by Antal Szerb
The revolution was of course ‘carried out’ spontaneously by the people, as an uprising, a devastating volcanic eruption—or more precisely it was the work of the street people of Paris, the dark mob from the St Antoine quarter, the workers who in consequence of a blundering Anglo-French trade agreement were made temporarily unemployed, and who, because of the equally blundering politics of superstition, could not for the time being buy bread; and this was followed on a wider scale by the whole nation, as a people oppressed by local village taxes and emboldened by the example of Paris took revenge for the way they had been ground down over the centuries.
But it would be pushing at an open door to argue that the populace did not rush off into revolution all by itself, but went there because they were led into it; that they were merely an instrument wielded by their superiors; or that, like Victor Hugo’s famous loose cannon, the uprising went on to destroy the very people who set it off. The revolutionaries, as everyone knows, called one another citoyens—citizens—and the essence of and influence behind the revolution was neither popular nor proletarian but bourgeois. It was the middle-class-dominated Third Estate that put an end to the power of the privileged.
The causes of the Revolution are no longer in question. It was not so much that the populace were destitute as that the bourgeoisie were increasingly prosperous. The peasantry certainly had their sufferings, but that had been the case for centuries, and by Louis XVI’s time people were at last beginning to think that it might be necessary to assist them. Moreover, the situation of the agrarian workers was not uniformly bleak. The notorious abuses of the landowners were not everywhere equally oppressive. Wahl draws attention to the fact that around this time the peasantry were turning woods on the great estates over to arable land without asking permission of the squirearchy and without resistance from them. The institution of serfdom, which the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe had suffered for so long, was by now confined to the easternmost provinces. Louis XVI had freed his own serfs, and his example had been spontaneously followed by many aristocrats. The remainder were given their freedom wherever there was enough money in the Treasury to compensate landowners.
And in fact, where things were at their worst, the people did not revolt. It was Tocqueville who noted that the most mutinous estates, for example the relatively affluent Île de France, were those that had suffered least from the old institutions, while those that had endured the most—in Brittany and the Loire estuary—became the powder keg of the counter-revolution.
The nobility were of course rich, at least in theory, since aristocratic privileges had never been as strong as they became immediately before they were terminated. But in practice this group was also struggling, since the obligation to maintain a style of living was proving ever more expensive, and many great families were going bankrupt.
On the other hand the bourgeoisie, in reality if not in theory, were doing rather better. They had been fostered and enriched by the great economic upswing we discussed at the beginning of this book, and they grew wealthy on the luxurious habits of the aristocracy, not just of France but also beyond its borders.
We are not primarily thinking here of the petit bourgeois craftsmen and shopkeepers. In Louis XVI’s reign, such families would all come together to eat in the kitchen in winter because they could not imagine the luxury of lighting fires in two rooms in the house at the same time. And for people at this level there was one traditional attitude that had not yet been eroded by the Enlightenment—Louis XVI was not alone in his religiosity. It was from a section of the bourgeoisie, in fact if not officially the leading sector, from the noblesse de robe, the lawyers, and the financially and intellectually pre-eminent, that the revolutionary discontent originated.
For a hundred years the higher bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia had felt aggrieved by the fact that while the real power lay in their hands, all the grandeur and distinction that should accompany it remained with the nobility. And the arrogance of the nobility increased as their real power declined. In the second half of the century they attempted to seize power again: not only were the most senior positions in both the army and the law restricted to members of noble families, but they sought on the basis of obsolete documents to enforce their former landowning rights over a peasantry that had long been liberated. The attempt failed miserably: the expropriation of the army and the law took place on paper only, simply because the leading bourgeois families had long before bought their way into the nobility. But that futile attempt, together with the steady ennoblement of the bourgeoisie, simply deepened the rift between the old privileged class and the new leaders of society. The intellectuals and the wealthy, says Rivarol—that grandfather of all right-wing ideologists since—found the arrogance of the aristocracy insupportable, and for that reason many of them purchased rank for themselves; but this simply produced a new form of misery. They had been ennobled, but they were not nobility. “The King’s subjects were cured of their bourgeois condition as from scrofula—it left its mark.”
The indignity of finding themselves not quite noble was felt most strongly by those leading intellectuals who were invited into the salons of those aristocrats who so much enjoyed their wit. They stayed as guests in country manors and were showered with all sorts of gifts and distinctions, and yet—in most cases no doubt unintentionally—they were still not accepted as equals. Of all forms of pride, that of the writer is the greatest and the most aggressive, and this pride was constantly being trampled on by the privileged, by their very acts of kindness and goodwill. The best examples of this are Beaumarchais and Chamfort.
“Your Excellency,” Chamfort said to someone. “I know very well what I ought to know, but I also know that it is much easier for you to patronise me than to treat me as an equal.”
There could be no better expression of a writer’s prickly self-regard. There is an echo of this in our period in what happened to a certain Abbé Rousseau. He, like Abélard before him, fell in love with one of his aristocratic pupils, and “finding no way to resolve the conflict of feelings between nobility and low birth”, as he wrote in his farewell letter, he dined at the Palais Royal and then shot himself in the heart.
