PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
Louis XV was succeeded in 1774 by his twenty year old grandson, Louis
XVI, at whose birth the Paris that later was to kill him expressed
extravagant delight in countless feasts, balls and displays of
fireworks. Young as he was at his accession, Louis had been married for
several years. His wife, Marie Antoinette, was but fourteen when she
came to Paris as a bride, and an accident which occurred during the
wedding festivities seemed a mournful prophecy of the troubled days to
come. At the close of a _fête_ in the Place Louis XV a panic seized the
crowd. It rushed headlong into the rue Royale in such a passion of
terror that the narrow street was swiftly filled with a mass of people
fighting their way over the bleeding, dying bodies of those who had
reached the exit first and by chance had fallen.
Again the royal family preferred Versailles to Paris. In the country the
well-meaning young king tinkered with locks and was generally dull and
uninteresting, while the queen made a charmingly elaborate pretence at
living the simple life, _à la_ Watteau. Louis did his ineffective best
to straighten out the affairs of his kingdom but the deluge which Louis
XV had predicted was coming and rapidly.
The court often came to town both to give and receive entertainment, and
public festivities were not infrequent, for the people had a sort of
tolerant affection for the king and queen whose gentleness and
helplessness were not without their appeal. When the dauphin was born,
eight years after the accession, the City of Paris gave a dinner at the
Hôtel de Ville in honor of the event. The royal table was laid with
seventy-eight covers and at it the king and his two brothers were the
only men, the remaining seventy-five being the queen, the princesses and
the ladies of the court. As seems frequently to have happened at these
large dinners at the City Hall not everything went smoothly. This time
the trouble arose from the commands of etiquette. The hosts bent their
whole energies upon serving the king promptly. When he had finished his
dinner the guests at the other tables had had nothing but butter and
radishes, yet in spite of their hunger they were forced to rise and
leave when the king rose. As the preparations for the feast are reported
to have been lavishly extravagant it is to be hoped that “the
left-overs” were given to the poor who were pitiably hungry most of the
time in those days.
The public works of Louis’ reign were not many. The unrest of the people
was too evident, the supply of money too small for much to be
accomplished. To the clearing of the bridges which has been mentioned
above was added an effort to bring light and air into at least one
crowded spot on the left bank by tearing down the ancient Petit
Châtelet. A new wall protected several of the outlying suburbs, and was
not pulled down until 1860. At each of its gates was a pavilion, several
of which are still standing, which served as an office for the
collectors of the _octroi_, a tax levied even now upon all food brought
into the city. As anything to do with taxes was obnoxious to the people
this construction has been described as
“_Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant._”
which may be inadequately translated, “The wall walling Paris makes
Paris wail.”
The over-florid architecture of Louis XV’s reign showed signs of
betterment under the younger Louis through the influence of the Greek.
The best and, indeed almost the only remaining examples are the church
of Saint Louis d’Antin which Louis built as a chapel for a Capuchin
convent, and the Odéon, a theater. This building has a dignified
façade, but around the remaining three sides runs an arcade filled with
open-air book shops whose widely varied stock is more picturesque than
appropriately placed. Its actors are the students graduated in the
second rank from the government school of acting. Those of the first
grade make up the company of the Comédie Française whose playhouse
stands in columned ugliness to-day attached to the corner of the Palais
Royal.
The drama always has been fostered in Paris, but up to Molière’s time no
especial provision was made for the presentation of the play from which
the people derived so much pleasure. In early times the performance took
place in the street. In the fifteenth century the clerks attached to the
court held in the palace of the Cité performed farces in the great hall
of the palace, using Louis IX’s huge marble table as a stage. In the
sixteenth century a troupe remodeled for its use a part of the Hôtel of
Burgundy of which a fragment is left in the Tower of John the Fearless.
In the seventeenth century a disused tennis court in the Marais housed a
company of players. Molière and his actors occupied the hall of a
half-ruined residence opposite the eastern end of the Louvre until it
was torn down, when they moved to the Palais Royal.
Street fairs were enormously popular. They
[Illustration: THE ODÉON.]
