Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  For the bright boy with no resources at all, the obvious avenue was the seminary. This was the only form of Catholic education permitted by the state before 1850, and supplied a need that was far broader than the training of priests. The father of Ernest Renan was a sea-captain who perished when the boy was five, and his mother’s grocery business did not long survive. He attended the College of Tréguier, run by secular priests, and envisaged a career in the priesthood that might have finished as grand vicar of Saint-Brieuc. By the good offices of his elder sister Henriette, who was teaching in Paris, in 1839 he was offered a scholarship to the seminary of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris, run by the Abbé Dupanloup, who was reputed to be the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and had just won fame by persuading Talleyrand to repent on his death-bed. Renan went on to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in 1841 to study theology, took minor orders but then lost his faith, threw himself into the study of oriental languages and eventually was appointed to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France. He would never have reached such academic excellence had it not been for the Church’s system of education; ironically, he then broke with it, becoming an influential critic on scholarly grounds of much of its teaching.

  A DIVIDED ELITE

  Balzac’s Monsieur Grandet, born in 1749, was a cooper in the small town of Saumur, on the Loire, who married the daughter of a timber merchant and acquired his first vineyards during the Revolution, church lands sold as biens nationaux. He bought meadows with the profits of white wine sold to the armies of the Republic and became mayor until, under the Empire, he was seen as too ‘red’. In 1806, nevertheless, he inherited more vineyards when his wife’s parents died, acquired notable status as the biggest taxpayer in the arrondissement and was awarded the Legion of Honour. He made a fortune in the bad harvest of 1811, speculating on other people’s hardship, bought a château from a marquis forced to sell up and then converted most of his assets into government stock at 20 per cent. When he died in 1827 he left an estimated 17 million francs to his daughter, Eugénie.56 Jean-Joachim Goriot, born in 1750, was a pasta-maker in Paris whose master’s business fell into his hands in the first riot of the Revolution. Essentially a grain merchant, he made a fortune earlier than Grandet by hoarding supplies when others were starving, while protecting himself from mob vengeance by becoming president of his local section, La Halle-aux-Blés. After his wife died he lived in self-imposed poverty, dedicating his fortune to furthering his daughters. Delphine, who loved money, married a banker of Jewish origin, Baron Nucingen, who himself had made a fortune in 1815 selling Grandet’s wine to the Allies, while Anastasie, who had ‘aristocratic leanings’, married the Comte de Restaud. Having married off his daughters, however, Goriot could only see them in secret; as a ‘man of 1793’ he was persona non grata in the society in which they lived. Moreover, as Delphine discovered, money bought entry into the society of financiers and businessmen centred on the Chaussée d’Antin district of Paris; it did not open the world of the old nobility, which centred on the Faubourg Saint-Germain.57

  ‘At the present moment, more than at any other time,’ reflected Balzac, ‘money rules laws, politics and morals.’58 His reading of French society in the early nineteenth century as dominated by money is painted in vivid strokes, and regrets a world of honour and piety that has passed away. Yet he points out, with much reason, that even in this material world money could not buy everything and that the social hierarchy was also determined by ancestry and connection. Huge fortunes were indeed made in the early part of the century. International trade was greatly disrupted by war before 1815, then by customs barriers, but governments fighting long wars were desperate both for credit and for supplies, so that anyone with capital or goods stood to make great profits. War also stimulated some industries, such as textiles for uniform and iron for armaments, and after peace broke out this ongoing ‘industrial revolution’ supplied growing urban markets and underpinned the communications revolution which reached a high point with the railway boom of the 1840s.

  Some individuals and some families were able to exploit these opportunities to the full. To do well, a number of strategies were required: a family strategy to mesh personnel and capital; an economic strategy which balanced specialization in sectors where expertise was available with diversification to spread risk and guard against slump in any particular sector; and a political strategy to ensure friends in high places and legislation which broadly favoured the capitalist interest. What could not be legislated for, however, was acceptance of the new capitalist class into the social elite, so that while the Revolution, as Balzac showed, promoted the interests of a rising bourgeoisie in many ways, its association with the Terror permitted its enemies to use it to shut out those who had benefited firstly from politics and then, when that was no longer possible, from polite society.

