The Rape of Europa
Page 12
Foreigners flocked to see the remarkable collection of paintings in the Palais-Royal. In 1781, Henry Ellison, in a letter to his brother Robert, compared them favourably with all he had seen on his Grand Tour in Italy. Six years earlier Samuel Johnson visited Paris. The eccentric doctor refrained from speaking French, preferring Latin instead, for ‘it was a maxim that a man should not let himself down by speaking a language which he speaks imperfectly’, but was determined to see all the sights. Discarding his brown coat, plain shirt and black stockings in favour of a new hat, white stockings and a handsome, French wig, he ventured forth.
One of Johnson’s first ports of call was the Palais-Royal. Although he did not mention Titian by name, he was very appreciative of ‘a very great collection of pictures’. Johnson then strolled through the Tuileries gardens, noting the way that the fashionable, upper classes were to be seen ‘dripping powder and paint’ on to their embroidered clothes. As a major literary figure in Georgian London, the doctor inspected the libraries of the king, the Sorbonne and Saint-Germain, together with the Ecole Militaire, the Observatory, the courts of justice and a number of churches. He admired the statue of Louis XIV in the Place Vendôme, the Gobelins tapestry factory, the Sèvres porcelain works, and enjoyed the egg-and-rope dancing on the boulevards. Johnson also went to Versailles to see the king and queen dining in public.
The formality of life that the doctor witnessed at Versailles contrasted with the free-thinking ways at the Palais-Royal. This included giving women a prominent role. The duchess’ favourite friend was Félicité de Genlis, niece of his father’s paramour Madame de Montesson. Pretty and cultured, equally adept as an actress and musician, Félicité soon attracted the attentions of the duke, who installed her as his mistress. He relished the sight of her bathing in milk strewn with rose petals, which he regarded as ‘one of the most agreeable things in the world’. But once fully clothed, often in trousers, Félicité was a formidable intellectual presence, holding salons in the palace which attracted the most intelligent figures of the age.
These men and women were noted for the brilliance of their conversation, none more so than Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, bishop of Autun (Talleyrand was a born survivor and was to play a major role in coming events as foreign minister of Napoleon and later of the restored Bourbon monarchy). Another liberal aristocrat who attended was the orator, writer and politician Henri Gabriel Riquéti, Comte de Mirabeau. A more exotic figure was the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, son of a French aristocrat and a black slave, renowned as a swordsman, who was to become the leading French abolitionist. Many of the habitués at the salons were freemasons, a body that encouraged the dissemination of radical ideas. Philippe was Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, the governing body of the Masonic Order. These masons included the Montgolfier brothers, pioneers of ballooning, and the firebrand Camille Desmoulins, soon to become a leader of the extreme left-wing Jacobin party.
One of the subjects much discussed at the salons was the nature of beauty and the part that art could play in the transformation of society. These conversations on aesthetics were held in rooms decorated with the most magnificent collection of art in all France. Since the 1730s there had been regular exhibitions in Paris, known as the Salon, and numerous reviews were written about them. Many of the most perceptive of these reviews were penned by the philosopher Denis Diderot. Diderot was the editor of the monumental Encyclopedie, a key work of the Enlightenment, and a regular attender at Félicité’s salons. The playwright Carmontelle, wit and intimate of Philippe, for whom he designed the beautiful Anglo-Chinese garden at Parc Monceau on the outskirts of Paris, felt that art could play a crucial role in the foundation of a new, liberal social order. Jean-Paul Marat, another habitué of the Palais-Royal and soon to become one of the leaders of the extreme Jacobin faction (his death in a bath, stabbed by Charlotte Corday, and painted by Jacques-Louis David as a martyr, was to become one of the iconic images of the French Revolution), shared Carmontelle’s ideals.
Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a brilliant, subversive journalist, thought that society constrained artists but that the greatest of them overcame these constraints. Brissot, future leader of the moderate Girondin party, had a key role to play at the Palais-Royal. He was employed by Philippe to transform the duke’s image from an arrogant, cynical and womanizing prince, notorious for his piercing blue eyes and sardonic smile, into a thoughtful liberal, devoted to improving the lot of his fellow citizens. Brissot was remarkably successful, and Philippe was widely perceived as a democratic king in waiting, surrounded by a circle of able and ambitious advisers.
The progressive thinking at the Palais-Royal extended to education, and the Orléans children were taught core academic subjects – Latin, Greek and moral science, as well as six European languages – but also architecture, carpentry and gardening. The star pupil was Philippe’s eldest son, the future King Louis Philippe. As a further example of Philippe’s progressive thinking, he put the formidable Félicité in charge of the children’s education, a highly unusual move at the time, and one much to the chagrin of the duchess, who held less liberal ideas than her husband. She was, not surprisingly, extremely jealous of the attractive blue-stocking who exerted such a strong influence over her family.
It is, however, too simplistic to praise the free-thinking ideals of the Orléanist party, as it was known, promoting the role that art would play in the establishment of a new society, and dismiss the reactionary ideas of Louis XVI and his ministers. The able and energetic Comte d’Angivillier, director general of the royal buildings, aimed to transform the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, the main royal palace in Paris, into a magnificent museum of art, a source of national pride and a way to enhance the prestige of the Bourbon monarchy. Ironically, the left-wing Jacques-Louis David, soon to play a leading artistic role in the French Revolution, was so keen to study the paintings that he was invited by Louis XVI to stay in the palace. Throughout the 1780s d’Angivillier bought a large number of French paintings to demonstrate the supremacy of France in the arts, together with Old Masters to fill gaps in the royal collection. Like the progressive party in the Palais-Royal, d’Angivillier saw the arts as playing a crucial role in shaping society.
Meanwhile, although Philippe enjoyed a life of incredible privilege, he longed to achieve something in his own right. In 1775 he applied to join the French navy, hoping to succeed his father-in-law to the office of Grand Admiral, which earned a salary of 400,000 livres. Although he was denied this office, three years later the duke served at the battle of Ushant against the British fleet under Admiral Keppel (during the American War of Independence France had allied with the American colonials against Britain). The battle was scarcely a French victory, indeed d’Orvilliers, the French admiral in command, blamed the duke for refusing to engage the enemy, but such was Philippe’s status in Paris that, on his return to the Palais-Royal, he was given a 20-minute standing ovation at the opera.
Louis XVI, who had succeeded his grandfather Louis XV in 1774, was unimpressed, and supported his admiral’s verdict, much to the duke’s annoyance. The king’s decision may have been based on personal animosity; there was no love lost between Philippe and Queen Marie Antoinette (daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Teresa) whom the duke scorned for her frivolous and spendthrift lifestyle. The queen, in return, despised Philippe for his treachery, hypocrisy and selfishness. The duke had been regarded with suspicion by his sovereign since 1771 when he had been banished to his country estates for countersigning letters of protest at Louis XV’s decision to raise taxes without consulting the Estates General. This was composed of the First Estate, representing the nobility, the Second Estate the clergy, and the Third Estate the rest of the population.
Even at this early stage, despite the income from his estates of 800,000 livres per annum, Philippe’s extravagant habits and his love of gambling were leading him into serious financial trouble. As an example, in 1777 he lost a large but entirely frivolous bet with the
Comte de Genlis that he could prick 500,000 holes in a piece of paper in one hour. The duke’s financial position improved when he was given the Palais-Royal in 1780 by his father as a way of healing the rift between father and son over Louis Philippe’s morganatic marriage, though the old duke was careful not to hand over the contents of the palace, fully aware of his son’s extravagant habits. Philippe now proceeded to make substantial alterations to the palace which cost the extra-ordinary sum of 12 million livres. To pay for this, he disposed of a number of properties in Paris which raised 3 million livres, and sold the Château de Saint-Cloud to Marie Antoinette, whom he affected to despise, for 6 million livres. He also set up a lottery, with the permission of his estranged cousin Louis XVI.
The duke’s most successful way of raising money, however, was to develop the gardens of the Palais-Royal by commissioning Victor Louis, who had already laid out the court of honour and rebuilt the theatre, to design a splendid colonnade. Beneath this colonnade, enclosing three sides of the gardens, were situated shops, cafés and commercial premises, with a covered promenade lit by 188 street lamps. To keep down costs, the fourth side was constructed of wood decorated with trompe l’oeil architecture.
Although Philippe’s cousin the Comte d’Artois, younger brother of Louis XVI and the Comte de Provence, commented disdainfully: ‘We don’t see our cousin any more since he has become a shopkeeper’, the venture proved a great success, and d’Artois and the Comte de Provence, the future Charles X, were soon to follow suit, developing their properties in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Luxembourg Gardens. Parisians of all classes flocked to the Tartars’ Camp, as it was known, to sample the shops filled with luxury goods, and frequent the excellent restaurants and cafes situated in the arcades. They discussed politics in the Café du Caveau, philosophical and artistic matters in the Salon des Arts, or boasted of their exploits fighting in America alongside the Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the French forces against the British in the American War of Independence, in the Café des Americains (Frenchmen who fought with the Americans often returned to France imbued with the colonials’ liberal views which they expressed in the Palais-Royal). They took refreshments at the kiosks situated on the lawns before stopping to watch the puppet theatre or visiting the new museum devoted to the science of aeronautics (this had become a passion in Paris following the successful ballooning exploits of the Montgolfier Brothers). The gardens were even more vibrant at night, when a less salubrious throng of gamblers, prostitutes, cheats and swindlers frequented the arcades, preying on visitors to the theatres, gambling clubs, wine shops and brothels.
The Palais-Royal, a haven for free thinkers of all persuasions, was a major focus for dissent against the government, and Parisians came here to express their dissatisfaction with the regime. They were welcomed by the duke, who was encouraged in his liberal ideas by his frequent visits to England, where he witnessed the passionate involvement by the aristocracy in politics, involving outspoken criticism of the government and even the monarchy. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were horrified by this criticism and their strong anglophobia was strengthened by the publication of scurrilous publications in England such as The Pleasures of Antoinette, which accused the French queen of rampant lesbianism.
Since the Palais-Royal belonged to the first Prince of the Blood, it was exempt from government censorship, and a flood of vitriolic propaganda was directed at Marie Antoinette. Ironically, one of the most stringent criticisms of the government was over taxation, and the blatant inequality between the exemption enjoyed by the aristocracy and the taxes that the bourgeoisie and the peasantry were obliged to pay. Considering the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by the Orléans family, it is remarkable that vociferous, left-wing figures such as Brissot, Marat and Desmoulins should have ignored the reckless extravagance of the duke when attacking the royal family.
During the 1780s efforts by the government to reduce the national debt by attempting to raise new taxes merely increased its unpopularity. In 1787 Louis XVI summoned an Assembly of Notables (a consultative body, like an expanded King’s Council), something no King of France had done since 1626, to help to achieve this. The obvious candidate for President of the Assembly was the Duke of Orléans (Philippe had succeeded to the title on the death of his father in 1785). But when the Assembly met at Versailles on 22 February the deputies were amazed to discover that their new president, displaying extraordinary fecklessness, had gone hunting instead. Despite this aberration, Philippe played a prominent role in expressing liberal anti-royalist, views in the Assembly and the duke was thought by his opponents to be plotting to replace Louis XVI.
When the Estates General met at Versailles in the autumn of 1787, summoned by Louis XVI on the advice of his finance minister, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, to try to persuade the nobility and clergy to pay their share in tax, the Duke of Orléans, a major beneficiary of the exemption, shocked the royalist party by his willingness to challenge the rights of Louis XVI, declaring: ‘Sir, allow me to lay at your feet the illegality of your orders.’ This was an act without precedent, coming from a Prince of the Blood, but proved immensely popular with the Parisian populace and led to Philippe returning in triumph accompanied by a vast crowd to the Palais-Royal. Although he was temporarily exiled once again to his estates outside Paris by the enraged king, Orléans reconciled himself with Louis XVI on condition that he refrain from political activity. Considering that he was President of the First Estate of the Estates General, and that the animated political discussions continued daily at the Palais-Royal, this was all but impossible. In an attempt to avert the growing political pressure the king agreed to double the number of deputies in the Third Estate.
Orléans’s champion Brissot now departed for America, but his place was taken by the equally ambitious radical Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, author of the seductive and subversive novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Like Brissot, Laclos’s mission was to promote his patron as the champion of individual liberty. His efforts were similarly successful and Philippe’s popularity among Parisians was greatly increased by the free food distributed at the gates of the Palais-Royal during the freezing winter of 1788–9 following the failure of the harvest that summer. By late 1788 Laclos was being employed by the duke on a salary of 6,000 livres per annum. Laclos was also given the honour of helping to educate the precociously bright 15-year-old Duke of Chartres, the future King Louis-Philippe, replacing Madame de Genlis, much to her chagrin.
Like his master Philippe, Laclos was one of many left-wing thinkers who revered the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he wished to follow his ideas in the creation of a more moral and democratic form of government. In his Social Contract, Rousseau argued that there was an agreement between the ruler and the people whereby the people accepted the rule of government as long as their rulers respected their rights, property and happiness. If this did not happen, the people were free to choose a new set of rulers. This radical idea, adopted by the Americans in their War of Independence, was to be used by the French Revolutionaries to justify the violent overthrow of the Ancien Régime, and was particularly popular among the extreme Jacobins, led by Desmoulins and his friends Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. They stood in contrast with the more moderate views espoused by Voltaire and Montesquieu (Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu), two leading philosophes, who advocated constitutional monarchy based on the British model.
During the summer of 1789, the political situation continued to deteriorate. With law and order breaking down, Paris became an increasingly dangerous place. On 9 June Arthur Young, who had travelled extensively through France noting how superior British agriculture was to its French counterpart (he was an authority on the subject, about which he had written several books), recorded how the mood in the gardens of the Palais-Royal had turned, against not only the monarchy, but also the clergy and the nobility. He noted how every coffee-house contained ‘orators, who from chairs and tables harangue each his little audien
ce. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined.’ No wonder Simeon Hardy, a bookseller with a shop in the palace’s arcades, wrote: ‘An air of discord hangs over the city. All it needs is a single spark to ignite some terrible conflagration.’
That spark was to be lit the very next day. On 20 June the Third Estate, now calling themselves the National Assembly, were locked out of the chamber of the Estates General at Versailles, and, at the instigation of a certain Dr Guillotine, inventor of the famous execution machine, soon to become symbolic of the Revolution, reassembled in a nearby tennis court, from where they issued their famous Tennis Court Oath, pledging themselves not to separate ‘until the constitution of the kingdom is established’. Philippe had already openly aligned himself as closely as possible with the Third Estate, voting with that body against the king to show his opposition to the government. Now the Assembly voted overwhelmingly for the Duke of Orléans as its first president, but Philippe, once again, refused the honour. This did not stop his opponents from suspecting him of harbouring greater ambition, either to become regent or lieutenant-general of the kingdom, the key posts controlling the government and the army respectively. And the ambitious clique that had formed around the duke, led by Laclos, continued to plot against the royal family, with Marie Antoinette as the focus of their dissent. When a rioting crowd attacked the Abbaye prison in Paris, and rescued some soldiers who had refused to fire on the crowd in the Reveillon riots earlier in the year (an attack in April by hungry workers on Jean-Baptiste Reveillon’s factory after he had offered the workers lower wages), the soldiers were carried in triumph to the Palais-Royal.