The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  John Evelyn’s pietre dure cabinet showing Orpheus charming the beasts.

  School of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Orpheus Charming the Animals, c.1600–1610.

  Joseph Highmore, The Harlowe Family from the illustrations of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, 1747–8. Clarissa’s oppressive father, Mr Harlowe, is reclining with his foot raised on a foot stool to alleviate the symptoms of gout, the classic ailment of cholic and intemperance.

  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Girl Weeping over her Dead Canary, c.1765.

  Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, autograph copy of Self Portrait (with a straw hat), 1782. Representative of the ‘rustic chic’ fashionable in 1780s Paris, as encouraged by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s classic novel Julie.

  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Milkmaid, before 1784.

  The frontispiece of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’Inégalité, 1755. The exposed breast, which became a symbol of natural simplicity as well as revolutionary fervour, was, according to Rousseau, also anatomical evidence of humanity’s herbivorous origins; for like goats and sheep (and unlike cats and dogs), women had only one pair of teats.

  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The White Hat, c.1780.

  Attributed to Marie Victoire Lemoine (earlier attributed to Elisabeth Vigée le Brun), Young Woman with a Dog, c.1796.

  Jean Laurent Mosnier, The Young Mother, c.1770–80. Following a campaign by Rousseau and others against the use of wet-nurses, it became fashionable for high- and middleclass women to breastfeed their own babies.

  Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 28 July 1830.

  C.J. Grant, The Singular Effects of the Universal Vegetable Pills on a Green Grocer!, 1841.

  ‘The Mansion of Bliss: A New Game for the Amusement of Youth’, from 1822, was designed ‘to promote the progressive improvement of the juvenile mind’ including the prevention of vices such as ‘Cruelty to Animals’.

  Thomas Daniell, The Old Fort, Playhouse and Holwell's Monument in Calcutta, 1786.

  Attributed to Johann Zoffany, Portrait of John Zephaniah Holwell, c.1765.

  Marquis de Valady (1766–1793) and his wife, daughter of the Comte de Vaudreuil.

  Akbar ordering the slaughter to cease, from Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama, c.1590. During a hunt in 1578 Akbar experienced divine revelations; some of his attendants told him ‘that the beasts of the forest had with a tongueless tongue imparted Divine secrets to him … he in thanksgiving for this great boon set free many thousands of animals. Active men made every endeavour that no one should touch the feather of a finch and that they should allow all the animals to depart according to their habit.’

  King Solomon and the animals, from the Iyar-i-Danish, c.1595.

  Silsila al-Zahab, ‘Majnun and the Hunter’, Akbar’s court, India, 1613. ‘Every wild animal which was in the desert/ Rushed to his service,/ … The sheep was freed from the violence of the wolf,/ The lion withdrew his claws from the wild ass,/ The dog made peace with the hare,/ The calf of the deer suckled milk from the lion’.

  Top-cover of a pen box signed by Manohar, late 17th century.

  Detail of lady holding a tree from a jewel casket from India, attributed to Rahim Deccani, late 17th century.

  Further detail from the same casket. Manohar and Rahim Deccani, whose painting also appears on the front cover, combined European and Indian motifs; in this case the image of a European, playing music to animals like Orpheus, blends seamlessly with the traditional Indian Ragamala illustrations of female musicians surrounded by animals.

  The pietre dure Orpheus on Shah Jahan’s Throne in the Hall of Public Audiences in the Red Fort, New Delhi.

  From a Ragamala (Garland of Melodies), Jaipur, India, c.1750.

  Detail of an illustrated vijnaptipatra by the eye-witness Ustad Salivahana, 1610. The Jain monk Vivekaharsha is shown receiving emperor Jahangir’s farman (imperial order) that no animals should be slaughtered in all the kingdom during the twelve-day Jain festival of Paryushana. From the outer perimeter of the court in Agra, two Europeans, probably Father Conti and William Hawkins, observe this typical instance of Mughal diplomacy towards Jain vegetarianism.

  The Buddhist scribe Amrtanda delivers a copy of the Lalitavistara (Sutra of Great Magnificence) to Captain Knox, an officer of the East India Company’s army, resident in Nepal, 1803.

  James Fraser, A Street Scene in the Village of Raniya, 1816–1820.

  James Gillray, French Liberty: British Slavery, 1792

  James Gillray, Consequences of a Successful French Invasion, or We teach de English Republicans to Work, 1798. The French revolutionaries force the English to exchange their national dish of roast beef for the cultivation of turnips and onions.

  James Gillray, Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal, 1792. One of James Gillray’s most audacious satires, this shows George III and Queen Charlotte enjoying a meal of eggs and sauerkraut or salad, flanked by emblems of their frugality. Dr Cheyne’s On the Benefits of a Spare Diet lies on the locked chest in the bottom right. On the wall hangs an empty frame titled The Triumph of Benevolence, a quip at the royal misers but also the title of Gillray’s portrait of the vegetarian prison reformer John Howard.

  James Gillray, A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion, 1792. The Prince of Wales (or Whales), bloated after polishing off a joint of meat, reclines beneath a portrait of the 16thcentury temperance writer, Luigi Cornaro.

  James Gillray, New Morality; – or – The Promis'd Installment of the High-priest of the Theophilanthropes, with the homage of Leviathan in his suite, including caricatures of David Williams and William Godwin, 1798.

  Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, c.1848. Hicks, a Quaker, produced about a hundred versions of this theme.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Marquis de Valady faces the Guillotine

  The Marquis de Valady was only twenty-seven years old when he was forced to reconcile himself to death. His vegetarian comrade, John Oswald, had died three months earlier; Valady’s end was to prove at least as bloody. The bloodless revolution to which these men dedicated their lives had become as bloody as a slaughterhouse.

  Jacques-Godefroy-Charles-Sébastien-Francois-Xavier Jean-Joseph d’Yzarn de Freissenet, Marquis de Valady – to give him his full aristocratic name – was born in the Auvergne in 1766. Although he has been almost entirely neglected by Anglophone historians, Valady’s letters, preserved in an extraordinarily rich archive at his ancestral chateau, provide a fascinating insight into some of the most important episodes in the French Revolution.

  Educated according to his station, Valady ‘imbibed from the ancient authors a love of philosophy, an ardent passion for liberty’. His father’s great friend the Comte de Vaudreuil had fought zealously alongside the Americans in their struggle for independence, and Valady grew up surrounded by men committed to the great cause of freedom. His domestic life, however, embodied all the opposite values. His authoritarian father – opposed to French republicanism – subjected him to all the usual disciplines of an aristocratic household and, at the age of barely sixteen, betrothed him without his consent to the even younger daughter of the Comte de Vaudreuil. According to their mutual American friend Samuel Breck, ‘a more bewitching girl was seldom seen’. But Valady could not abide the arbitrary use of paternal power: marriage without love was null and immoral and he refused to consummate their marriage, despite his mother-in-law forcing him to spend a night in his wife’s room. His battle for personal freedom fuelled a burning desire to fight for political liberty.1

  Escaping his domestic nightmare, Valady gained the privileged post of an ensign at the Gardes Françaises. He moved to Paris and immediately fell in with a clique of friends from whom he imbibed the spirit of radicalism: Samuel Breck, Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, the liberal Encyclopédistes and, most importantly for Valady’s future, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the friend and collaborator of John Oswald. Breck remembered Valady at this time as ‘a wild enthusiast in matters of political freedom’, and counted him among the disinterested worshippers of lib
erty who ‘were ready to lay down their lives and their all for the good of France’.2

  Disgruntled with the French government and opposed to warfare, in June 1786 Valady quitted his post in the army, repudiated his former life of luxury, and refashioned himself – like Oswald – as a model of Spartan austerity. There was no mistaking that, in the words of one contemporaneous history, this was ‘in consequence of sentiments of simplicity he had imbibed from Brissot’. Brissot had been a great admirer of Benjamin Franklin; he saw his own fight for liberty in France as a continuation of the struggle for independence that Franklin had led in America, and he emulated Franklin’s Quaker-like simplicity as a potent and charismatic ethical statement. Drawing on Franklin’s Autobiography, Brissot dedicated pages of his own Mémoires to Franklin’s frugality: ‘Benjamin had read a treatise of doctor Trion, on the Pythagorean regimen; strongly convinced by his reasonings, he abstained from meat for a long time … This Pythagorean diet economised the money of the printer’s apprentice; and he used it to buy books.’3 Plainness and Liberty formed a united front against Luxury and Tyranny, and Valady dramatically transferred his allegiance from the court life of his upbringing to the new idiom of unadorned egalitarianism. The budding revolutionary took hold of his curly locks of hair and ceremoniously cut them off; he renounced the title of marquis; sold his watch because ‘it is not appropriate for men to wear jewellery’; laid aside his elegant military costume and donned the Quaker-like clothes of simplicity.4

  Wishing to escape the shackles of his background, he decided to travel to England, ‘the only spot in Europe where liberty dwelt’. In London, Valady took lodgings with John Bell (the publisher of David Williams, the Welsh republican druid-priest). He met many of the leading British republican agitators, studied law at an academy in Fulham and formed an intimate friendship with Thomas Paine. But then he became disillusioned with the British government for committing the ‘foulest encroachments upon our national rights’, and decided to move to America, the real land of democracy.5

  This extraordinary behaviour threatened to disgrace the houses of Valady and Vaudreuil, and his friends used all their aristocratic networks to cover up the young man’s follies. But none of his family friends could persuade him from his new-found life, until finally his unfortunate wife and her mother made the journey to London with their cousin the Comte de Parroy. On hearing that Valady had embarked for America two days earlier the delegation despaired, but the news turned out to be false and they made contact with the miscreant marquis. Valady at first invited his wife to emigrate to America with him, but, overcome by their pleas, he agreed to return to France only once they had signed a bizarre contract stipulating that Valady would retain his personal freedom and would be allowed to travel according to his desire.6

  Only two months after departing to England, he arrived back in France. These were the years building up to the Revolution of 1789 when King Louis XVI had gathered the Assembly of Notables to try to appease the grievances of the French people. Valady continued to ignore his military duties and spent all his energy trying to convince the aristocrats and ecclesiastics to alleviate France’s fiscal crisis by relinquishing their exemption from the taxes that currently burdened the Third Estate (the commoners). Alarmed by Valady’s continual intransigence, his friends won him a pardon for his desertion from the army and arranged for the young marquis to take a long vacation. Away from the political stirrings in Paris, his family hoped he would reflect on his follies, and return to his national duties and the wife whom he had spurned. But Valady ignored the imprecations of his father and remained at Paris with the pretext of poor health, until January 1787 when he grudgingly made the journey first to his spouse’s home and then to his father.

  By springtime he was expected back in the army, but instead Valady returned to England from where he wrote to Samuel Breck: ‘I am here on my way to America, where I mean to delve the earth for a subsistence, rather than be beholden to any of my proud connexions. They form the clan of oppressors, and being the enemies of liberty I hold them in enmity myself.’ Just as he was about to depart for America he heard that the Dutch Patriots had started a new democratic revolution in Holland and he immediately returned to Paris to assist them. This time his family used financial coercion to thwart his plans and deprived him of his annual allowance. But Valady persisted and joined the Duc d’Orléans and Lafayette in offering protection to the defeated Dutch Patriots, promising to join with them in arms as soon as a new campaign could be launched.7

  Once again, his family stepped in. His uncle, the Baron de Castelnau, obtained a new holiday for him and invited Valady to stay with him in Geneva for the summer.8 There, in Valady’s words, Castelnau had ‘the design of curing me of my eccentricity, of my wildness, and my philosophic and republican manner, and to make a man of the world of his poor day-dreamer of a cousin’. But the plan blew up in his family’s faces. For, as Valady wrote to his sister, in Geneva, instead of cooling off, he became still more immersed in radical idealism. He made ‘acquaintance of a great man, of a sage around whom I found refuge, the port so desired. He put me in the path of the true wisdom and which is that of Nature and the only one which leads man to the sovereign good.’9 This ‘great man’ was Robert Pigott (1736–94) and the path of nature he showed Valady was radical vegetarianism.