[Illustration: THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE ABOUT 1785.]
were often conducted by hospitals or religious houses. The best known
are the Fair of Saint Germain and the Fair of Saint Laurent, both the
left and the right banks being served by these two entertainments. There
were side shows and mountebanks of all kinds, and some old verses say
that “as one approaches his ears are as full as bottles with noise.”
In summing up the causes of the Revolution soon to let loose the pent-up
fury of generations of repression, the economic and social reasons are
easily seen. To English minds the only wonder is that the people endured
so long the steady curtailment of opportunity and that they were so long
deluded by the magnificence of royalty. The lower classes were taxed
inordinately, even on necessities. The nobility (of whom there were some
two hundred thousand as against England’s five hundred) and the clergy
were not taxed at all, and when the Minister of Finance suggested to the
assembled Notables, whom Louis was forced to summon, that they should
bear their share of the government support, they resented the idea as
insulting. Not only were the taxes heavy, their collection was farmed
out to tax-gatherers who were permitted to take in lieu of salary as
much more than the original tax as they could squeeze out of their
victims. And, as if this drain, long continued and ever increasing,
were not enough, Louis XV had collected advance taxes.
Politically, the power of the French monarch was practically absolute.
The nobility and clergy almost invariably supported him, voting two to
one against the Third Estate in the States General, and, as this body
had not convened for nearly two hundred years before Louis XVI summoned
it, it hardly could be regarded as a check to absolutism. Trial by jury
had fallen into complete disuse and no man was sure of his personal
liberty or of undisturbed ownership of his property, and, at the same
time, he was denied freedom of belief and of speech.
But independence of belief and of speech was fast increasing, and its
growth is an evidence of the intellectual change which is one of the
causes of the Revolution, less evident but not less powerful than those
which affected the economic, social and political status of Frenchmen.
Paris was the center of this intellectual and literary activity. In
Paris lived or sojourned the men whose advanced thinking was percolating
through all classes of society--Voltaire and Montesquieu, who pleaded
for liberty and a constitutional government, and Rousseau whose appeals
for individual freedom of politics, religion and speech subordinated to
the good of the whole, crystallized in the war cry “Liberty, Equality
and Fraternity” which has become the watchword of modern France. In
Paris, too, were published the famous philosophical and economic
articles of the Encyclopedia, often with difficulty in evading the
police, and often interrupted by the prison visits of its contributors,
Diderot being sent to the Bastille immediately upon the appearance of
the first volume.
Skepticism permeated the upper classes, irreligion the lower.
Paris, indeed, was the very crater of the Revolution. In the scholars’
attics on the left bank argument was growing loud where only whispers
had been heard before; in the crowded tenements of the eastern quarter
around the Saint Antoine Gate, and especially amid the fallen grandeurs
of the once fashionable Marais people were talking now where once they
had hardly dared to think. The mob that was soon to take unspeakable
license in the name of Liberty was watching for an opportunity to test
its strength.
It made its first trial amid the excitements of the election to the
States General which Louis was forced to summon when the Notables failed
to suggest any solution of the country’s problems. It met in the spring
of 1789, the first time in one hundred and seven-five years. Riots were
frequent, prophetic of the struggle with the king which began as soon
as the sitting opened at Versailles. Louis closed the hall to the
assemblage and they met in the tennis court and took the famous oath by
which they bound themselves not to disband until they had prepared a
written constitution. They called themselves the National Constituent
Assembly, the nobility and clergy joined them at the king’s request, and
they voted thereafter not by classes but as individuals.
Some of the Third Estate knew definitely what they wanted. A peasant
declared that he was going to work for the abolition of three
things--pigeons, because they ate the grain; rabbits, because they ate
the sprouting corn; and monks, because they ate the sheaves.
Three weeks after the Oath of the Tennis Court, Desmoulins, a young
journalist, made an inflammatory speech in the garden of the Palais
Royal, declaring that the fact of the king’s surrounding his family with
Swiss soldiers was an introduction of force that made the wise regard
the Bastille as a menace to the city.
The facts seem to be that most of the prisoners were well cared for, so
well fed that Bastille diet was a town joke, and, as a picture by
Fragonard shows, might even entertain their friends.
On July 14, 1789, two days after Desmoulins’ speech, the Parisians
poured against the fortress a horde of citizens armed with weapons
taken from the Hôtel des Invalides. They forced the first drawbridge,
burned the governor’s house and easily compelled his surrender, since
the garrison of which the people declared themselves in terror consisted
only of about eighty men who were but scantily provided with ammunition.
The crowd set free the prisoners, who numbered but a half dozen or so
under Louis’ mild rule, seized the captain and hurried him to the Grève
where they struck off his head and carried it about the city on a
pike--the first of such hideous sights of which the Revolution was to
know an appalling number. The destruction of the huge mass of masonry
was begun the next day and lasted through five years. Lafayette sent one
of the keys to General Washington.
So thoroughly did the Bastille symbolize oppression in the public mind
of France that the anniversary of the day of its fall has been made the
national holiday.
One of the schemes proposed for the decoration of the vacant square was
the erection of an enormous elephant to be made from guns taken in
battle by Napoleon. A plaster model stood in the _place_ for several
years, the same animal which served as a refuge for the street urchin,
Gavroche, in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” After 1830 the present
“July Column” was erected to the memory of the victims of the “Three
Glorious Days” of the Revolution of that year.
Upon hearing of the Fall of the Bastille the king made concessions to
the Assembly and then went to Paris accompanied by a huge and motley
crowd armed with guns and scythes. The mayor went through the ceremony
of presenting him with the keys of the city in token of its loyalty,
while at almost the same time Lafayette was organizing the citizens into
the National Guard, who wore a cockade made up not only of red and blue,
the colors of Paris, but of white, the royal hue.
The nobles, awakened to the danger of a general insurrection, tried to
put a stop to the rioting and incendiarism that was spreading over the
country by offering to yield their privileges. This concession proved
but a sop, for the people’s hunger was now unappeasable. Louis continued
to spend most of his time at Versailles to the dissatisfaction of the
Parisians. When they heard of the expressions of loyalty uttered by the
king’s body-guard at a banquet they voted that the court had no right to
feast while Paris was suffering for bread, marched to Versailles and
forced the king, the queen, and the little dauphin--the baker and his
wife and the baker’s boy, they called them--to go back with them to
town. Marie Antoinette had succeeded in making herself extremely
unpopular, both with the nobility who objected to her independence of
the laws of etiquette to which they were accustomed, and with the
people, who called her the “Austrian Wolf,” and who really believed her
to be sinister and wicked instead of a gay and affectionate young woman,
whose worst fault was thoughtlessness. If she had had before but small
knowledge of the opinion in which she was held by her subjects she
discovered it during this ten-mile drive when her carriage was
surrounded by east-end roughs and disheveled women from the Halles who
had only been deterred from killing her as she stood beside her husband
at Versailles by her display of dauntless courage, and who crowded upon
her now, yelling indecencies and shaking their fists at the king and the
uncomprehending little prince and his sister. This return to Paris was
called the “Joyous Entry.”
Arrived at Paris they went to the Tuileries and passed a sleepless night
in the long-deserted palace which seems to have been despoiled even of
its beds. There they lived for many months, willingly served only by a
few faithful guards and daily insulted by people who came to see the
tyrants and to watch the “Wolf’s Cub” dig in the little fenced enclosure
which he called his garden. The king’s brother and his closest friends
fled from the country, leaving him to face his troubles alone.
The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated upon
the Field of Mars by a great festival. Undeterred by a violent rainstorm
a hundred thousand people passed before an Altar of the Fatherland
erected in the middle, and after taking part in a religious service,
listened to Lafayette, who was the first to swear to uphold the
Constitution, and to Louis, who declared: “_I, King of the French, swear
to use the power which the constitutional act of the State has delegated
to me, for the maintenance of the Constitution decreed by the National
Assembly and accepted by me._”
The Assembly confiscated church property and gave to the state the
control of the clergy. Then it ordered the clergy to take an oath to
support the Constitution. Because this implied an acknowledgment that
the action of the Assembly was justifiable the pope forbade the clergy
to take the oath. At first the king vetoed this bill, called the “Civil
Constitution of the Clergy,” and then he sanctioned it. It was this
vacillation that caused the distribution in Paris of the cartoon of
“King Janus.”