Between Wealth and Intellect, observes Spengler, there was an unspoken pact of mutual resistance to, and contempt for, the common enemy, Blood. Intellect provided the justification for what Wealth brought about by brute omnipotence—the destruction of privilege and the dethronement of irrational, arbitrary selection on the basis of birth, in the interests of rational selection on the basis of talent and wealth. “Who would have believed,” says the same Rivarol, “that it was not the level of debt, or the lettres de cachet, or any other of the abuses of power—not even the intendants—that provoked revenge, nor was it the interminable tardiness of the justice system that so enraged the nation, but the privileges of the nobility; as is confirmed by the fact that it was the bourgeoisie, the writers, the financiers and all those who envied them, who stirred up the little people in the capital and the peasantry in their villages.”
Chamfort complained that he could never afford to keep a coach under the Ancien Régime, when his weak constitution made it absolutely necessary for him to have one. But he later remarked:
“I only continued to believe in the Revolution while there were so many coaches they knocked people over in the streets.”
“In 1782,” Sainte Beuve explains, “everyone wanted their own carriage, but because they couldn’t all have one, they demanded in 1792 that nobody should.”
But that brings to mind the much-maligned Hegel’s always valid lesson: “The Weltgeist uses human selfishness, envy and other passions as the moving force that drives humanity towards its goal, the unacknowledged but ultimate goal of history—freedom”. And that remains true even if we don’t believe in the great German Weltgeist.
When the besieged fortress finally fell, two different processes came to an end: the attackers had seized and occupied it, but the besieged, whether willingly or
unwillingly, had already consented to its being taken. And when the monarchy was brought down in the Revolution, that event also had two sides. The Third Estate and the people demolished the ancient edifice, but the nobility and the monarchy allowed them to do so. And this second element is perhaps just as important as the first. The French aristocracy and the monarchy itself, in very large measure, contributed to the making of the Revolution. This is the key to our symbolic narrative, and its true meaning.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, as we have said, that great if gradual shift of sensibility came about to which we assign the all-embracing term ‘pre-romantic’. But in the France of Louis XVI there were signs of another shift in taste which it would be difficult to link with pre-romantic sentimentality and restlessness. At first glance it would seem to be an omen of a very different kind.
From Mercier we know, for example, that by this time the petit-mâitres were no more. These were people who flittered like butterflies from box to box in the theatre, peeped out through gaps in the stage curtain, clung to the necks of actresses in the passageways, and stood around in the foyer or leant over to assess the legs of ladies stepping into their carriages. Gone too were the bureaux d’esprit, salons presided over by blue-stockings where only very clever remarks could be uttered and the ladies had no other ambition than to be learned. The place of the petit-mâitres was taken by the élégants. The word is still in use today and its meaning is little changed.
The élégant no longer drops the names of his aristocratic friends and high-born mistresses. He speaks of his solitude, in which he busies himself with chemistry, but generally he says little. A barely discernible smile of mockery sits on his lips; his face wears a distant, dreamy look; he seldom stays long, leaving early and without fuss. But the women are even more advanced: the only words they utter are ‘délicieux’ and ‘étonnant’, spoken with a studied simplicity and indifference. In a man they admire délicatesse. Mere eloquence is out and the ‘art of conversation’ is in. Very little wine is taken, only water. Parisians speak much more softly than provincials. They keep themselves trim, and should they by chance begin to put on weight, drink vinegar.
The new style expresses itself in déshabillé rather than formal dress. Men now carry walking sticks rather than swords. Questions of honour are less of a concern than in previous generations, and duelling is much rarer. Where once people flaunted their vast wealth, they now boast of being on the verge of bankruptcy. Black clothing is now the fashion, and the extraordinary pomp and splendour of the court of Louis XV is steadily being pushed out.
After all this, even had Mme de Campan had not written her memoirs, we would still have guessed: “This Anglomania had reached such a pitch that Paris was now indistinguishable from London. The French, formerly imitated by the whole of Europe, were now become a nation of imitators … Since the trade agreements concluded under the peace treaty of 1783 not only carriages, but everything from ribbons to common earthenware were of English manufacture.” Young men wore tails and discussed the constitution, the upper house, the lower house, the balance of power and Magna Carta.
And what was the meaning of all these trifles? The end.
However bombastic that may sound, it really was the end—the end of aristocratic culture. Its ideal, savoir vivre, the art of living, had reached its zenith in the Court of Louis XV and the Paris of his time, and been unable to develop any further. People had by then become so distinguished, so refined and so perfect that now the great baroque expressions of that distinction, its classical pomp and dignity, had to be renounced. It was followed by charm and nuance, in that age of the art of delicate little things, the rococo. And then, by the closing years of the reign of Louis XVI, even that was too highly-coloured, too loud; and gave way in turn to the mode for softly-spoken conversation and silence: in a word, ‘Anglomania’.
