1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Paine takes a hearty swipe at monarchy in general, and Britain’s system of government in particular. He outlines the ideals of the French Revolution, and predicts ‘political happiness and national prosperity’ there.

  He also put his money where his mouth was and went to France to support the Revolution, despite being unable to speak a word of French … although his departure might also have been due to the fact that the British authorities were after him for sedition.

  Paine’s is the best-known response to Burke’s book, but in fact the first to react had been feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who published A Vindication of the Rights of Men only three weeks after Burke. Because it was written so quickly, the book has been criticized for being disorganized. And because it was written by a woman, it was also slammed by her male contemporaries for being too emotional (as soon as they found out who had written it, that is – the first edition was anonymous).

  Wollstonecraft rips into Burke for supporting hereditary privilege and government by an elite. She also mocks the old man for his apparent infatuation with Marie-Antoinette. On 6 October 1789, a mainly female mob had marched to Versailles, decapitated several members of the palace guard and brought the royal family back to Paris in a procession led by protesters carrying heads on spikes. Burke had described the ‘horrid yells, frantic dances and unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women’. In a very modern-sounding critique of his language, Wollstonecraft takes him to task for criticizing these women just because they were poor and uneducated compared to the refined Queen. The women’s yells would have seemed less abominable, she says, if they hadn’t had to earn their living selling fish.

  This public row about France was highly entertaining and very profitable. All three books were major publishing successes* on both sides of the Channel, with Paine and Wollstonecraft easily outselling Burke because their publisher undercut his cover price. Cruelly, however, only one writer’s prophecies came true.

  For all his elitism and misplaced gallantry, Burke had seen the way things were going. The politicians soon got tired of intellectual debate and began purging moderate elements. The name of the Assemblée nationale kept changing – Assemblée constituante, Assemblée législative, Convention and Directoire were some of its new identities over the next five years – and each change brought not just sackings but wholesale executions as different factions – the Girondins, Montagnards and Jacobins – took power. It was Voltaire who said that ‘in a government, you need both shepherds and butchers.’ The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds, while the sheep turned cannibal.

  Earth-shaking laws were being implemented – the abolition of slavery, the legalization of divorce, the adoption of the metric system – but it was in a climate as devoid of political principles as a drunk footballer in a brothel.

  After Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette made a pathetic attempt to escape from France in June 1791, organized by the Queen’s alleged Swedish lover Count Fersen, a climate of paranoid fear had set in. Anyone suspected of being a Royalist was liable to be ‘tried’ by a tribunal and either guillotined or, more often, handed over to the crowds outside for lynching.

  In September 1792, a rumour went around that a counterrevolution was being planned in Paris’s jails, and that prisoners had been heard chanting ‘Vivent les Autrichiens’ (long live the Austrians, a reference to Marie-Antoinette’s family). In each section of the city, the prisons were opened up, the inmates hauled out and tried for treason. Thousands were killed and, in an apparent confusion about buildings with high walls, the massacres were even extended to monasteries.

  The most famous of the victims was Marie-Antoinette’s First Lady of the Bedchamber, Marie-Louise, princesse de Lamballe, who was suspected of having a lesbian affair with the Queen. She was taken out of La Force prison (in the picturesque Marais district of Paris) and told to swear an oath of disobedience to the royal family. When she refused, she was hacked to death, and her head was paraded under Marie-Antoinette’s window at the nearby Temple prison by a crowd calling to her to come out and kiss her lover.

  It was all exactly as horrific as Burke had predicted.

  A Frenchman ate my hamster

  Again, this violence was given an official title – ‘la Terreur’ – and as news of the atrocities filtered out, the last vestiges of British sympathy for the Revolution dissipated completely. London’s newspapers had a field day describing the bloodshed.

  Reporting the princesse de Lamballe’s killing, The Times said that ‘her thighs were cut across, and her bowels and heart torn from her, and for two days her mangled body was dragged through the streets.’ The newspaper also enjoyed itself immensely over the September 1792 massacres, raging that ‘the most savage four-footed tyrants that range the unexplored deserts of Africa, in point of tenderness, rise superior to these two-legged Parisian animals.’

  On 10 September, The Times gave an eye-witness account of the killing of 220 Carmelite monks:

  They were handed out of the prison door two by two into the Rue Vaugirard, where their throats were cut. Their bodies were fixed on pikes and exhibited to the wretched victims who were next to suffer. The mangled bodies of others are piled against the houses in the streets; and in the quarters of Paris near to which the prisons are, the carcases lie scattered in hundreds, diffusing pestilence all around.

  On 12 September, the paper did its best to drum up sympathy for the imprisoned royals, though it seemed to be scraping the barrel just a little: ‘The victuals given to the King and Queen is worse than that of any of their guards, and the jailors oblige them to eat such dishes as they know they dislike most. They drink the same wine as their guards.’

  Then as now, journalists had much more fun when they were allowed to concentrate on pure atrocities:

  The mob ordered one of the Swiss soldiers to dress the hair of a young Swiss officer, a very handsome young man; and when it was done, they ordered him with a hand-saw to take off his head, and to be cautious not to spoil his headdress, saying it was too fine a head to put upon a pike, but to the best advantage. The soldier refused to obey, and was immediately cut to pieces; and two women sawed the officer’s head from his body. He was not heard to make the least complaint, and it was near an hour before the head was quite off.

  Another story, if true, was just as gory:

  At the Place Dauphin, the mob had made a fire, and before it several men, women and children were roasted alive. The countess Perignan with her two daughters, the daughters first, and the mother after, were stripped of their clothes, washed with oil, and roasted alive, while the mob were singing and dancing round the fire, and amusing themselves with their cries and sufferings. After the repeated prayers of the eldest girl, not more than 15 years old, that someone would with a sword or a pistol put an end to her horrid existence, a young man shot her through the heart, which so irritated the mob, that they immediately threw him into the fire.

  You can almost feel the British glee that the political chattering was over and the violence had really got under way.

  When is a cake not a cake?

  Soon afterwards, Thomas Paine’s theory that the King was not under personal threat was proved bloodily wrong. On 21 January 1793, Louis XVI was driven through the streets of Paris in a carriage and guillotined on the place de la Révolution (today the place de la Concorde), his final words drowned out by a drum roll and the yells of the crowd to get on with it. On 16 October, Marie-Antoinette followed him, after being tried for treason and (bizarrely) incest. She did not get the carriage treatment and had to ride to her execution on the back of an open cart, taunted by the crowd.

  Frighteningly, British illustrator James Gillray’s grotesque view of the French Revolution contains elements of truth. Cannibalism was almost certainly not on the menu, but massacres, mutilations and even roastings were common during the Terreur.

  These days, many French people think of Marie-Antoinette a
s a victim of the Revolution rather than one of its causes. They pity the Austrian girl who had been married off for political reasons at the age of fourteen to an impotent French prince, and was then kept in a gilded cage while her hapless husband let France sink into the mire. But back then, she was regarded as a haughty harlot, the foreign princess who dressed up as a shepherdess in her custom-built model farm in the grounds of Versailles while real peasants were starving to death nearby.

  All of which probably explains the ‘let them eat cake’ rumour – the story being that the Queen uttered these callous words when she heard that Parisians were rioting because they couldn’t afford bread. Opinions vary on whether she actually made the remark, although one thing is certain: whatever she said, it wasn’t ‘let them eat cake’, which has to go down as one of the worst translations in history. It’s as if ‘vive la différence’ were translated as ‘let the difference live’. It doesn’t mean anything.

  The actual quotation attributed to her was ‘qu’ils mangent de la brioche’, which means something like ‘then why don’t they eat brioche?’, and would need a little footnote explaining that brioche is a posh version of bread made with eggs, butter, sugar and milk.

  If she did say this, some might say she deserved to have her head cut off, or at the very least bashed with a brioche. But in fact it’s almost certain that she didn’t say anything of the sort – the phrase is actually taken from the autobiography of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  In Les Confessions, Rousseau tells a story about working as a live-in tutor to the children of a certain Monsieur de Mably and falling in love with the local white wine – so much so that he often sneaked away a bottle to have a quiet drink in his room. But, he says, he could never drink without eating. ‘How was I to get bread?’ he agonizes. He couldn’t be seen taking baguettes up to his room, and if he asked the servants to buy bread, his host would be insulted. Finally, to quote the original, ‘Je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit: Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.’ In other words: ‘I remembered the solution suggested by a great princess, who was told that the peasants had no bread, and answered: Then why don’t they eat brioche?’ Rousseau is not bothered at all by the political incorrectness of the story, and goes out to the patisserie to buy brioche for himself, which was apparently an acceptable thing for a well-bred young man to do, being a luxury rather than a staple food.

  He was writing about the year 1736, nineteen years before Marie-Antoinette’s birth, and was probably suggesting that the brioche remark had been made by the wife of the Sun King, Princess Marie-Thérèse, daughter of Philip IV of Spain. This is a perfectly credible idea – Louis XIV’s court was totally cut off from reality and lived by its witticisms. Anything was good for a joke.*

  Whatever the truth about the whole cake/brioche story, Rousseau’s autobiography came out in 1782, seven years before the Revolution, and was the perfect source of a misappropriated quotation when people were looking for nasty things to say about Marie-Antoinette. As we’ve seen, it was a time when rumours caused riots and massacres. No one was going to disbelieve such an easily quotable quip, and it was destined to stay with Marie-Antoinette for much longer than her head.

  A day for parsnips

  It would be a shame to think of the French Revolution as one long round of bloodletting and demolition, however. Among the power-seekers, there were real innovators who leapt at the chance to rethink a whole society from scratch.

  Apart from the metric system, the most radical of these new ideas was the Revolutionary Calendar, a superbly crackpot scheme to begin again at Day One and reshape the year to fit French life. It was doomed to fail, for a reason we will see in a moment, but in a way the opponents of the old calendar were right. After all, several of the months were named in incorrect Latin – September was the ninth month and October the tenth. What kind of lesson was that for schoolkids learning dead languages? And what was all this business of having different-length months, and the Catholic nonsense of decreeing that a week should have seven days?

  It was time, the Revolutionaries thought, to do away with it all and start afresh.*

  The new calendar was developed by a wonderfully French combination of people – two mathematicians and two poets. The mathematicians did the groundwork, deciding that the year should have twelve months of thirty days. Fortunately, being mathematicians, they quickly realized that this wasn’t enough, and added five extra holidays – six in leap years – so that France would stay in alignment with the natural calendar.

  The poets chose the names of the days and months, using French plants, animals and tools for the days, and making the months rhyme in groups of three. Winter, for example, was divided into nivôse, pluviôse and ventôse (names derived from the French words for snow, rain and wind). For the days, the poets didn’t want to be tied down to simply replacing lundi, mardi, mercredi, etc., so they gave each individual day of the year a name. In autumn, for example, there was parsnip (30 September), pumpkin (8 October), aubergine (17 October) and spade (20 December). In spring, 8 April was beehive, 4 May silkworm. All very picturesque, but the drawback is obvious …

  ‘What’s the date today?’

  ‘Parsnip.’

  ‘Merci.’

  ‘Or hang on – is it carrot? Or horseradish?’

  This wasn’t the fatal flaw in the idea, however. The Revolutionary weeks were to be ten days long, and you don’t have to be an expert mathematician to work out that this automatically reduced the number of weekends, which is one thing you cannot do to a French person. To rub it in, the government declared that ‘Sunday is abolished in the name of reason’. As well as this, the new calendar’s five or six holidays were peanuts compared to all the old Catholic saints’ days. The people were more than happy to hack a few priests to death, but they didn’t want to lose their saints’ days.

  So it came as some relief to the French when the Revolutionary Calendar was abolished in 1805 by Napoleon, who restored the illogical old system with the added bonus of a new holiday – 14 July, which would otherwise have been rather limply called sage.

  The French are aliens

  Whatever the Brits might have thought about the pros and cons of the Revolution, eventually France forced their hand.

  First, in November 1792, the Convention nationale, as the French ruling body was called that week, issued an Edict of Fraternity calling on the downtrodden subjects of all Europe’s monarchs to rise up and overthrow their rulers. The Convention declared that it would provide aid to the citizens of any country who decided ‘to recover their liberty’. Understandably, monarchies like Britain, Prussia, Holland and Spain did not take kindly to this public invitation to rebel, and on 1 February 1793 (otherwise known as broccoli, the 12th day of pluviôse, Year 1) France made things even clearer by declaring war on Britain.

  A new law was passed, obliging every able-bodied, unmarried man to join the Revolutionary Army. Predictably, this caused a rush for marriage licences as single men proposed to any woman who would have them. It is said that French widows have never been merrier. Even so, about half a million men joined up and although many of them soon deserted or mutinied, France still represented a daunting opponent.

  Britain was suddenly faced by a triple French threat – war with Revolutionary France; trouble stirred up at home by the 70,000 or so Royalist exiles; and a British revolution fomented by Paris.

  Britain couldn’t trust its French exiles, partly just because they were French, but also because the highest-ranking of them – the comte d’Artois (a grandson of Louis XV) and his son the duc de Berry – were fully fledged members of the Bourbon family of Louis XIV, who had virtually bankrupted Britain with his wars. So Pitt and his government voted through an Aliens Act, forcing French émigrés to register with a Justice of the Peace, and thereby putting them on a kind of open-ended probation.

  This was reinforced by the Traitorous Cor
respondence Act, which called for letters written to France to be opened and censored, and forbade all trade with France or active support for the Revolution.

  Fear of a British revolution made Pitt and co. become dictatorial themselves. Public meetings were banned and troublemakers were shipped off to the handy new penal colony of Australia. Pitt also decided that it would be much easier if he paid France’s other enemies – especially Austria and Prussia – to fight the French, which might explain why Britain’s direct interventions against France became slightly half-hearted.

  In the summer of 1793, for example, the Brits sent a fleet to capture the southern French port of Toulon. Local officials actually welcomed the invasion, but the invaders announced that they hadn’t come to enforce a regime change, and were soon evicted by a daring 24-year-old Corsican artillery captain called Bonaparte, who recaptured strategic forts and was able to bombard the Brits into retreat. When Toulon was retaken, Royalists were brutally executed, some of them being blown apart by cannons. As usual, being a counter-revolutionary was proving to be a messy business.

  At the same time, Napoleon’s home, Corsica, rather insultingly asked to become part of the British Empire with George III as its king. The island was briefly occupied, but was deemed too difficult to defend because of its many ports and its hilly terrain, and the Brits soon left the Corsicans to the mercy of their vengeful French overlords. Ten thousand Corsicans fled the subsequent persecution, and relations with the French mainland have never been friendly since.

  In July 1794, a French Royalist army, with British backing, landed in Quiberon Bay in Brittany. But the aristocratic French leaders could hardly understand the Breton peasants they had come to liberate, and the British fleet had to set sail again because of bad weather, leaving the invasion force unprotected. In the end, the Revolutionary Army cut them off, executed 700 of the returned exiles and captured 20,000 British muskets. If this wasn’t bad enough, the Quiberon cock-up also provoked France into launching a retaliatory attack.