the Luxembourg Palace, or at his Château de Grosbois; and its allure was not in the lore of philosophers but in the beauty and smiles of Mmes. Tallien and Josephine de Beauharnais.

  Josephine was not yet Bonaparte, and Mme. Tallien was no longer Tallien’s wife. Married to him on December 26, 1794, and acclaimed for a while as “Notre Dame de Thermidor,” she had left the fading Terrorist soon afterward, and had become the mistress of Barras. Some journalists gibed at her morals, but most of them returned her smiles, for there was nothing haughty in her beauty, and she was known for many kindnesses to women as well as to men. The Duchesse d’Abrantès described her later as “the Capitoline Venus, but even more lovely than the work of Pheidias; for you perceived in her the same perfection of features, the same symmetry in arms, hands, and feet, the whole animated by a benevolent expression.”45*It was one virtue of Barras that he was generous to her and to Josephine, appreciated their beauty in no merely sexual way, shared it, in his
receptions, with hundreds of potential rivals, and put his blessing upon Napoleon’s capture of Josephine.

  IV. MUSIC AND DRAMA

  Every grade of music flourished. You could get encores from a street singer for a coin, or you could join a crowd and frighten the bourgeois with “The Carmagnole” or “Ça ira,” or you could shake the frontiers with “The Marseillaise,” of which Rouget de Lisle had written all but the title. In the Concert-Feydeau you could marvel at Dominique Garat, the Caruso of his time, whose voice could evoke tremors in hearts and rafters, and was famous throughout Europe for its range. Amid the Terror of 1793 the Convention inaugurated the Institut National de Musique, and two years later it expanded this into the Conservatoire de Musique, granting it 240,000 livres per year for the free tuition of six hundred students. On the night when Robespierre was shot a Parisian could have heard Armide at the Opéra, or Paul et Virginie at the Opéra-Comique.46

  Opera flourished during the Revolution. Besides putting Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s idyl to music in 1794, Jean-François Lesueur (1760–1837) scored another success, in the same year, with Fénelon’s Télémaque; he aroused all France with the noise and terror of La Caverne, which received seven hundred performances; he continued to produce during Napoleon’s ascendancy, and lived long enough to teach Berlioz and Gounod. In a much shorter life Étienne Méhul (1763–1817) wrote over forty operas for the Opéra-Comique, while his massive chorales—Hymne à la raison (1793) and Chant du départ (1794)—made him the musical idol of the Revolution.*