The Assembly worked hard in the old riding school near the Tuileries,
and formulated many political changes which did not live and many civil
improvements which were more enduring. Mirabeau used his strength for
order; but popular clubs, the Jacobins and Cordeliers, which took their
names from the old religious buildings in which they met, were
constantly stirring the fiercest passions of the people, and principles
closely akin to anarchy were taught in the press of Danton and
Desmoulins, sincere believers in revolution.
Despairing of achieving peace from within the king entered into a secret
arrangement with several other European rulers, by which they were to
invade France and subdue his subjects for him, and in June, 1791, he
tried to escape from the country with his family and to join his allies.
They stole forth at night from the Tuileries and managed to leave the
city, but they were recognized and sent back, making their way once more
to the palace through a huge and sullen crowd. The clubs clamored for
the king’s deposition and the people rioted in the Field of Mars against
Lafayette and the mayor of Paris, who dispersed them at the command of
the Assembly.
In the autumn the Assembly finished the preparation of the constitution
and disbanded, to be succeeded at once by the Legislative Assembly,
whose leaders, the Girondins, were antiroyalists, but not active
republicans. War was declared against Austria, but distrust and
discontent led the French army to reverses of which the revolutionary
press made the most.
It happened to be on the anniversary of the flight of the royal family
that the Marais and the Faubourg Saint Antoine again gave up their
hordes, who lashed themselves into fury as they pushed their way through
the chamber where the Assembly was sitting, and then surged on to the
Tuileries. Without doubt their intention was murder, but once more, as
when Marie Antoinette fronted them at Versailles, they stopped abashed
before a calm which they could not understand. Louis donned the scarlet
liberty cap which they handed him, the queen allowed a similar “Phrygian
bonnet” to be put upon the dauphin, and the mob stood appeased and even
admiring. Yet only a few days later Lafayette, the defender of the
Assembly, was forced to flee from the country. The Reign of Terror had
begun.
The threatened approach of the foreign enemy was the signal for a final
attack upon the royal family. Early on one August morning the National
Guard and the Swiss Guards massed themselves about the palace to
withstand the assault of the crowd whose ominous roar was heard growing
momentarily louder as it poured westward under the leadership of a
brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine. The guards gave their life
valiantly, but they were hacked to pieces in the struggle which
Thorwaldsen’s famous Lion commemorates at Lucerne. The victorious rabble
set fire to the palace, which was partly destroyed, and then rushed
before the Assembly, demanding that it dissolve in favor of a National
Convention. In the old riding school the king and queen, their children
and the king’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, took refuge, staying crowded
into a small room while the Assembly discussed the question of what
should be done with them. After three days and nights of extreme
discomfort they were removed to the tower of the ancient Temple.[5]
Paris was the very heart of the Terror. The rabble had learned its power
and unscrupulous leaders permitted brutality and urged violence. A
casual word was enough to cause anybody, man, woman or child, to be
arrested as a suspect and thrown into prison. If he did not die there,
forgotten, he came out only to be taken before a so-called tribunal
which listened to false charges, practically allowed no denial or
protest, declared its victims, in detachments, guilty of “conspiring
against the Republic” and sent them straightway to the guillotine.
This instrument was invented by a physician, Dr. Guillotin, to provide a
humane method of capital punishment. Its victims would feel no pain he
said; only a refreshing coolness! It was set up in various parts of the
city. In the Place Louis XV, then called the Place de la Révolution, the
scaffold was erected near the statue of Liberty to which Mme. Roland
addressed her famous exclamation: “O Liberty, what crimes are committed
in thy name!” Around it gathered a daily crowd, some, the industriously
knitting women described in “A Tale of Two Cities,” who came as to a
vaudeville performance; some, fanatics, equally joyous over the downfall
of hated aristocrats or of plebeian “enemies of the Republic,” others,
monsters who rejoiced in blood, no matter whose. Pitiful, indeed, were
those who came day after day to watch the tumbrils approaching from the
east through the rue Royale from the rue Saint Honoré for some friend
whose appearance here might solve the mystery of an unexplained
disappearance. In a little over two years two thousand and eight hundred
people lost their heads in this place; one thousand three hundred were
slain in six weeks in the Square of the Throne; scores more suffered in
the small square where the Sun King had held his Carrousel, and yet
others in the Grève before the City Hall.
Even such slight semblance of the forms of justice as preceded the ride
to the guillotine was denied to hundreds of people, many of them
innocent of any fault. Almost a thousand of such victims were massacred
in the early days of September following the incarceration of the royal
family. Bands of authorized assassins held pretended court in the
prisons and butchered the helpless prisoners. At the Abbaye, the old
prison of the monastery of Saint Germain-des-Près, the unfortunates were
killed in the square before the church. It was in this prison that Mme.
Roland wrote the “Memoirs” that give us one of the most vivid
contemporary pictures that we have of these awful days. Here, too,
Charlotte Corday spent the days between her murder of Marat and her
passage to the guillotine.
If there is one more moving spot than another in the Paris of to-day it
is the Carmelite Convent near the Palace of the Luxembourg. Behind the
old monastic buildings, almost deserted now, lies one of those
unexpected gardens which make Paris wonderful in surprises. Surrounding
houses shut out the roar from the stone-paved street. In a central pool
a lone duckling, surviving from Easter Day, swims briskly as playful
goldfish nip the webs of his busy feet. It is all as peaceful and as
remote from scenes of either pain or joy as a _château_ garden in the
provinces. Yet here at the garden entrance of the building one hundred
and twenty parish priests were hacked down in cold blood at the command
of a coward who urged on his ruffians through a grated window. The
stains are still red in a tiny room above where the swords of some of
the assassins dripped blood against the plastered wall, and down in the
crypt are piled the skulls of the slaughtered, here crushed by a heavy
blow, there pierced by a bayonet thrust or a pistol bullet.
During this time when the mutual suspicion of the moderate Girondists on
the one hand and of the radical group, Robespierre, Marat and Danton and
their friends, on the other, brought about the arrest of no fewer than
three hundred thousand suspects, all sorts of places were pressed into
service as prisons, even buildings so unsuitable as the College of the
Four Nations (the Institute) and the Palace of the Luxembourg. In the
latter was detained Josephine, who was afterwards to marry Napoleon.
Five months after his capture the king was tried by the Convention,
which had succeeded the Legislature and had formally declared the
Republic, and twenty-four hours after his conviction “Citizen Capet” was
beheaded on the same charge that had brought thousands of his subjects
to the scaffold, that of having “conspired against the Republic.” He
died bravely, his last words silenced by an intentional ruffle of drums.
The queen was removed from the Temple to the Conciergerie where she was
kept in close confinement, never without guards in her room, until she
went through a form of trial which sent her to execution in the October
after Louis’ death. Her courage, so often tested, was superb, and her
composure failed her only when a woman standing on the steps of Saint
Roch to watch the tumbrils pass, spat upon her. Mme. Elizabeth was
guillotined a few days later. The dauphin probably died in the Temple of
ill-treatment, though tales persisted of an escape to the provinces and
even to America. The little princess was the only member of the pathetic
group to live through this time of horror. She married the duke of
Angoulême.
Internal dissensions grew sharper. The extremists made use of the
lawless Paris rabble against the more moderate element and a number of
prominent Girondists were seized and plunged into the Conciergerie only
to leave it to march singing to the guillotine. Marat’s death by the
knife of Charlotte Corday could not stay the turmoil.
There were grades of radicalism even among the extremists. The most
advanced struck at the very basis of social agreement. Religion they
declared out of date and substituted the worship of Reason. The Goddess
of Reason, a dancer, they installed with her satellites in the most
sacred part of Notre Dame, Saint Eustache became the Temple of
Agriculture, Saint Gervais the Temple of Youth, Saint Étienne-du-Mont
the Temple of Filial Piety, Saint Sulpice the Temple of Victory. Other
sacred buildings were put to more practical uses--the Convent of the
Cordeliers became a medical school, the Val-de-Grâce a military
hospital, Saint Séverin a storehouse for powder and saltpeter, Saint
Julien, a storehouse for forage, the Sainte Chapelle a storehouse for
flour.
The observation of Sunday as a day of rest was abolished, and men and
animals died of fatigue. Many churches were closed, for “We want no
other worship than Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” cried the
radicals.
Robespierre of a sudden took a stand against such a display of
irreligion, probably that he might have yet another accusation to bring
against his enemies. To replace the Cult of Reason he established with
grotesque rites a Worship of the Divine Being, acting himself as the
high priest. The ceremony took place in the Tuileries Garden where there
is still standing the stone semicircle built for the occasion.
Robespierre was adorned with a blue velvet coat, a white waistcoat,
yellow breeches and top boots and he carried a symbolic bouquet of
flowers and ears of wheat. After he had made a speech there were games
and the burning of effigies of Atheism, Selfishness and Vice.
Destruction and change reigned. Churches were mutilated if the statue of
some ancient saint wore a crown; the relics of Sainte Geneviève were
burned on the Grève; the Academies were suppressed; no street might be
named after a saint; no aristocrat might keep the _de_ of his name.
The very calendar was altered, the new year beginning on September 22,
1792, which was the first day of the Year I of the Republic.
The division of the year into twelve months was unaltered, but instead
of weeks each month was divided into three decades of ten days each.
This necessitated the addition at the end of the twelfth month of five
extra days so that the new calendar might agree with that used by other
peoples. These days were called by the absurd name, _Sansculottides_.
The months were given names made appropriate by the season or the
customary weather. They were:
October, _Vendémiaire_, “Vintage month”
November, _Brumaire_, “Fog month”
December, _Frimaire_, “Hoar-frost month”
January, _Nivose_, “Snow month”
February, _Pluviose_, “Rain month”
March, _Ventose_, “Wind month”
April, _Germinal_, “Sprout month”
May, _Floréal_, “Flower month”
June, _Prairial_, “Meadow month”
July, _Messidor_, “Harvest month”
August, _Thermidor_, “Heat month”
September, _Fructidor_, “Fruit month.”
On the other hand some excellent constructive work was accomplished by
the foundation of several schools and libraries, of several museums,
among them the Louvre, and of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers,
established in the ancient priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs. Thanks to
the good sense of a private individual many architectural relics of
priceless value were saved from destruction and converted into a museum
in what is now the Palais des Beaux Arts. After the Revolution most of
them were restored whence they had come.
It has been computed that the Revolution cost France 1,002,351 lives. To
make up these figures Robespierre was now killing two hundred people a
week. At last, when he tried to establish his own position with some
show of legality the end of the Terror was in sight. For the moment,
however, it seemed as if there were only increased horror, for the
Parisians took possession of
[Illustration: “THE CONVENTION.” MODEL OF GROUP BY SICARD, TEMPORARILY
PLACED IN THE PANTHEON.]
Robespierre and fought fiercely in his defence against the supporters of
the Convention. It was the Grève, the theater of many wild scenes, which
furnished the battleground. Robespierre and the mob were defeated and
when Robespierre went to the guillotine, with his face, which has been
described as looking like a “cat that had lapped vinegar,” bound up
because of a wound, then the Terror died with him. Thousands of suspects
were released at once from prison, and the city, except for the vicious
element whose worst spirit he incarnated, breathed freely once again.
So strong was the reaction that the royalists hoped for a return of
power, and even marched against the Tuileries where the Convention was
sitting. They were hotly received, however, by the troops of the
Convention, one of whose officers, Bonaparte, killed royalist pretenses
now only to revive imperial aspirations later on.