1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Next day at 10 a.m., Parisians attacked the army barracks at Les Invalides and, unopposed by a sympathetic garrison, seized some 30,000 muskets. An army mutiny in favour of the people – a great cause for celebration and, pourquoi pas, a national holiday?

  Well, non, for two reasons. First, Invalids Day wouldn’t have been at all sexy. And secondly, they had the guns but no powder to fire them with, or bullets to fire. It was a damp squib of a day.

  Enter the Bastille, an old fortified prison in the east of Paris. It was due for closure, and held only seven forgotten prisoners, none of them revolutionaries. There were four forgers, who had been jailed for a banking scam, two lunatics and one count who was accused of helping his sister run away from her husband. The Marquis de Sade (who had been shut away by his wife’s family because of accusations of sexual violence) should also have been there on 14 July, but he had been transferred a few days earlier after yelling out of his cell window at passers-by that the inmates were all being murdered.

  In Charles Dickens’s novel set during the Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities,* the released prisoners are borne aloft like liberated heroes, but in fact the Parisians weren’t interested in freeing this motley crew of prisoners (indeed, all of them apart from the count were locked up again after the prison had been stormed). The mob targeted the Bastille because it was rumoured to contain a veritable gunpowder mountain, guarded by a squadron of only eighty-two semi-invalid soldiers. The pickings were too easy to resist. It was around 10.30 a.m. on 14 July 1789, and history was about to be made.

  A delegation was sent into the prison to demand that the governor, a marquis called Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, hand over the gunpowder. The petitioners were invited in for lunch (yes, even in mid-Revolution, the French took time out for a civilized meal) but then sent away empty-handed. And when a second delegation was no more successful, the mob gathering outside the prison walls began to get impatient.

  De Launay should perhaps have seen the way the political wind was blowing and opened the gates, just as the soldiers at Les Invalides had done. But just after lunchtime, at which he might have had a glass of wine too many, he made the mistake that would cost him his head.

  Around 1.30 p.m., a crowd broke into the prison’s outer courtyard, and were fired on from the ramparts. This enraged the attackers, who could do little about it other than wave their empty muskets in protest. Unfortunately for de Launay, however, they were soon reinforced by mutinous soldiers, who brought along a couple of cannons and began pounding the gates. At about five in the afternoon, de Launay accepted that his meagre garrison was not going to hold out, even if they did have several tons of gunpowder and musket balls. He wrote a polite note asking the mob for the usual terms in such situations – surrender in exchange for humane treatment – and really ought not to have been too surprised when his request was refused. Almost a hundred attackers had been shot dead, and one had been crushed when the chains holding up the drawbridge had been cut. The stormers of the Bastille were in no mood for polite negotiations.

  De Launay finally opened the gates, and the mob surged in to take possession of the prison. Half a dozen of the defenders were picked out and killed for having been too enthusiastic in their defending, and de Launay himself was marched off to the Hôtel de Ville, which had been occupied by the rebellious townspeople. On the way there, he was badly beaten by his captors, and no doubt guessed what kind of violence lay in store for him. So, deciding that he’d had enough, he kicked one of his tormentors in the groin, a final crime for which he was stabbed and shot, before having his head carved off with a kitchen knife.

  This attack on a barely inhabited prison was not the glorious start to the Revolution that it is usually held up to be, but it was very symptomatic of what was to come – the mixture of trial by mob and decapitation was a theme that would be repeated all over France for at least the next five years.

  France wanted an English king

  At this stage of the Revolution, no one was talking about killing Louis XVI, or even deposing him. What most politicians wanted was a constitutional monarchy, like the one across the Channel. These days, we might think of George III of England as a drooling idiot who thought the King of Prussia was a tree, but in the late eighteenth century he was pretty popular in Britain. He had chosen a brilliant Prime Minister in William Pitt, and, seen from Paris, seemed to be the embodiment of what Voltaire had described in his Lettres écrites de Londres, when he praised Britain’s ‘wise system of government in which the ruler is all-powerful when it comes to doing good, and has his hands tied if he attempts to do evil’.

  In May 1789, Louis XVI had reacted to the growing discontent amongst his citizens by giving up a day’s hunting and summoning Parliament to Versailles so that he could hear the doléances, or grievances, brought by the members from all over the country. This was not the list of petty complaints one might imagine – Parliament was not being asked to vote on the maximum height of a hedge in South Brittany, for example. Instead, the members came with lists of truly idealistic demands: there should be a universal system of taxation regardless of rank; key state jobs should go to the best qualified rather than most aristocratic candidate; a national education system should be set up to help the poor, etc., etc. Hopes were running high and even the King, who had got dressed up in his finest jewel-encrusted finery for the occasion, was optimistic that the air could be cleared so that he could get back to hunting in peace.

  Typically, however, the members became embroiled in a row about voting before they could debate any social reforms. The Parliament, or États généraux, was divided into three États (Estates). The First Estate was the clergy, and its 291 representatives spoke for 10,000 or so people. It paid no tax on its vast landholdings. The Second Estate was the nobility, which consisted of about 400,000 people, and had 270 representatives. They were not taxed either, and had feudal rights over many members of the Third Estate, the 25 million commoners, who had 585 representatives at Parliament. Theoretically, the commoners had a slim majority, but they now demanded that all MPs should represent equal numbers of constituents. By this system, the commoners would have had 50 times more members than the other two Estates put together.

  King Louis, who was no doubt beginning to sweat behind his diamond façade, tried to get everyone to discuss taxation, which was the issue that would rebalance the nation’s accounts, bring down food prices and put a stop to the smouldering popular discontent. Critically, though, he didn’t have the necessary power or charisma to keep his Parliament in check, and the Third Estate went off to debate in private – deciding it could do without the others, it declared itself an Assemblée nationale. And instead of trying to placate the commoners and bring them back into the fold, Louis simply locked them out of the proceedings.

  With one turn of the key, he had sealed his own fate. Almost 150 members of the clergy and two aristocrats joined the Assemblée nationale, and suddenly the absolute monarchy was finished. An alternative government was in place, and a precedent had been set. You could say merde to the King and get away with it.

  Even so, the breakaway Parliament, which also called itself les Communes as an apparent homage to its British role model, did not want the King’s head on a plate, or even in prison headgear. The leader of the Assemblée was a count – Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau – who had been elected to represent the Third Estate for Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. Mirabeau was a Marquis de Sade-like eroticist who had once been imprisoned because of his salacious writings, but he now turned his energies to campaigning for a British-style constitutional monarchy. He tried to persuade the King that absolutism and feudalism had had their day, and that he could hold on to the throne if he would only agree to govern beside ministers, as George III of Britain was doing.

  Louis XVI wouldn’t listen, though, and neither would Marie-Antoinette, who – it was rumoured – tried to bribe Mirabeau into dropping all this foolish democracy nonsense. And when the exhausted Mirabeau died
of heart disease (one of the few politicians to die a natural death over the next few years), the monarchy’s last chance died with him.

  Nobbling the nobility

  From now on, the Revolution proceeded with a mixture of idealistic political debate and violent destruction. In August 1789, while the Assemblée was hammering out the details of France’s Declaration of Human Rights, the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, article two of which is about the inalienable right to property, peasants were burning chateaux and landowners’ houses all over the country. Like the Storming of the Bastille, this round of demolition was given an official name – ‘la Grande Peur’ or Great Fear, not because the landowners were frightened of getting burned along with their furniture, but to explain the peasants’ actions. Apparently the Fear was caused by scaremongers spreading rumours that the aristos had – horreur! – invited the Anglais to invade.

  Understandably, the landowners took the hint and started to leave the country, along with many high-ranking army officers. Grabbing whatever they could of their remaining possessions, the refugees streamed over the borders into Italy, Holland, Germany, Austria (Marie-Antoinette’s homeland) and Britain.

  The impoverished aristocrats who chose to take refuge in England must have been nervous about the kind of reception they would receive. After all, they were running for help to the traditional enemy, and many Brits were known to be in favour of the Revolution. The idealistic egalitarian demands of the Assemblée excited libertarians – the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then a teenage student, burned the words ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’ into the lawns at Cambridge (presumably he was stopped before he could get to ‘Fraternity’). Even Royalist Brits were pro-Revolution because they thought that the internal strife would exhaust France and rule it out once and for all as a rival for world power.

  Generally, however, the fleeing French aristos were kindly received, especially because they presented such a pitiful spectacle. Escaping from France was difficult and expensive – the price of a one-way boat trip from Dover to Calais had risen spectacularly. Many of them arrived with little more than the clothes they stood up in, and even the flounciest silks and most perfumed handkerchiefs began to get jaded after a few months of poverty.

  There is an episode of the Blackadder sitcom about French exiles in London, in which Rowan Atkinson meets a snooty aristo who is reduced to eating ‘horse’s willy’ in a cheap café. For once, though, the Blackadder episode was even tamer than the truth. A wonderful book called Histoire générale des émigrés pendant la Révolution française, written by Henri Forneron in 1884, is full of sumptuous anecdotes about French goings-on in London in the 1790s. Forneron tells the story of the writer René de Chateaubriand, a nobleman, who was having to live in a shared hovel, and was so cold at night that he slept under a chair to try and stay warm. In the morning, he and his French roommate would often wake up thinking: where’s the servant with breakfast? before remembering that they had no servant, or money to buy breakfast. They would boil water and pretend it was English tea.

  The English writer Frances Burney met a French family who were so penniless that they were sleeping in their carriage outside an inn in Winchester. Well, they weren’t exactly a family – the carriage was home to a countess, her brother, a noble lady and the countess’s lover, whom she apparently treated alternately ‘with scornful impatience and a seductive sweetness’. Frances Burney wrote that they told her tearful stories of burnt chateaux and murdered friends, but reserved their strongest emotion for an English lady who confessed that she had never been to France.

  ‘What, you’ve never seen Paris?’ the countess gasped. ‘How terrible!’

  Frances Burney did her bit for Anglo-French solidarity by marrying an impoverished French general, whom she fed with her royalties, but other Brits found slightly less generous ways of helping out.

  London newspapers were full of adverts offering instant cash for French jewels, silks and silverware. The Marquess of Buckingham set up a shop selling handicrafts made by the émigrés, with marquises and comtesses working ten hours a day as salesgirls. The enterprising Buckingham also created a tapestry workshop employing 200 priests – some 8,000 French clergymen fled to England during the Revolution, and, not being qualified (or willing) to work for the Anglican Church, had to find other employment. Many of them got work as teachers (Latin and French were much in demand) or doing manual work such as making wooden crates or paper flowers.

  One clergyman found a less conventional position. An abbot moved in with a German singer, who pretended he was her uncle. She was fooling no one, though, and the émigré community loved to gossip about the way she would bully him to into composing French poetry that she sold to a publisher. Not only that but she would hit him, prompting a fellow émigré to remark that ‘if you’re going to have a niece, you should choose her more carefully.’

  Scandal also dogged a certain chevalier de Saint-Louis (something like a Knight of the Garter), who is named in Henri Forneron’s book only as Aimé M**** de la V***. Aimé claimed to have a job as a servant in Carnaby Street, but it was common knowledge that he was living with a prostitute he had picked up in Jersey on the way over from France. This outraged the exiles so much that a group of chevaliers held an emergency meeting and officially kicked him out of the Ordre, even going as far as publishing their decision in a London newspaper.

  Adapting to life in Britain was tough for many of the émigrés. One is quoted as saying that she ‘hates this country without sunlight, where French fruit is unavailable’. The worst thing was that after being cloistered at court, the aristos were suddenly out in the big wide world. One exile complained that she had had ‘no news of the royals for long periods, which is troublesome because one really should not marry without their permission’.

  These British-based refugees clung on to hopes that the excitement in France would die down and they would be able to return, but the more adventurous ones crossed the Atlantic to start completely new lives in America.

  One hard-up émigré called Brillat-Savarin went to Connecticut, where he was taken in by an American family with four daughters – a dream scenario for a roving Frenchman, you might think, but his amorous instincts seem to have been dulled by pure hunger. He had to go out hunting for the family’s food, and would often shoot turkeys and squirrels. On one occasion, the girls put on their best dresses and sang what he refers to as ‘Yankee Doddee’ for him. But instead of wondering which daughter he would most like to undress, he confesses that all the time they were singing, ‘I was thinking of how I was going to cook my turkey.’ Providing even further proof that the French are more interested in food than sex, he goes on to report that ‘the turkey wings were served en papillote and the squirrels boiled in a Madeira wine jus.’

  Brillat-Savarin did seem to be pleased with his country of refuge, though. One evening, he had dinner with some Englishmen and was disturbed to watch the two Brits drinking like fish while he ate and supped in moderation. After dinner, the Englishmen sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and then passed out under the table. It seems that English tourists haven’t changed much in 200 years, and they convinced Brillat-Savarin that he was better off on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Wise words from a Burke

  Life might have been hard for the émigrés living amongst the less than sympathetic Brits, but in November 1790 they gained a very respectable ally.

  Edmund Burke was a renowned lawyer and politician, a 61-year-old former MP who was born in Dublin but had served in the London Houses of Parliament, and had given a famous speech in 1774 pleading for an easing of the dictatorial rule over the American colonies. His advice was ignored* and two years later the Americans rebelled.

  Given his democratic sympathies, Burke might have been expected to come out in favour of the upheavals in France, but in fact his book Reflections on the Revolution in France did exactly the opposite. In it, he considered the attempts to cure France’s economic and political ills,
coupled with the outbreaks of murderous violence, and decided that something was fundamentally wrong with the Revolution.

  ‘In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene,’ he writes, ‘the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror.’

  He talks about the violence in Paris and the Grande Peur and concludes:

  Were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! Nothing like it. Their cruelty has not even been the base result of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety, in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings throughout their harassed land.

  This was not a fashionable opinion, and Burke provoked outrage amongst the chattering classes. The most famous of these was Thomas Paine, the English revolutionary who had been one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Paine reacted in March 1791 by publishing his Rights of Man, in which he accuses Burke of being ‘afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies’ and of pouring forth nothing but ‘rancour, prejudice, ignorance’ and ‘copious fury’.

  Paine also defends the French against Burke’s charge that they have rebelled against a ‘mild and lawful monarch’, stressing that ‘the Monarch and the Monarchy were distinct and separate things; and it was against the established despotism of the latter, and not against the person or principles of the former, that the revolt commenced, and the Revolution has been carried.’