  Their meeting became a legend in the histories of the Revolution. The Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders of the French Republic (1797), published by the republican vegetarian Richard Phillips (1767–1840), elaborated that Valady met ‘an English Pythagorean, well known by the name of Black Pigot, who confined himself entirely to eating vegetable fare. Valady immediately adopted this gentleman’s dietetic system, and for several years after never tasted animal food.’10 Five years later, Phillips’ friend, the revolutionary vegetarian Joseph Ritson, correctly affirmed that this was Robert Pigott, once high sheriff of Shropshire and inheritor of the ancient and extremely valuable estate of Chetwynd.11 Originally emigrating to the Continent after selling his English estates because he thought the American war would ruin England, Pigott became acquainted with Voltaire, Franklin, Brissot and the leading hostess of the revolutionary Girondins, Madame Roland, who called him the ‘franc original’ (alluding to the fact that like Oswald he had been granted honorary French citizenship). Pigott had immediately set about promulgating his vegetarian solution to France’s chronic food shortages by calling for the populace to revert to a diet of potatoes, lentils, maize, barley and cabbage.12 In Brissot’s republican journal Le Patriot François, he announced that prisoners in particular should have their hard natures softened by ‘that wholesome and natural regimen of bread, water and vegetables’.13 Brissot mentioned his friendship with Pigott in his Mémoires, and promised a full discussion of him which unfortunately he never got round to completing.14

  From 1790 Pigott was trying to purchase one of the ‘nationalised’ ecclesiastical estates in order to establish a model Rousseauist agricultural commune with Brissot and other prominent Girondins, François Lanthenas, Bancal des Issarts, Champagneux de Blot, François Buzot, the Rolands and possibly Valady. Pigott had promised to fund the project with the vast sum of 100,000 francs, but Madame Roland rightly put little faith in ‘this inconstant Pythagorean’ and the dream never came true. The few of this confederacy who survived Robespierre’s Reign of Terror ended up buying private retirement estates and lived their shattered dreams in solitude.15

  After meeting Pigott, Valady became an evangelist of vegetarianism and ardently wished to convert his fellow revolutionaries to the same cause, seeing in it the only hope for a future of peace. He took to wearing the signature white linen gown of the ancient Pythagoreans, and he still yearned to travel to America and establish a Pythagorean community of vegetarian harmony: ‘a school of Temperance and Love, in order to preserve so many men from the prevailing disgraceful vices of brutal intemperance and selfish cupidity’.16

  Valady even impertinently tried to convert the far sen
ior Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, co-designer, with Rousseau, of the Revolution’s rhetoric of nature. As Saint-Pierre wrote to Brissot with amused indulgence for their junior comrade:

  M. de Valady, full of zeal for the well-being of the human race and without experience of men … wants to reduce me to the diet of the Pythagoreans and, which is more, to their costume. I give my best wishes for his success in America and if ever he forms there a society which has his virtues, his mores, as much as your wisdom, I will endeavour to go there to end my days: there will be nothing missing for the satisfaction of my heart and my spirit.17

  Despite his irony, Saint-Pierre was genuinely attracted to Valady’s callow conversion to the vegetarian ideas he was himself publishing in the Études de Nature and Paul et Virginie.* One of their mutual associates expressed the emotion of listening to Valady’s impassioned diatribes: ‘Never have we experienced the enchantment, the amazement which he caused us. It was truly a divine gift … Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who loved him much, after having listened to him one day in our presence, cried ‘‘You are a man of the time of Orpheus, you are Orpheus himself resuscitated to train men by the charm of the word.’’’18 It may have been thanks to Saint-Pierre that Valady had visited Robert Pigott in the first place, for Saint-Pierre commemorated Pigott in his sincere approbation of vegetarianism in the Études de Nature: