The most highly regarded of all bourgeois were those who ‘lived nobly’. That meant they lived without exercising any profession, on the proceeds of investments or landed revenues. Bourgeois living nobly were a rare breed, however, since anybody who could afford to live like a noble could equally well afford to become one; and ennoblement was the ultimate recognition of social success that all bourgeois dreamed of. Nor did men of means find it hard to achieve. Over 4,000 of the most sought-after venal offices conferred nobility on their holders, and by this and a number of less important avenues perhaps 10,000 individuals (which if their families are included means up to 45,000 people) left the bourgeoisie for the nobility in the course of the eighteenth century—a rate of two people per day. Most ennobling offices, it is true, required two successive generations to hold them if the nobility thereby acquired was to be fully hereditary; but the 857 offices of King’s Secretary, with no duties to speak of, ennobled completely and at once. ‘Soap for scum’ (savonnettes à vilains) they were called, but they were much in demand among financiers, merchants, and industrialists, who pushed their price to unparalleled heights in the 1780s. Nothing outraged the professional bourgeoisie more than to see self-made businessmen leapfrogging them into the highest levels of society. It made nonsense of their assumption that tradesmen, of whatever sort, were their inferiors. But the prices parvenus were prepared to pay put most ennobling offices far beyond the reach of professional men, however worthy. All they could do was petition (as the members of local civil and criminal courts constantly did) to have their own offices made ennobling ones; or try to get away with usurping noble status. Forging false genealogies was a minor industry, and the number of later revolutionary leaders who tried to make their names sound noble is striking. Before 1789 we meet D’Anton, de Robespierre, and de Marat, while Brissot qualified himself de Warville, and Roland, de la Platière. Nor was it any consolation to know that nobles thought little of brash intruders into their order either. When parlements voted (as several did between the 1760s and 1780s) not to admit members without several generations of noble ancestry, or when in 1781 the notorious ‘Ségur Ordinance’ decreed that army officers would henceforth need at least four degrees of nobility, bourgeois opinion was shocked. These measures were largely directed against that same moneyed interest whose ability to buy their way into the nobility so disturbed professional people’s sense of propriety. But from outside they looked like attempts to exclude all bourgeois from the most desirable public employments. In practice few bourgeois had ever got that far without becoming noble first, but to formalize the situation publicly was provocative in an age when the education, values, and outlook of nobles and bourgeois were increasingly indistinguishable.
What then made nobility so desirable? Obviously there was the glamour, distinction, and recognition that noble status had always brought. Then there was a range of privileges which all nobles enjoyed. The bourgeoisie were themselves no strangers to privilege in a society where most people benefited from some special rights or exemptions by virtue of the corporations, groups, towns, or even provinces to which they belonged. Privilege was the hallmark of a country without uniform laws or institutions. But nobles were entitled to more privileges than most. They formed a separate order or estate in society, and all the rest of the king’s subjects, from the most wretched beggar to Young’s great colonial shipper dining off plate, were roturiers, commoners. Nobles took precedence on public occasions, carried swords, and made display of special coats of arms. They were entitled to trial in special courts, and even to a distinctive mode of execution—decapitation—if convicted of a capital offence. They were not subject to the corvée, billeting of troops, or conscription into the militia. Above all they enjoyed substantial fiscal advantages. They escaped much of the weight of the gabelle, the hated, extortionate, salt monopoly; they paid no mutation duties on transferring feudal property (franc-fief); and nobility conferred exemption from the basic direct tax, the taille. It was true that many bourgeois escaped it too, as citizens of towns which had been granted exemption; and that many nobles in the pays d’états, where it fell on lands not persons, found themselves subject to it while non-noble neighbours owning fiefs were not. And there were certainly no exemptions for nobles from more recent direct taxes such as the capitation (1695) and the vingtième (1749). But taille exemption remained, in most people’s eyes, the quintessential badge of nobility; a tangible link with chivalric times when those whose duty was to risk their lives to defend the country in what they called the ‘blood tax’ were not expected to contribute money as well. The same warrior associations made it dishonourable for nobles to engage in retail trade. Those who did so risked loss of status (dérogeance), and reduction to the ranks of the taillables. Few chose to imperil the advantages of nobility by flouting this law, or the deep prejudices which lay behind it. In any case they had their children to think of; nobility was a family affair, a distinction only truly worth having if it could be passed on down the generations. Besides, nobles were presumed to have more important things to do than make their fortunes. They were society’s traditional rulers—yet another reason why aspiring bourgeois were so keen to join them.
Noble numbers were in steep decline. From around 234,000 in the last years of Louis XIV, they had fallen by 1789 to nearer 140,000. But members of this shrinking fragment of the nation owned between a quarter and a third of the land, and most of the feudal rights over the rest. They owned all the most valuable venal offices, huge amounts of government stock, and up to a quarter of the Church’s revenues went into the pockets of noble priests and monks. Most heavy industry was noble-controlled, either through investments or outright ownership in fields like mining and metallurgy which, being land-based, were not deemed commercial. Even the prohibition on trading had its loopholes. Wholesale trade had been open to nobles for generations, and King’s Secretaries, most of whom were great merchants or financiers, were not required to give up business on purchase of this ennobling office. And because it was so easy for successful bourgeois to join the nobility in this way, the wealth of the order was constantly being supplemented by the riches they brought in with them, not to mention the dowries of bourgeois heiresses with which impecunious gentlemen were always eager to ‘regild their arms’. Thus the growing wealth of the bourgeoisie also enriched the nobility, and helped it maintain its leading position. Nobility was a club which every wealthy man felt entitled, indeed obliged, to join. Not all nobles, by any means, were rich, but sooner or later all the rich ended up noble.
And along with noble wealth went influence and power. The king, the ‘first gentleman of the realm’, passed his whole life among noble courtiers. Technically only those with long pedigrees might even meet him. All his ministers were nobles: it caused a sensation in 1776 when Louis XVI gave office to Jacques Necker, a Swiss, Protestant commoner. All the senior members of the administration—ambassadors, governors, councillors of state, intendants—were nobles, as were all senior military and naval officers and most junior ones, too. Most of the great financiers and tax farmers who kept central government solvent had invested in nobility, and since every office in every sovereign court was an ennobling one, the whole upper judiciary were members of the order. In the Church, nobles occupied all bishoprics and all the choicest abbacies and canonries, and under Louis XVI it became a matter of policy that they should. The motive was one that lay behind the Ségur Ordinance of 1781—to reserve some part of the public service for a group without other resources: the poor nobility.
For in reality France under Louis XVI was governed not by the nobility, but by a plutocracy in which the majority of nobles had no share. Half or more of the nobility were no better off than the average bourgeois, and many were a good deal poorer. The nobility of Boulogne, noted Tobias Smollett in 1763,
are vain, proud, poor, and slothful … They allow their country houses to go to decay, and their gardens and fields to waste; and reside in dark holes in the Upper Town … without light
, air, or convenience. There they starve within doors, that they may have the wherewithall to purchase fine cloaths, and appear dressed once a day … They have no education, no taste for reading, no housewifery, nor indeed any earthly occupation, but that of dressing their hair, and adorning their bodies. They hate walking, and would never go abroad, if they were not stimulated by the vanity of being seen … They pretend to be jealous of their rank, and will entertain no correspondence with merchants, whom they term plebeians.14
At Court, and in Paris, wealth opened every door, and dukes and peers happily married the well-endowed daughters of great financiers. Necker’s passport to power was his opulence as a banker. There was similar mingling of rank and riches in some provincial capitals, especially if they were ports. But away from such centres of conspicuous consumption, the nobility often consisted of threadbare gentry with impeccable lineages but no resources. These were the only nobles most peasants, and therefore most French people, ever came across. They found them haughty, keen to exact their feudal dues and exercise their seigneurial prerogatives, and ferociously attached to their ancestry and privileges as noblemen. ‘It generally happened’, recalled Count de Ségur in 1825, looking back on the years before the Revolution, ‘that there was less cause of complaint against the higher nobility or persons attached to the court than against the country nobility, who were poor and unenlightened. This ought to occasion no surprise, for the latter had nothing but their titles, which they were continually opposing to the real superiority of some of the middle classes whose knowledge and wealth embarrassed and humbled them.’15 Among nobles of this sort prejudice against trade was at its most virulent. In Brittany, gentlemen fallen on hard times were allowed to ‘put their nobility to sleep’ while they restored their fortunes in commerce. But even those who did so, like Chateaubriand’s father, who eventually managed to buy back the ancestral castle, spent all they had made in the process, and were then content to resume lives of straitened but genteel idleness. Lack of money closed the judicial bench to such people: the price of offices was beyond them, nor could they have afforded the education indispensable for sovereign court magistrates. They took solace in sneering at what they chose (erroneously, often enough) to think of as the recent origins of the nobility of the robe. They saw themselves, on the contrary, as the only true nobility, a nobility of the sword. Their vocation, inherited with the blood of their ancestors, was to fight. They had a duty to serve the king—as officers, of course—in his armies. And he in turn had a duty to give them that opportunity. The problem was that all officer ranks were subject to purchase, and here again plutocrats priced them out of the market. In mid-century there had been a lively public debate about the problem of the poor nobility. In La Noblesse commerçante of 1756 the Abbé Coyer had argued that the solution was to encourage them to trade. But in La Noblesse militaire ou Le Patriote français, the Chevalier d’Arc, illegitimate grandson of Louis XIV, responded by denouncing the power of money and advocating a noble monopoly of military commissions with promotion on merit alone. This would both give poor nobles a guaranteed livelihood and make for more dedicated, professional officers. Such debates culminated in 1776 in the establishment of a system of twelve military schools like that of Brienne, where young Napoleon Bonaparte, from a poor noble family in newly acquired Corsica, learned the rudiments of the military arts. The Ségur Ordinance had the same aim—to purge the body of army officers of rich playboys just up from the bourgeoisie, more interested in the glamour and social recognition of a uniform than in military efficiency. The flaw was that it did nothing about courtier playboys, whose pedigrees were excellent, who were just as rich, but whose commitment to the military life was just as token. Either way those with talent or abilities seemed doomed to take second place to people endowed by chance of birth with riches or noble ancestors: and not only in the army. The whole of society, many thought, worked too obviously in this way. ‘What being is most alien to those around him?’ mused Chamfort, a self-made man of letters, whose aristocratic contacts propelled him into the Académie française in 1781. ‘ … Might it not perchance be a man of merit without gold or title-deeds, in the midst of those who possess one of these two advantages, or both together?’16
It was scarcely a coincidence that public dissatisfaction should become focused on the army. The record of the French armed forces in the wars of mid-century had been lamentable. Swept from the seas by the British, and mauled on the battlefield by the Prussians, no other institutions had had their inadequacies so spectacularly demonstrated. Reforms like the introduction of military academies and the Ségur Ordinance were part of a sustained attempt to restore the tarnished prestige of an army that had been the admiration of Europe in the days of Louis XIV. That role had now been inherited by the army of Frederick the Great, and it provided the model of many of the French reforms. Successive war ministers sought not only to build a Prussian-style officer-corps, but also introduced Prussian tactics and manoeuvres, Prussian uniforms, and even Prussian discipline. Controversy raged over every aspect of this policy, and polemics flew over such questions as whether French soldiers could honourably be punished for military offences in the German way by beating with the flat of a sword. And certainly Louis XVI’s army was very differently constituted from that of Frederick. Most of his soldiers were his own subjects, and volunteers too. There were indeed twenty-three foreign regiments, including the redoubtable Swiss Guards permanently attached to the royal household, but they barely accounted for one-seventh of the entire strength. And conscription was only used to recruit the militia, a reserve army never now mobilized except in wartime. Lots were drawn to select the conscripts required from each district, but exemption was so widespread that only the poorest peasants failed to avoid the draw. Even though the risk of the militia being embodied was now small, it was deeply unpopular in the countryside. The military life had little appeal for even the most miserable of peasants. The ranks of the regular army were drawn overwhelmingly from the highly urbanized, heavily garrisoned northern and eastern frontier districts. Most recruits stayed with the colours for the full eight years of their engagement, and losses of 3,000 a year through desertion were low by international standards. So was the relative weight of the military in society. The 180,000 strong army represented one soldier for every 156 of the king’s subjects (as compared with 1 in 29 in Prussia), and its regional concentration meant it impinged little on the lives of whole provinces in the centre, south, and west of the country. French troops had not fought on their own soil for three generations, and in the eighteenth century they were seldom called upon to deal with civil unrest. Despite, therefore, the increasing sums being spent on it, the army was becoming more and more a world apart, making little impact on areas or populations not already militarized for generations. But even within the army there were separate worlds. Most officers, endowed with generous leave, saw little of their subordinates and cared less. The Prussian models so fashionable among military theorists, which called for mindless automatons in the ranks, did nothing to bring them closer together. Nor did attempts to restrict access to commissions. In their anxiety to exclude rich commoners, they also kept out or kept down talented ‘officers of fortune’ with long and valuable experience in other, lower, ranks.
Such distance was impossible in the navy, where a ship’s complement all lived on top of one another for months on end, and each officer needed a thorough understanding of navigation and the duties of a crew. It was true that throughout the French navy’s history repeated attempts had been made to restrict the recruitment of officers to nobles. Naval schools (compagnies de gardes de la marine) at Brest, Rochefort, and Toulon were intended to supply all the service’s needs and were theoretically open only to nobles. But the latter found far less attraction in the rigours of seagoing than in the army; and although the ‘red’ officers produced by the schools dominated the service, in wartime they were outnumbered by ‘blues’ recruited from a wide spectrum of maritime society. There was n
o purchase in the navy, and few courtiers were interested in even the highest ranks, so social rivalries were far less pronounced at every level. What counted at sea was competence and experience, and ever since the time of Colbert a system of naval conscription had operated in order to ensure that even the lower decks had these qualities. In coastal districts and navigable river valleys every man under 60 with experience afloat was required to register for assignment to a ‘class’, or naval reserve category, liable for mobilization if the need arose. The system was as unpopular among sailors, fishermen, and bargemen as the draw for the militia was among peasants; but it produced better crews for warships than the British pressgang, and ones which had their revenge on the British during the American War of Independence. This war seemed to vindicate the massive programme of naval expansion and re-equipment that had been pursued since the end of the previous one in 1763. By 1780 there were 86 frigates and 79 ships of the line in French service, and the annual cost of the navy almost quadrupled between 1776 and 1783. These efforts were crucial in securing American independence, and even after the war ended Louis XVI remained determined to keep France a major naval power. The only time he saw the sea, or visited any of his kingdom outside the Île de France before 1791, was in 1786, when he travelled to Cherbourg to inspect progress on a vast new naval harbour. Three thousand men were employed on the works, which deeply impressed Arthur Young when he viewed them late in August 1788. Young wondered, however, whether such a stupendous project could be completed without bankrupting the kingdom. In fact it took another 65 years to complete. And defence spending on this scale had already brought bankruptcy just eleven days before Young arrived in Cherbourg.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 5