  The capitalist interest was of course not a bloc. There were, first of all, industrial families of local origin who did not expand their investments or political influence outside their home region. The Dollfus family of Mulhouse, headed by Jean Dollfus, who revolutionized the cotton industry, sent their sons to learn the trade and establish contacts in Great Britain and Belgium but married into other textile families on either side of the Rhine, such as Mieg, Koechlin and Schlumberger, and were not involved in politics beyond the town, Jean Dollfus being mayor of Mulhouse 1863–9.59 Augustin Pouyer-Quertier, son of a Rouen entrepreneur who put out cotton to rural weavers, married the daughter of a Rouen merchant with a dowry of 58,000 francs, established mechanized and water-powered cotton mills in the Rouen area and was elected deputy for Seine-Inférieure as an ‘official candidate’ in 1857. He then used his political influence to defend the cause of protectionism after the Empire’s free-trade treaty with Britain in 1860, became Thiers’ minister of finance in 1871 and married his daughters Hélène and Marguerite to a marquis and count respectively.60 Another industrialist cultivated by the Empire to counterbalance the influence of loquacious lawyers was Eugène Schneider. A Lorrainer, he began as manager of a woollen mill in Reims but then became involved in iron. He became manager of the Bazeilles ironworks near Sedan, and married the daughter of its owner who was a baron of the Empire and mayor of Sedan. He went into partnership with his elder brother Adolphe, who had married the daughter of the iron master of Fourchambault, Louis Boigues, bringing a dowry of 100,000 francs and an annual income of 60,000, and with a Parisian cloth manufacturer and banker Alexandre Seillière, in order to buy the ironworks of Le Creusot, way outside his native area, in 1836. Adolphe died in 1845, leaving Eugène as sole boss of what became a company town, building arms, ships and locomotives. Eugène became the first president of the Comité des Forges, representing the iron and steel industry, and co-founder of the Société Générale bank in 1864, director of a number of railway companies, ‘official’ deputy for Le Creusot in 1852 and president of the Legislative Body in 1867.61

  The richest individuals and families drew their wealth less from industry than from finance and land. Casimir Périer was the fourth son of an entrepreneur involved in the put-out trade in the Dauphiné, who moved into printed cotton goods and banking, lending to Bonaparte’s new government in 1800 and becoming one of the founders and first regents (directors) of the Banque de France. Casimir was one of his ten children, who each inherited 580,000 francs on his death in 1801. He set up the Périer Frères bank with his elder brother Scipion, who died in 1821, investing in insurance, sugar-refining, canal-building, the Anzin coal mines near Valenciennes and above all in real estate, buying up the plaine des Sablons outside Paris and selling it in small lots to build out-of-town villas in what became the suburb of Neuilly. He married Pauline Loyer, the heiress of a Lyon magistrate who had been guillotined in the Terror, was elected deputy of the Seine in 1821 and became prime minister in 1831, dealing harshly with the silkworkers’ revolt in Lyon, before dying of cholera in the epidemic of 1832, leaving a fortune of 14 million francs.62

  Other bankers felt that poli
tical influence rather than political power suited them better, but they disagreed about investment strategy and risk. Even in the banking world there were aristocrats who proceeded with caution for the greater good of the family and parvenus ambitious to make money fast who sometimes came to grief. James de Rothschild, one of the six sons of Frankfurt banker Meyer Amschel Rothshild, bought gold smuggled out of Britain during the Napoleonic wars which he then resold in Paris and effectively financed the Restoration by arranging loans to the government which had to pay off a war indemnity of 700 million francs. The Rothschild dynasty made a fortune of 109 million by 1828 using the relatively safe strategy of lending to governments and becoming renowned as the bankers of the Holy Alliance. They invested little in real estate, and avoided industry, which was seen as extremely risky. James was challenged by a new species of investment banker, notably the brothers Émile and Isaac Péreire, from a family of Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux whose father lost his fortune when war disrupted international trade and died while they were boys. Moving to Paris and using contacts in the banking world such as Benedict Fould, they foresaw the possibility of fortunes to be made from the nascent railway industry. They persuaded James de Rothschild, rather against his will, to buy shares in the Paris–Saint-Germain railway of 1837 and in the Chemin de Fer du Nord in 1845. They then left him behind with their experiments in conjuring up capital through the Crédit Mobilier of 1852 and the Crédit Immobilier of 1854. There followed a bonanza of investment in railway companies such as the Compagnie du Midi and the Grand Central, a transatlantic shipping company and dockyards at Saint-Nazaire, the rebuilding of Paris and the development of the seaside resort of Arcachon. Isaac was elected to the Corps Législatif as official candidate for Perpignan in 1863. However, Rothschild squeezed out the Péreires from the Chemin de Fer du Nord in 1855, and kept them out of the Paris– Lyon–Marseille railway and from railway concessions in Austria. Then a downturn in the market which drastically cut back their returns forced them to resign from the direction of the Crédit Mobilier and the Crédit Immobilier in 1867, as the Banque de France stepped in. The visit of Napoleon III to Rothschild’s Château de Ferrières in 1862 demonstrated that even among Jewish bankers there were kings and there were knaves.63

  For Balzac all this would be evidence of the rule of money and the decline of the old nobility, whose fortune was based on land. In fact the impact of the Revolution on the landed nobility was limited in material terms: of about 200,000 nobles 1,158 or 0.6 per cent were executed, while 16,500 or 8 per cent emigrated, although this affected perhaps a quarter of noble families, and half of all noble families (12,500 out of 25,000) lost some land. Many families were able to recover land they had lost, or received some indemnification under a law of Charles X in 1825, despite the incumbrance of debt.64 Landownership still represented a safe investment when war and economic crisis were disrupting markets and the sale of biens nationaux confiscated from the Church increased land’s attractiveness for non-noble families. Nobles were invariably at the top of the landowning hierarchy. The port of Bordeaux was dominated by a Protestant merchant, Jacques-Henri Wustemberg, but in 1831 he was only the ninth largest taxpayer in the Gironde department, and overall noble landowners were richer than merchants. The richest man was the Marquis de Lamoignan, a robe noble who had emigrated to the London region before returning to his vast estates near Balye, where he was mayor and conseiller-général, and was made a peer in 1832. The Duc de Decazes, something of a parvenu, made a peer by Louis XVIII, but of bourgeois origins and founder of a mining company in the Aveyron as a speculative toy in 1826, came in at eighteenth.65

  The rivalry at the end of the Ancien Régime between old nobles and anoblis was sharpened after 1808 with the creation of the im perial nobility. The imperial nobility was the newest version of a nobility of service, a meritocracy of those who worked for the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes as soldiers or civil administrators. ‘Since the soldier of 1793 has become a general and peer of France,’ wrote Pierre de Pelleport, ‘I have several times been asked by members of an illustrious military family to trace a link between their ancestors and mine. But there is nothing doing: I date only from myself.’66 Some of the imperial nobility made vast fortunes. Alexandre Berthier, whose father was an anobli of Louis XV, became one of Napoleon’s marshals, Prince de Neuchâtel and Prince de Wagram. As grand huntsman and vice-constable in the emperor’s household he drew an annual income of 400,000 francs, he spent 250,000 a year acquiring landed estates, and he drew another million francs a year revenue from fiefs allotted to him in Germany and Poland; he married the daughter of the Duke of Bavaria.67

  The fortunes of the imperial nobility were, however, vulnerable to political change, and they were never accepted as equals by the old Bourbon nobility, 80 per cent of whom refused to serve Napoleon and sulked in the Faubourg Saint-Germain or on their country estates, making up for glamour by cultivating honour and ancient lineage. Most of the imperial nobility rallied to Louis XVIII when he was restored in 1814, but the return of the emperor in 1815 faced them with a terrible dilemma: should they rejoin the man who had made them, though Europe was ranged against him, or should they stay with the legitimate monarchy? Berthier dithered, took refuge in Bavaria and died in mysterious circumstances. Ney rallied to the emperor, fought at Waterloo, was captured and tried when the monarchy was restored, and was then shot. Imperial nobles were systematically purged from the army and administration. The loss of their fiefs and offices in an Empire that was no more destroyed their financial position. They made a come-back under Louis-Philippe, whose regime combined monarchy and the revolutionary tradition. Marshal Soult headed the 1832 ministry which also included Victor de Broglie and Guizot, who had begun their careers under Napoleon. A quarter of prefects and 46 per cent of the Chamber of Peers in 1831 were imperial nobles and the return of Napoleon’s body to lie in the Invalides in 1840 was in some sense a tribute to their influence.68

  This political success of the imperial nobility, however, was not echoed by social success in relationship to the old nobility. Between 1789 and 1830 over 75 per cent of marriages of old noble families which had rejected the blandishments of the Empire were with families of the same caste. Noble families who had been at court before 1789 such as the Duc and Duchesse de Duras increasingly sought out provincial families like the La Rochejacqueleins, whose royalist credentials in the Vendean risings upgraded their noble cachet.69 A similar hesitancy to admit new blood was evident in the salons of Paris which structured the social life of the capital. Some salons allowed an intermingling of different clienteles, such as that of the Comte d’Haussonville, himself a hybrid who had served in Condé’s army and been chamberlain to Napoleon, denounced as a ‘remade count’ by the old nobility, or that of the Comtesse de Flahaut, the daughter of an English admiral who married one of Napoleon’s aide-de-camps and whose guests included Casimir Périer, Laffitte, Walewski and Morny.70 Others, particularly those of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, presided over by the Duchesse de Duras, the Princesse de la Tremoïlle or the Marquise de Montcalm, who ran the salon of her brother, the Duc de Richelieu, were highly restrictive, and used their social exclusivity deliberately to quash the pretensions of mere wealth or exclude those who had any association with the Revolution or Napoleon. ‘Conversation there is often and deliberately literary,’ said Alfred de Vigny of the time of his election to the Académie Française in 1845. ‘It had a religious tone, rendered a little mystical and elegiac by the memory of the ruins of the Revolution of 1789, the pain of exile, the violence of the Terror and the oppression of the Empire.’71

  French society in this period was clearly in motion, as individuals took advantage of the opportunities offered by economic change and the expansion of the state, to which was geared a developing system of education. Legally, too, careers were open to the talents and could not be confined to any particular caste or corporation. And yet, in many ways, society was becoming more divided. Agricultural populations became more dis
tinct from industrial workers, and though some peasants acquired more land and joined the rural bourgeoisie, the rural hierarchy remained fairly rigid. Industrial progress advantaged urban, factory-based industry over rural industry, which went into decline. Some workers set themselves up as masters or shopkeepers but many workers became locked in class conflict with employers backed by a state that on the grounds of free enterprise refused to allow trade unions to restore any of the restrictive practices of Ancien Régime corporations. In 1831, 1834 and 1848 the state resorted to violence to quell workers’ rebellions. The division in the education system between elementary and secondary both reflected and reinforced the division between elite and masses in French society, and though the scholarship system served to promote some individual talent, to acquire a firm position in the administrative, military or judicial elite generally required the right family background and social connections. Within the French elite the landed class was challenged for influence by financiers and industrialists, and the old nobility was challenged by the new imperial nobility. But parvenus generally succeeded best when they aped the manners of the nobility and social divisions were often intensified by political quarrels that went back to the Revolution and the Empire, and became entrenched in marriage patterns and social intercourse.

  4

  Religion and Revolution

  THE CURÉ D’ARS

  In 1818 a new priest arrived in the parish of Ars, 35 kilometres north of Lyon on the inhospitable plateau of Dombes, a treeless region, flecked with stagnant pools, the poor population living in clay huts. Religion had scarcely been practised in the parish since the Revolution. The former curé had broken faith by taking the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the church was in a state of disrepair, the church bells had been removed and melted down, and Sunday observance was at a low ebb, with the menfolk spending most of the day in the tavern and young people indulging in dances which frequently subsided into orgies.