THE PROVINCIAL TOWNS.
The provincial towns in France under Louis XVI. were only beginning to
assume a modern appearance. Built originally within walls, their houses
had been tall, their streets narrow, crooked, and dirty. But in the
eighteenth century most of the walls had been pulled down, and public
walks or drives laid out on their sites. The idea that the beauty of
cities consists largely in the breadth and straightness of their streets
had taken a firm hold on the public mind. This idea, if not more
thoroughly carried out than it can be in an old town, has much in its
favor. Before the French Revolution the broad, dusty, modern avenues,
which allow free passage to men and carriages and free entrance to light
and air, but where there is little shade from the sun or shelter from
the wind, were beginning to supersede the cooler and less windy, but
malodorous lanes where the busy life of the Middle Ages had found
shelter. Large and imposing public buildings were constructed in many
towns, facing on the public squares. With the artistic thoroughness
which belongs to the French mind, the fronts of the surrounding private
houses were made to conform in style to those of their prouder
neighbors. The streets were lighted, although rather dimly; their names
were written at their corners, and in some instances the houses were
numbered.
But such innovations did not touch every provincial town, nor cover the
whole of the places which they entered. More commonly, the old
appearance of the streets was little changed. The houses jutted out into
the narrow way, with all manner of inexplicable corners and angles. The
shop windows were unglazed, and shaded only by a wooden pent-house, or
by the upper half of a shutter. The other half might be lowered to form
a shelf, from which the wares could overrun well into the roadway. Near
the wooden sign which creaked overhead stood a statue of the Virgin or a
saint. Glancing into the dimly-lighted shop, you might see the master
working at his trade, with a journeyman and an apprentice. The busy
housewife bustled to and fro; now chaffering with a customer at the
shop-door, now cooking the dinner, or scolding the red-armed maid, in
the kitchen.[Footnote: Babeau, _La Ville_, 363. Ibid., _Les
Artisans_, 73, 82. Viollet le Duc, _Dict. d'Architecture_
(Boutique.)]
The house was only one room wide, but several stories high. Upstairs
were the chambers and perhaps a sitting-room. Even among people of
moderate means the modern division of rooms was coming into fashion, and
beds were being banished from kitchens and parlors. There were more beds
also, and fewer people in each, than in former years. On the walls of
the rooms paint and paper were taking the place of tapestry, and light
colors, with brightness and cleanliness, were displacing soft dark
tones, dirt, and vermin.[Footnote: Babeau, _Les Bourgeois_, 9, 19,
37.]
Houses were thinly built and doors and windows rattled in their
frames. The rooms in the greater part of France were heated only by
open fires, although stoves of brick or glazed pottery were in common
use in Switzerland and Germany; and wood was scarce and dear. In
countries where the winter is short and sharp, people bear it with
what patience they may, instead of providing against it, as is
necessary where the cold is more severe and prolonged. Thicker clothes
were worn in the house than when moving about in the streets. Wadded
slippers protected the feet against the chill of the brick floors, and
the old sat in high-backed chairs to cut off the draft, with
footstools under their feet. Chilblains were, and are still, a
constant annoyance of European winter. The dressing-gown was in
fashion in France as in America, where we frequently see it in
portraits of the last century. Similar garments had been in use in the
Middle Ages. They belong to cold houses.[Footnote: Babeau, _Les
Artisans_, 123. In 1695 the water and wine froze on the king's table
at Versailles, _Les Bourgeois_, 23.]
The dress of the working-classes, which had been very brilliant at the
time of the Renaissance, had become sombre in the seventeenth century,
but was regaining brilliancy in the eighteenth. The townspeople dressed
in less bright colors than the peasants of the country, but not cheaply
in proportion to their means. Already social distinctions were
disappearing from costume, and it was remarked that a master-workman, of
a Sunday, in his black coat and powdered hair, might be mistaken for a
magistrate; while the wife of a rich burgher was hardly distinguishable
from a noblewoman.[Footnote: Babeau, _Les Artisans_, 13, 199.
Handiwork was very cheap. Babeau gives the bill for a black gown costing
210 livres 15 sous, of which only 3 livres was for the making; _Les
Bourgeois_, 169 n.]
Great thrift was practiced by the poorer townspeople of the middle
class, but their lives were not without comfort. We read of a family in
a small town of Auvergne before the middle of the century, composed of a
man and his wife, with a large number of children, the wife's mother,
her two grandmothers, her three aunts, and her sister, all sitting about
one table, and living on one modest income. The husband and father had a
small business and owned a garden and a little farm. In the garden
almost enough vegetables were raised for the use of the family. Quinces,
apples, and pears were preserved in honey for the winter. The wool of
their own sheep was spun by the women, and so was the flax of their
field, which the neighbors helped them to strip of an evening. From the
walnuts of their trees they pressed oil for the table and for the lamp.
The great chestnuts were boiled for food. The bread also was made of
their own grain, and the wine of their own grapes.
In the country towns, among people of small means, a healthy freedom was
allowed to boys and girls. There were moonlight walks and singing
parties. Love matches resulted from thus throwing the young people
together, and were found not to turn out worse than other marriages. But
in large towns matches were still arranged by parents, and the girls
were educated rather to please the older people than the young men, for
it was the elders who would find husbands for them.[Footnote:
Marmontel, i. 10, 51. Babeau, _Les Bourgeois_, 315.]
Amusements were simple and rational in the cultivated middle class.
People in the provinces were not above enjoying amateur music and
recitation, and the fashion of singing songs at table, which was going
out of vogue in Paris, still held its own in smaller places. A literary
flavor, which has now disappeared, pervaded provincial society. People
wrote verses and made quotations. But this did not prevent less
intellectual pleasures. Players sometimes spent eighteen out of the
twenty-four hours at the card-table. Balls were given either by private
persons or by subscription. Dancing would begin at six and last well
into the next morning; for the dwellers in small towns will give
themselves up to an occupation or an amusement with a thoroughness which
the more hurried life of a capital will not allow. The local nobility,
and the upper ranks of the burgher class, the officers, magistrates,
civil functionaries and their families, met at these balls; for social
equality was gaining ground in France. The shopkeepers and attorneys
contented themselves, as a rule, with quieter pleasures, excursions into
the country, theatres, visits, and little supper parties. Dancing in the
open air and street shows, in which once all classes had taken part,
were now left to the poor.[Footnote: Babeau, _Les Bourgeois_, 209,
225, 241, 305.]
The journeyman sometimes lived with his master, sometimes had a room of
his own in another part of the town. He dressed poorly and lived hard;
but generally had his wine. Bread and vegetables formed the solid part
of his diet, beans being a favorite article of food. Wages appear to
have been about twenty-six sous a day for men, and fifteen for women on
an average, the value of money being perhaps twice what it is now, but
the variations were great from town to town. The hours of work were
long. People were up at four in the summer mornings, in provincial
towns, and did not stop working until nine at night. But the work was
the varied and leisurely work of home, not the monotonous drudgery of
the great factory. Moreover, holidays were more than plenty, averaging
two a week throughout the year. The French workman kept them with song
and dance and wine; but drunkenness and riot were uncommon.[Footnote:
Babeau, _Les Artisans_, 21, 34. A. Young, i. 565.]
The workman's chance of rising in his trade was far better than it is
now. There were not twice as many journeymen as masters.[Footnote:
Babeau, _Les Artisans_, 63. Perhaps more workmen under Louis XVI.
Manufactures on a larger scale were coming in. At Marseilles, 65 soap
factories employed 1000 men; 60 hatters, 800 men and 400 women.
Julliany, i. 85. But Marseilles was a large city. In smaller places the
old domestic trades still held their ground.] The capital required for
setting up in business was small, although the fees were relatively
large; the police had to be paid for a license; and the guilds for
admission.
These guilds regulated all the trade and manufactures of the country.
They held strict monopolies, and no man was allowed to exercise any
handicraft as a master without being a member of one of them. The guilds
were continually squabbling. Thus it was an unceasing complaint of the
shoemakers against the cobblers that the latter sold new shoes as well
as second-hand, a practice contrary to the high privileges of the
shoemakers' corporation. Sometimes the civil authorities were called on
to interfere. We find the trimming-makers of Paris, who have the right
to make silk buttons, obtaining a regulation which forbids all persons
wearing buttons of the same cloth as their coats, or buttons that are
cast, turned or made of horn.
Minute regulations governed manufactures exercised within the guilds.
The number of threads to the inch in cloth of various names and kinds
was strictly regulated. New inventions made their way with difficulty
against the vested rights of these corporations. Thus Le Prevost, who
invented the use of silk in making hats, was exposed to all sorts of
opposition from the other hatters, who said that he infringed their
privileges; but he overcame it by perseverance, and finally made a large
fortune. The regulations served to keep up the standard of excellence in
manufacture, which probably fell in some respects on their abolition.
They were often made to benefit the masters at the expense of the
workmen, who on their side formed secret combinations of their own,
fighting by much the same methods as such unions employ to-day. Thus in
1783 the journeymen paper-makers instituted a system of fines on their
masters, which they enforced by deserting in a body the service of those
who resisted them.[Footnote: Babeau, _Les Artisans_, 51, 108, 202,
239. Levasseur, ii. 353. Turgot, iii. 328, 347. (_Éloge de M. de
Gournay_), Mercier, xi. 363.]
The successful master of a trade, as he grew rich, might pass into the
upper middle class, the _haute bourgeoisie_. He became a
manufacturer, a merchant, perhaps even, when he retired on his fortune,
a royal secretary, with a patent of hereditary nobility. His children,
instead of leaving school when they had learned to read, write and
cipher, and had taken their first communion, stayed on, or were promoted
to a higher school, to learn Latin and Greek. His wife was called
Madame, like a duchess. She had probably assisted in his rise, not only
by good advice and domestic frugality, but by the arts of a saleswoman
and by her talent for business. Should he die while his sons were young,
she understood his affairs and could carry them on for her own benefit
and for that of her children. No longer a single maidservant, red in the
face and slatternly about the skirts, clatters among the pots in the
little dark kitchen behind the shop, or stands with her arms akimbo
giving advice to her mistress. The successful man has mounted his house
on a larger scale, and if the insolent lackeys of the great do not hang
about his door, there are at least one or two of those quiet and
attentive old men-servants, whose respectful and self-respecting
familiarity adds at once to the comfort and the dignity of life.
[Footnote: Babeau, _Les Artisans_, 158, 167, 181, 204, 271.]
It was not within the walls of his own house alone that the burgher
might be a man of importance. The towns retained to the end of the
monarchy a few of the rights for which they had struggled in earlier and
rougher times. Assemblies differently composed in different places, but
sometimes representing the guilds and fraternities and sometimes made up
of the whole body of citizens, took a part in the government of the
town. They voted on loans, on the conduct of the city's lawsuits, and on
municipal business generally. Officers were chosen in various ways, some
of them by very complicated forms of election, and some by throwing of
lots. These officers bore different titles in different places, as
consuls, echevins, syndics, or jurats. They sometimes exercised
considerable executive and judicial powers, controlling the ordinary
police of the city. Their perquisites and privileges varied from town to
town, with the color of their official robes, and the ceremonies of
their installation. The cities valued their ancient rights, shorn as
they were of much substantial importance by the centralizing servants of
the crown; and repeatedly bought them back from the king, as time after
time the old offices were abolished, and new-fashioned purchasable
mayoralties set up in their stead.[Footnote: Babeau, _La Ville_,
39. When the towns bought in the office of mayor, they had to name an
incumbent, and the town owned the office only for his lifetime and had
to buy it in again on his death. _Ibid._, 81. This looks as if the
royal office of mayor were not hereditary, In spite of the _Edit de la
Paulette_. Where no other purchaser came forward, the towns were
obliged to buy the office. _Ibid._, 79.]
The municipal authorities shared with the clergy the control of
education and the care of the poor and the sick. The last were
collected in large hospitals, many of which were inefficiently
managed.[Footnote: There were great differences from place to
place. Howard, _passim_. The hospital, poor-house, etc., at Dijon
were good; the hospital at Lyons large, but close and dirty. Rigby,
102, 113. Muirhead, 156.] It must always be borne in mind, when
thinking of the daily life of the past, that in old times, and even so
late as the second half of the last century, a high degree of
civilization and a great deal of luxury were not inconsistent with an
almost entire disregard of what we are in the habit of considering
essential conveniences. Comfort, indeed, has been well said to be a
modern word for a modern idea. Dirt and smells were so common, even a
hundred years ago, as hardly to be noticed, and diseases arising from
filth and foul air were borne as unavoidable dispensations of divine
wrath. Yet some advance had been made. Baths had been absolutely
essential in the Middle Ages when every one wore wool; the result of
the common use of linen had been at first to put them out of fashion;
under Louis XVI. they were coming in again. The itch, so common in
Auvergne early in the century that in the schools a separate bench was
set apart for the pupils who had it, was almost unknown in 1786.
Leprosy had nearly disappeared from France before the end of the
seventeenth century. The plague was still an occasional visitant in
the first quarter of the eighteenth, in spite of rigorous quarantine
regulations. On its approach towns shut their gates and manned their
walls, and the startled authorities took to cleansing and
whitewashing. In 1722, the doctors of Marseilles went about dressed
in Turkey morocco, with gloves and a mask of the same material; the
mask had glass eyes, and a big nose full of disinfectants. How the
sight of this costume affected the patients is not mentioned. When the
plague was over, the Te Deum was sung, and processions took their way
to the shrine of Saint Roch.[Footnote: Babeau, _Les Bourgeois_,
177. Ibid., _La Ville_, 443.]
Schools were established in every town. The schoolmasters formed a
guild, the writing-masters another, and neither was allowed to infringe
the prerogatives of its rival. The schoolmasters in towns were generally
appointed by the clergy, but the municipal government kept a certain
control. A good deal of the teaching of boys was done by Brotherhoods,
while that of girls was almost entirely entrusted to Sisters. In many
places primary instruction was free and obligatory, at least in name.
The law making it so had been passed under Louis XIV., for the purpose
of bringing the children of Protestants under Catholic teaching; but
this law was not always enforced. In northern France, there were evening
schools for adults, and Sunday schools where reading and writing was
taught, probably to children employed in trades during the week. A
certain amount of religious instruction preceded the ceremony of the
"first communion." As to secondary or advanced schools, they are said to
have been more numerous and accessible in the eighteenth century than
now, when they have mostly been consolidated in the larger cities. There
were five hundred and sixty-two establishments reckoned as secondary in
France in 1789, about one third of them being in the hands of
Brotherhoods. There were also many private schools licensed by the
municipal authorities. The boys when away from home lived very simply
indeed. Marmontel, who was sent from his own little town to attend the
school at a neighboring one, has left a description of his mode of life.
"I was lodged according to the custom of the school with five other
scholars, at the house of an honest artisan of the town; and my father,
sad enough at going away without me, left with me my package of
provisions for the week. They consisted of a big loaf of rye-bread, a
small cheese, a piece of bacon and two or three pounds of beef; my
mother had added a dozen apples. This, once for all, was the allowance
of the best fed scholars in the school. The woman of the house cooked
for us; and for her trouble, her fire, her lamp, her beds, her lodging
and even the vegetables from her little garden which she put in the pot,
we gave her twenty-five sous apiece a month; so that all told, except
for my clothing, I might cost my father from four to five louis a year."
This was about 1733, and the style of living may have risen a little,
even for schoolboys, during the following half century. The sons of
professional men and people of the middle class were better off in
respect to education than most young nobles; as the former were sent to
good schools, while the latter were brought up at home by incompetent
tutors. It would appear to have been easy enough for a boy to get an
education; harder for a girl. But no one who has glanced at the
literature of the time will imagine that France was then destitute of
clever women.[Footnote: Babeau, _La Ville_, 482. Ibid., _Les
Bourgeois_, 369. Marmontel, i. 16. Montbarey, i. 280. Ch. de Ribbe,
i. 320.]
In the eighteenth century great changes were taking place in the
national life. Simple artisans presumed to be more comfortable in 1789
than the first people of the town had been fifty years before. The
middle class lived in many respects like the nobility, with material
luxuries and intellectual pleasures. Yet the artificial barriers were
still maintained. The citizen, unless of noble birth, was excluded not
only from the army, but from the higher positions in the administration
and in the legal profession. The nobility of the gown was liable to be
treated with alternate familiarity and impertinence by that of the sword
or by that of the court. The last held most of the positions which
strongly appealed to vanity, many of those which bore the largest
profit. Jealousy is possible only where persons or classes come near
each other, and before the Revolution the various classes in France were
rapidly drawing together.