But those who saw this Anglomania as mere imitation failed to notice the social significance of its roots. By this stage the English, having concluded an alliance of the aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie, and taken, by way of the slow but steady transformation begun in 1688, to the upper-middle-class way of life, had become as we have seen (or imagined) them ever since. Earlier, they had been the noisiest people in the world, as evidenced by the uproar and garrulousness of Elizabethan drama. In imitating the English, the French nobility was taking its cue not from another aristocracy but from a quite different section of society, the upper bourgeoisie. This was the moment when aristocratic culture over-reached itself.
In his writings on the sociology of power Max Weber asserts that every historical regime that is not rationally based rests on a hidden principle which he terms ‘charisma’—a kind of divine power or grace which one person is regarded by his fellows as possessing, and by reason of which he is obeyed. Such power depends on direct personal contact and thus cannot survive long—usually only until the death of the charismatic individual. To consolidate and perpetuate this power, the charisma must be ‘routinised’, institutionalised by substituting symbolic acts for the real thing. The early Carolingian kings, for example, still exercised such charismatic power over their people, while later French monarchs were merely invested with symbols of that sacred power by the act of coronation and anointment with holy oil. The allegiance paid by their subjects was no longer to some irresistible force emanating from the royal person, but to the institution of kingship as a surviving sanction against non-obedience.
The special ‘chosen’ nature of the charismatic individual’s power extends to his entourage, and so the concept of a nobility comes into being. In time, this nobility also becomes a mere institution, its power deriving not from itself but from the law that sanctions it.
In our earthly existence, everything living in time must obey time. Through time, everything wears out and ebbs away. Palaces fall into ruin, and the silk and velvet of formal dress fade. But ideas wear out too—“after many a summer dies the swan”—and with the passing of so many centuries the force of charisma also becomes attenuated. There were many ‘reasons’ for the demise of the French Monarchy, but if we take a longer view, from the sort of distance at which the details start to dissolve into one another, then perhaps this might emerge as the one fundamental reason that gathers all those details into one single causation. The charisma faded, people no longer felt the specially chosen nature of the King and his entourage, and neither the King himself or his nobility felt it either.
Very few people die of pure senility. Even very old people generally fall victim to illness or accident, but usually these are the sort of illnesses and accidents that in their younger days they would easily have survived. In the final analysis, one might say that time had simply finished with them. And so it was with the Ancien Régime.
The aristocracy, partly as the result of its own prolonged inactivity, and partly under the influence of intellectual trends, had, as we have already noted, lost its sense of vocation. It no longer believed in itself. Its desire was simply to s’encanailler, and this above all showed its bad conscience. Perhaps that might explain the significance of what Wahl considered one of the most important causes of the Revolution: that eighteenth-century France produced no great men of action. There were none, because the social arrangements were such that men of this type could emerge only from the old aristocratic families, but the loss of a sense of vocation among those families also meant the loss of their whole raison d’être—to produce leaders for the country.
But it was the singular misfortune of the monarchy that the last two kings before the Revolution, Louis XV and even more importantly Louis XVI, suffered from that same bad conscience. The latter’s kindly heart was filled with fine intentions, and his ministers with plans for reform. He was the first king in many decades who sincerely, from the goodness of his heart, wanted to help his people. That proved fatal. As Tocqueville once again observes in his great work: “Only real genius can rescue a prince who sets out to ease the lot of his people after a long perio
d of oppression.” Such a course can lead only to even greater oppression—or to surrendering power altogether.
Tocqueville also suspected, but it was Wahl who showed with his mass of incontrovertible facts, that the Revolution broke out not because the Monarchy was especially tyrannical but because the last French kings were not tyrannical enough. They introduced arbitrary measures, but lacked the strength to see them through. There were no revolutions in other countries where abuses were far worse but where royal power remained strong, and perhaps one might have been averted in France too. That is of course a rather lazy expression—the casual and playful use of the historical ‘might have’. And yet there are so many moments in the approach to the Revolution when one feels that it might indeed have been avoided if only Louis XVI had behaved differently.
The highly symbolic episode we have narrated was just one of those moments. Contemporaries saw the necklace trial as an example of absolutist royal and ministerial behaviour that cried out to the heavens, but now that the details have been clarified we can see it rather as the King’s incompetence that did so. Even the revolutionary Condorcet recognised this: while the people imagined themselves to be groaning under tyrannical oppression, properly speaking they were the victims of a headless anarchy.
We urge you, dear reader, not to misunderstand us. It is far from our intention to mourn for the French Monarchy in the manner of modern French historians, nor is it to grieve, like Wahl, that they did not deploy the most powerful weapons at their command. In some strange and indefinable way, we do believe, amongst all the other forces at work in history there are also moral ones, and that in the great deeds of nations the struggle between Good and Evil will go on for ever. Louis XVI’s good-heartedness and weakness arose from a bad conscience, and the French King’s conscience certainly had reason to be bad. Because neither the lace-frilly, sweetly-autumnal beauty of the Régime, nor the King’s always heartfelt good intentions (themselves a reflection of the prevailing sensibility and the habit of living in the constant expectation of miracles)—ever quite amounted to the salt-sweet spring gale that was really needed. And what came after Louis XVI … we do not of course forget the horrific aspects of the Terror, but nonetheless, the glowing twilight of those years … permit me, reader, once again, for the last time, to give you the words of Tocqueville:
