Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee

by Thomas J. Craughwell

  These domestic dramas in the Jefferson household were being played out against the backdrop of a much grander and ultimately tragic crisis. All across France, and especially in Paris, discontent with the government had been simmering for years; in 1789 the pot finally boiled over. The causes of the French Revolution are complicated, but the crippled finances of the government and the outrageously unfair system of taxation played a large part in driving the people to rebellion. Under the rules of the system, the middle and working classes bore the full weight of taxation, while the aristocracy and the Catholic clergy were exempt. Time and again, Louis XVI had brought in a financial advisor to revive France’s treasury. All of them told the king the same thing: the system of taxation must be reformed. For stating this inconvenient truth, each advisor was fired. Then, in 1783, the king accepted what he had denied for years—France’s tax system was broken. He turned to Charles de Calonne to fix it. Calonne was a lawyer with a strong business sense, and immediately he set about raising revenue—partly by building the wall around Paris and installing customhouses for the collection of duties.

  It wasn’t enough. France was 113 million livres in debt, and collecting taxes on baskets of eggs and buckets of milk brought into the capital from the countryside wasn’t going to fix the problem. In 1787 the king called upon the aristocracy and the clergy to attend an Assembly of Notables, at which Calonne would present his plan to make France solvent again. Among other things, he argued in favor of a universal tax on land. While this proposal seems eminently fair to us today, the assembled notables knew there would be consequences—mainly, that they would no longer be exempt from paying taxes on their vast estates. Calonne’s initiative failed.6

  Desperate for a solution that would save the treasury and perhaps his monarchy, in 1789 Louis XVI called for a meeting of the Estates-General. This body, first created in the fourteenth century, was the closest thing feudal France had to a parliament. It was made up of the three levels, or estates, of society—the clergy, the aristocracy, and the commoners—and it had not been in session since 1614. Rather than tackle the problems afflicting the nation, the three estates spent weeks arguing about their particular powers and privileges.

  Not everyone was impressed by Louis’s calling of the Estates-General. Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a sixty-eight-year-old statesman who had been working for government reform for decades, dismissed the assembly as “a vestige of ancient barbarism” and called upon Louis to grant France a constitution. “A King who submits to a constitution feels degraded,” Malesherbes wrote, “a King who proposes a constitution obtains instead the highest glory among men and their liveliest and most enduring gratitude.”7 Malesherbes was calling upon an absolute monarch to voluntarily become a constitutional monarch, and that Louis would not do.

  The debates in the Estates-General especially taxed the patience of the members of the third estate, the commoners. They represented the ordinary populace of France, which vastly outnumbered the nobles and the clergy. Yet in the Estates-General, each estate had a single vote, and the clergy and the nobles always voted together against the commoners. So on June 20, 1789, six hundred delegates of the third estate walked out on the proceedings. At a nearby indoor tennis court—the only building in the neighborhood large enough to hold them all—the delegates declared the Estates-General abolished and the creation of a new sovereign legislative body: the National Assembly. In essence, the commoners had declared that Louis XVI no longer had any authority in France, that the legitimate government was now in the hands of the people.

  Would the king give up his power without a fight? Would he send his troops into the streets of Paris to slaughter the delegates of the National Assembly and their supporters? Fear and uncertainty swept through the slums and working-class districts of the capital, and one royal bastion in particular became the object of their paranoia: the Bastille prison.

  Built in the fourteenth century as a fortress, by the eighteenth century the Bastille was a prison for the better class of criminals, such as aristocrats, political dissidents, and authors, publishers, and booksellers who disseminated works the government considered indecent or seditious. This huge fortress, with cannons pointed toward the surrounding neighborhoods, became Paris’s most important symbol of royal despotism. Rumors spread of dozens of prisoners confined in underground dungeons (in fact, in July 1789, the Bastille held only seven inmates, all of whom were free to walk in the open air atop the building’s battlements).

  One of the prisoners was the Marquis de Sade, the notorious libertine and author of pornographic novels. During her weekly visits, Sade’s wife brought him updates of the political situation. Now when he took the air, he shouted down to passersby brief speeches in favor of the new National Assembly. When the guards retaliated by keeping Sade locked in his cell, he shouted his speeches through the opening in the floor that served as his toilet. Historian Simon Schama tells us that the opening was lined with metal, which made it a natural megaphone. When Sade claimed that Bernard-René de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, was planning to massacre all the prisoners and called upon to people of Paris to save them, de Launay transferred Sade to another prison.8

  The rumors and unrest in Paris were making de Launay and men like him nervous. The commandant of the Invalides, a hospital and residence for military veterans, sent thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder to the Bastille for safe-keeping. De Launay had only eighty-two men to defend the prison; he begged for reinforcements but received only thirty-two Swiss mercenaries. Although the building was as massive a work of medieval masonry as one could find in Paris, protected by a moat and armed with thirty pieces of artillery, it had no well or spring to provide water and only enough food to feed the garrison and prisoners for two days. De Launay had not been shortsighted; he simply never imagined that one day French citizens would besiege the prison.

  On the night of July 13, a rumor circulated that royal troops were on the march against the people of Paris. The next morning a crowd of approximately nine hundred, most of them workingmen from the adjacent Faubourg Saint-Antoine, gathered outside the Bastille. They wanted the gunpowder and they wanted to spike the artillery so the guns could not be used against them by the royal troops, who the rumormongers still insisted were on their way.9

  De Launay invited two delegates into the Bastille to discuss the crowd’s demands. The delegates joined the governor for lunch, but by the end of the meal the two parties had agreed on nothing. On leaving the Bastille, the delegates declared they would go to the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall, for further instructions. Once they were gone, the restless crowd surged into the prison’s undefended outer courtyard, crying, “Give us the Bastille!” A few of the more agile protestors climbed up and cut the drawbridge chain, and as the massive bridge slammed down, the crowd ran into the heavily defended inner courtyard, where they were met by gunfire.

  The battle raged all afternoon, with the crowd receiving reinforcements from soldiers who had deserted from the royal ranks. They brought along muskets from the Invalides armory, as well as two cannons. By five in the afternoon, de Launay had concluded that further resistance was useless. He raised a white handkerchief over the Bastille, ordered his men to cease firing, and sent out a note demanding safe conduct for himself and his troops and threatening to blow up the gunpowder if it was not given. Such an explosion would have leveled the Bastille and most of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; nonetheless, the crowd rejected de Launay’s terms. Once again, they stormed the fortress, and this time they captured it.10

  The Bastille garrison had killed eighty-two members of the mob and wounded an unknown number of others. The garrison’s casualties were one killed and three wounded. Once the Bastille was in the mob’s hands, some members freed the prisoners while others lynched two guards. De Launay was dragged through the streets to the Hôtel de Ville, where the mob shouted suggestions on how best to kill him. When a pastry cook named Desnot spoke in favor of clemency, de Launay cr
ied, “Let me die,” and kicked his would-be savior in the groin. At that, the mob attacked the governor, hacking him to death with swords and bayonets looted from the Bastille. Once de Launay was dead, a member of the crowd cut off the corpse’s head. It was impaled on a pike, and the mob, singing and dancing around it, carried their gruesome trophy through the streets.11

  That night, about eleven o’clock, Jefferson’s friend the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt asked to see the king. After he had described the fall of the Bastille and the murder of Governor de Launay, Louis XVI asked, “It is a revolt?” “No, Sire,” the duke replied. “It is a revolution.”12

  The French people as a whole had enchanted Jefferson. In a letter to Elizabeth House Trist, a friend in Philadelphia, he wrote: “The roughness of the human mind are so thoroughly rubbed off with them that it seems as if one might glide thro’ a whole life among them without a jostle.” It saddened him to see that such a delightful people were ruled by such a corrupt, despotic government. “Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France,” he continued, “I am of the opinion there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence, than the most conspicuously wretched individual in the whole United states.” The majority of the French people were the victims, he said, of “a monstrous abuse of power under which these people were ground to powder.”13 Everywhere he looked he saw institutions that kept France poor, ignorant, and backward. He blamed the unjust system of taxation, the government-granted monopolies that crippled industry and any entrepreneurial spirit, the infringement on freedom of religion, speech, and the press, the indolence and decadence of the clergy, and “the enormous expenses of the Queen, the princes & the Court.”14 When Trist showed this letter to James Madison, he suggested that she keep it to herself. Such strong words from a diplomat could cause embarrassment to both Jefferson and the U.S. government.

  During the 1780s, Marie Antoinette had become France’s national scapegoat. A foreigner, the daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, the queen was said to have siphoned millions from the French treasury and smuggled the money out of the country to enrich her brother, Emperor Joseph. A stream of salacious pamphlets portrayed the queen as a woman of insatiable sexual appetites who exhausted her male and female lovers, among them the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois. In drunken orgies she took on her entire retinue of bodyguards. A play produced in 1789, La Destruction de l’Aristocratisme, had Marie Antoinette’s character declare that she hated her French subjects so intensely that “with what delight would I bathe in their blood.” Jefferson was no fan of the queen. He believed she was profligate and autocratic—and she was—but it is unlikely that he put much faith in this scurrilous propaganda against her.15

  Even if he did not think of Marie Antoinette as a sexual omnivore, Jefferson disapproved of her public demeanor. To relieve the boredom of life at Versailles, she surrounded herself with gentlemen known as chevaliers servants. Her favorite was the elegant, charming, and enormously wealthy Comte de Vaudreuil. Most of France assumed he was her lover, although Jefferson did not.16 In a 1787 letter to James Madison he described the queen as “devoted to pleasure and expense,” then added that she was “not remarkable for any other vices.”17

  It was her conduct in general that earned Jefferson’s disapproval. In dress, the queen preferred the loose, casual, “pastoral” style that was in vogue; Jefferson favored that style for women, just not for a monarch. A queen was not an ordinary individual; she was an embodiment of the nation, and as such her attire should be formal. Then there was the queen’s social life: her circle of chevaliers made her a subject of gossip, as did her frequent appearances at the theater; even worse was her appearance on the stage of the theater she had built at her retreat at Versailles, the Petit Trianon. In Jefferson’s view, Marie Antionette was still a wife and mother, and her proper sphere was the home, creating a happy family life.

  In April 1789, three hundred fifty workers at a Paris wallpaper factory and a nearby saltpeter factory went on strike, protesting their starvation wages of twenty-five sous per day. Some of the strikers cobbled together a gibbet and paraded it through the streets, with effigies of the factory owners dangling from the crossbeam. The protest spread until three thousand men and women were rampaging through the streets. They attacked the home of the owner of the saltpeter factory, dragged all his fine possessions into the street—including his personal library of fifty thousand books—and burned them. Then they stormed the wallpaper factory and destroyed it. The Gardes Françaises, or National Guard, was called out. In the confrontation between the king’s troops and the rioters, twelve soldiers and dozens of rioters were killed.18

  In this foretaste of the French Revolution, Jefferson’s sympathies lay with law and order rather than the aggrieved workers. In a letter to John Jay, he characterized the demonstrators as a “mob … the most abandoned banditti” whose actions were “unprovoked and unpitied.”19

  By July, Jefferson’s mood had swung from partisan to dispassionate observer. On the afternoon of July 13, the day before the storming of the Bastille, he was riding in his carriage through the Place Louis XV (soon to be the location of the guillotine). At one end of the square were Louis XVI’s mercenary German cavalry; at the other end stood a crowd of Parisians armed with stones. The crowd parted so that Jefferson’s carriage could pass, then closed ranks again, and a moment later attacked the Germans. As historian William Howard Adams describes it: “In that file of sullen, defiant Frenchmen, Jefferson had made his closest contact with the raw forces of the French Revolution.”20

  After Jefferson’s brush with the Paris mob on July 13, events accelerated within the city. The next day, the Bastille was captured and its governor and two of his deputies were murdered. On July 15 the Marquis de Lafayette was named commander of the Gardes Françaises and swore before the high altar in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame to defend the liberty of the people. On July 16, Jefferson watched as Lafayette and his troops escorted Louis XVI and fifty deputies into Paris. It was estimated that sixty thousand Parisians lined the route, and most of them were armed—some with scythes, others with swords or pistols looted from the Bastille or the Invalides. The royal government’s progress across the city, through a grim and suspicious multitude, must have been an ordeal for the king, and it ended with a humiliating gesture—he was obliged to pin to his hat a red, white, and blue ribbon, the cockade of the revolution.

  Two weeks later, Jefferson concluded that the mob was harmless. “I have been thro’ [the city] daily,” he wrote to a friend, Count Diodati, “have observed the mobs with my own eyes in order to be satisfied of their objects, and declare to you that I saw so plainly the legitimacy of them, that I have slept in my house as quietly thro’ the whole as ever I did in the most peaceful moments.”21 He was confident that from then on the work of drafting a constitution and forming a republic would distract the Parisians “from the bloody objects which have lately occupied their minds.”22

  In August, Lafayette begged Jefferson to host a dinner party for various delegates who represented the increasingly fragmented political factions in the National Assembly. Some delegates wanted the king to possess the power of veto; at the other end of the spectrum were those who wanted the king to have no political power at all. Between the two extremes were a host of other points of view. Lafayette hoped that civil war could be averted by rational discussion over a good dinner served at the home of a man whose Declaration of Independence had inspired lovers of liberty in every nation of Europe. The dinner party lasted six hours. Afterward, Jefferson concluded that James Hemings’s food and his own wines had done the trick. He noted that the discussion among the delegates had been marked by “logical reasoning and chaste eloquence.” The gentlemen were willing to compromise, and soon, he predicted, France would have “a good constitution.”23

  Also that month, Jefferson received a letter from James Madison in which his friend wrote: “I have been asked if any app
ointment at home would be agreeable to you.”24 The implication was unmistakable—he was being offered a position in the first-ever administration of President George Washington. Jefferson replied, “[When] I quit the present, it will not be to engage in any other office.”25 As Jefferson prepared for his departure from France, he suddenly came down with a violent migraine headache that kept him confined to his bed for six days. Studying other occasions when Jefferson was incapacitated by a migraine, the biographer Fawn Brodie believes there is a pattern to these afflictions: “It was triggered, it would seem, by a sense of loss.” In the five years Jefferson lived in France, he never had a single migraine, but now that he was going home, “he was losing friends, artists, scholars, scientists, Paris—all of Europe—to say nothing of a place in the new French Revolution.”26 For his illness in Paris, Jefferson was attended by a seventy-two-year-old Welsh doctor named Richard Gem, whom Jefferson considered one of the most skillful physicians he had ever met. But perhaps his recovery had less to do with Dr. Gem’s prescriptions and more to do with Jefferson’s own acceptance of the inevitable: he was leaving France.

  The last dinner party at the Hôtel de Langeac took place the evening of September 17, 1789. Jefferson had invited four guests: the Marquis de Lafayette, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, the Marquis de Condorcet, and an American, Gouverneur Morris. All four men believed in democratic government and welcomed the first signs of revolution in France.