DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
In France, more conspicuously than in England, kingship broke down in
that century. Louis XV., born in a private station, might have risen to
the ownership of a small livery-stable, in which position his neighbors,
commenting upon his character in the candid manner of French neighbors,
would have epitomized him as a cross, proud pig. Those dull kings who
finished kingship in Europe possessed but one trait which we usually
associate with the kingly character--pride--and this was the single
point of resemblance between Louis XV. and George III. Once in his life,
it is related, Louis XV. uttered a few words with a vivacity approaching
eloquence. "Would you believe," said he to Madame de Pompadour, "that
there is a man in my court who dares to lift his eyes to one of my
daughters?" He was blazing with passion at the thought of such flagrant
impiety.
And was there ever, since sacred childhood first appealed for protection
to the human heart, a child so unhappily placed as that baby king, an
orphan, with a _roue_ for a guardian, a smooth, insinuating priest for
preceptor, and a dissolute court conspiring to corrupt him? The priest,
who represented what then passed for virtue, taught him virtue out of a
dreary catechism, still extant, which never yet elevated or nobly formed
a human soul--a dead, false thing, with scarcely an atom in it of sound
nutrition for heart or mind. But Cardinal Fleury had some success with
his pupil. Thirty years after, when Pompadour was supplying him with
fresh young girls of fourteen and fifteen, bought from their mothers by
her for this purpose, the king's conscience would not permit him to go
to bed until he had knelt down by the side of the timid victim, and
required her to join him in saying the prescribed prayers.
The courtiers were not less successful in their endeavors. At the tender
age of six years they provided for him an entertainment which gave the
old Marquis de Dangeau the idea that they had formed the _purpose_ of
"drying up in him the very source of good feeling." They caused
thousands of sparrows to be let loose in a vast hall, where they gave
the boy the "_divertissement_" of seeing them shoot the birds, and
covering all the floor with bloody, fluttering, crying victims. He
doubtless enjoyed the spectacle, for at sixteen he shot in cold blood a
pointer bred by himself, and accustomed to feed from his hand. So rude
was he at seventeen, the chroniclers tell us, that the courtiers used
all their arts to give him _du gout pour les femmes_, hoping thereby to
render him "more polite and tractable." The precise manner in which a
bevy of illustrious princesses and duchesses sought to _debaucher le
roi_ during one of the royal hunts is detailed in the diaries and
satirized in the epigrams of the time.
The ladies, long frustrated by the "ferocity" of the youth, who cared
only for hunting, succeeded at last, and succeeded with the applause of
all the court. "Every one else has a mistress," remarks Barbier,
advocate and magistrate; "why shouldn't the king?" It was a long reign
of mistresses. Changes of ministry, questions of peace or war,
promotions and appointments of generals and admirals, the arrest of
authors and nobles--all were traceable to the will or caprice of a
mistress. Frederick of Prussia styled Pompadour, Petticoat the Third,
which some one was kind enough to report to her; and when Voltaire, whom
she "protected," conveyed to the Prussian monarch a complimentary
message, he replied, coldly, "I don't know her." Maria Theresa of
Austria, a proud and high-principled lady, stooped to recognize her
existence, and wrote her civil notes. If there is any truth in the
printed gossip of the innermost court circles of that period, it was
this difference in the treatment of the king's mistress which made
France the ally of Austria in the Seven Years' War.
Would the reader like to know how affairs go on in a court governed by a
mistress, then let him ponder this one sample anecdote, related by the
_femme de chambre_ of Madame de Pompadour, showing how she, _femme de
chambre_ as she was, obtained a lieutenant's commission in the army for
one of her relations. She first asked "madame" for the commission; but
as madame was in full intrigue to remove the Minister of War, this
application did not succeed. "Pressed by my family," the _femme de
chambre_ relates, "who could not conceive that, _in the position in
which I was_, it could be difficult for me to procure a trifling
commission for a good soldier, I asked it directly from the minister
himself. He received me coldly, and gave me little hope. On going out,
the Marquis de V---- followed me, and said: 'You desire a commission.
There is one vacant, which has been promised to a _protege_ of mine; but
if you are willing to exchange favors with me, I will yield it to you.
What I desire is to play the part of Exempt de Police in "Tartuffe" the
next time madame gives it in the palace before the king. It is a _role_
of a few lines only. Get madame to assign that part to me, and the
lieutenancy is yours.' I told madame of this. The thing was done. I
obtained my lieutenancy, and the marquis thanked madame for the _role_
as warmly as if she had made him a duke."
Generals were appointed to the command of expeditions for no better
reason than this. That Pompadour drew thirty-six millions of francs from
the "royal treasury," _i. e._, from the earnings of the frugal and
laborious French people, could easily have been borne. It was government
by mistresses and for mistresses, the government of ignorant and idle
caprice, that broke down monarchy in France and set the world on fire.
Of the evils which corrupt rulers bring upon communities, the waste of
the people's money (though that is a great evil in so poor a world as
ours, with such crowds of poor relations and so much to be done) is
among the least. It is the absence of intelligence and public spirit in
the Government that brings on ruin.
"As long as I live," said Louis XV. one day to Madame de Pompadour, "I
shall be the master, to do as I like. But my grandson will have
trouble." Madame was of the same mind, but gave it neater expression:
"After us the deluge."
[Illustration: Assembly of the Notables at Paris, February 22d,
1787.[22]
"Dear objects of my care, I have assembled you to ascertain with
what sauce you want to be eaten."
"But we don't want to be eaten at all."
"You are departing from the question."
[Footnote 22: Champfleury, "Histoire de la Caricature sous la
Republique," etc., p. 5.]]
[Illustration: Mirabeau.[23] (Paris, 1789.)
[Footnote 23: Champfleury, "Histoire de la Caricature sous la
Republique," p. 81.]]
The world is familiar with the tragic incidents of the sudden collapse
of the monarchy. Except during the Reign of Terror, which was short, the
caricaturists, whether with the pen or the pencil, played their usual
part. It was almost impossible to caricature the abuses of the times, so
monstrous was the reality. The "local hits" in Beaumarchais' "Marriage
of Figaro," played with rapturous applause a hundred nights in 1784,
were little more than the truth given with epigrammatic brevity. When
the saucy page, Cherubin, confessed that he had behaved very badly, but
rested his defense upon the fact that he had never been guilty of the
slightest indiscretion in _words_, and so obtained both pardon and
promotion, the audience must have felt the perfect congruity of the
incident with the moral code of the period. In Figaro's famous discourse
on the English _God-dam_ there is, indeed, a touch of caricature: "A
fine language the English; a little of it goes a great way. The English
people, it is true, throw in some other words in the course of
conversation, but it is very easy to see that _God-dam_ is the basis of
their language." When he descants upon politics, he rarely goes beyond
the truth: "Ability advance a man in the Government bureaus! My lord is
laughing at me. Be commonplace and obsequious, and you get every thing."
Figaro gives the whole art of French politics in a few words: "To
pretend you don't know what you do know, and to know what you don't; to
hear what you understand, and not to hear what you don't understand; and
especially to pretend you can do a great deal more than you can; often
to have for a very great secret that there is no secret; to shut
yourself up to mend pens and seem profound, when you are only empty and
hollow; to play well or ill the part of a personage; to spread abroad
spies and pensioned traitors; to melt seals, intercept letters, and try
to ennoble the poverty of the means by the importance of the ends--may I
die if that isn't all there is of politics." It is a good hit of Susan's
when she says that vapors are "a disease of quality," only to be taken
in boudoirs. A poor woman whose cause is coming on at court remarks that
selling judgeships is a great abuse. "You are right," says the dolt of a
magistrate; "we ought to get them for nothing." And how a Paris
audience, in the temper of 1789, must have relished the hits at the
hereditary principle: "It is no matter whence you came; the important
question is, whither are you bound?" "What have you done, my lord, to
merit so many advantages--rank, fortune, place? You took the trouble to
be born, nothing more." We can fancy, too, how such touches as this
might bring down the house: "I was thought of for an office, but
unfortunately I was fit for it. An arithmetician was wanted; a dancer
got it."
All men, as Mr. Carlyle observes, laughed at these jests, and none
louder than the persons satirized--"a gay horse-racing Anglo-maniac
noblesse loudest of all."
The first picture given in these pages relating to the French
Revolution, "The Assembly of the Notables," is one of the most
celebrated caricatures ever produced, and one of the best. Setting aside
one or two of Thackeray's, two or three of Gillray's, and half a dozen
of Mr. Nast's, it would be difficult to find its equal. It may be said,
however, that the force of the satire is wholly in the words, which,
indeed, have since become one of the stock jokes of French Joe Millers.
The picture appeared in 1787, when the deficit in the revenue, after
having widened for many years, had become most alarming, and it was at
length proposed to tax the nobility, clergy, and magistrates, hitherto
exempt from vulgar taxation. But the Assembly of the Notables, which was
chiefly composed of the exempt, preferred to prolong inquiry into the
causes of the deficit, and showed an unconquerable reluctance to impose
a tax upon themselves. It was during this delay, so fatal to the
monarchy, that the caricature appeared. There must have been more than
one version of the work, for the one described by Mr. Carlyle in his
"History of the French Revolution" differs in several particulars from
that which we take from M. Champfleury. Mr. Carlyle says: "A _rustic_ is
represented convoking the poultry of his barn-yard with this opening
address, 'Dear _animals_, I have assembled you to advise me what sauce I
shall dress you with,' to which a _cock_ responding, 'We don't want to
be eaten,' is checked by, 'You wander from the point!'"
The outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 menaced Europe with one of the
greatest of all evils--the premature adoption of liberal institutions.
Forever vain and always fruitful of prodigious evil will be attempts to
found a government by the whole people where the mass of the working
population are grossly ignorant and superstitious. The reason is known
to all who have had an opportunity of closely observing the workings of
such minds. They can only be swayed by arts which honest intelligence
can not use, and therefore they will be usually governed by men who have
an interest in misleading them. Great Britain was nearer a republic than
any other nation in Europe; but England, too, needed another century to
get the tap-room reduced, the people's school developed in every parish,
and the educated class intensely alive to the "folly of heaping
importance upon idiots."
[Illustration: The Dagger Scene in the House of Commons. (Gillray, 1793.)]
Edmund Burke was the man who, more than any other, held England back
from revolution in 1792. Rational appeals to the rational faculty could
not have availed. Appalled at what he saw in France, Burke, after thirty
years' advocacy of liberal principles, and assisting to create a
republic in America, became a fanatic of conservatism, and terrified
England into standing by the monarchy. He was alarmed even at the influx
of Frenchmen into England, flying from _La Lanterne_, and he gave
vehement support to the Alien Act, which authorized the summary
expulsion from the kingdom of foreigners suspected by the Government.
Vehement? Some of his sentences read like lunacy. It was in the course
of this debate that the celebrated dagger scene occurred which Gillray
has satirized in the picture on the following page. A wild tale reached
his ears of the manufacture of daggers at Birmingham for the use of
French Jacobins in England, and one of them was given him as a specimen.
It was an implement of such undecided form that it might have served as
a dagger, a pike-head, or a carving-knife. He dashed it upon the floor
of the House of Commons, almost hitting the foot of an honorable member,
and proceeded to declaim against the unhappy exiles in the highest style
of absurdity. "When they smile," said he, "I see blood trickling down
their faces; I see their insidious purposes; I see that the object of
all their cajoling is blood." A pause ensued after the orator had spoken
a while in this strain. "You have thrown down a knife," said Sheridan;
"where is the fork?" A shout of laughter followed this sally, which
relieved the suppressed feelings of the House, but spoiled the "effect"
of Mr. Burke's performance.
[Illustration: The Zenith of French Glory--A View in Perspective.
(Gillray, London, 1793.)]
[Illustration: The Estates. (Paris, 1789.)]
[Illustration: The New Calvary. (Paris, 1792.)
Louis XVI. crucified by the rebels; Monsieur and the Comte d'Artois
bound by the decrees of the factions; Robespierre, mounted upon the
Constitution, presents the sponge soaked in regicides' gall; the Queen,
overwhelmed with grief, demands speedy vengeance; the Duchess de
Polignac, etc.]
In the French caricatures that have come to us from the period of the
Revolution (many hundreds in number) every phase of the struggle is
exhibited with French _finesse_. There is even an elegance in some of
their Revolutionary caricatures. How exquisite, for example, the picture
which presents the first protest of the Third Estate, its first attempt
to be Something in the nation which it maintained! We see a lofty and
beautiful chariot or car of triumph, in which king, nobleman, and clergy
gracefully ride, drawn by a pair of _doves_. The Third Estate is merely
the beaten road on which the whole structure moves. Nothing could more
elegantly satirize the sentimental stage of the Revolution, when the
accumulated abuses of centuries were all to disappear amidst a
universal effusion of brotherly love, while king, lords, and clergy rode
airily along as before, borne up by a mute, submissive nation! When at
last the Third Estate had become "Something" in the nation, a large
number of sentimental pictures signalized the event. In one we see
priest, noble, and peasant clasped in a fervent embrace, the noble
trampling under foot a sheet of paper upon which is printed "Grandeurs,"
the priest treading upon "Benefices," the peasant upon "Hate." All wear
the tricolor cockade, and underneath is written, "The wish accomplished.
This is as I ever desired it should be." In another picture priest,
noble, and peasant are playing together upon instruments--the priest
upon a serpent-shaped trumpet, the noble upon a pipe, and the peasant
upon the violin--the peasant in the middle, leading the performance, and
exchanging looks of complacent affection with the others.
But even in the moment of triumph the effusion was not universal. There
are always disagreeable people who doubt the duration of a millennium as
soon as it has begun. Caricatures represented the three orders dancing
together. "Will it last? won't it last?" sings a by-stander, using the
refrain of an old song. "It is I who must pay the fiddler," cries the
noble to the priest. From being fraternal, the Third Estate became
patronizing. The three orders sit together in a cafe, and the peasant
says, familiarly, "All right; every man pays his own shot." A picture
entitled "Old Times and the New Time" bore the inscription, "Formerly
the most useful class carried the load, and was trodden under foot.
To-day all share the burden alike." From patronizing and condescending,
the Third Estate, as all the world knows, speedily became aggressive and
arbitrary. "Down with taxes!" appeared on some of the caricatures of
1789, when the public treasury was running dry. An extremely popular
picture, often repeated, exhibits a peasant wearing the costume of all
the orders, with the well-known inscription, so false and so fatal, "A
single One makes the Three." An ignorant family is depicted listening
with gaping eagerness to one who reveals to them that they too are the
order of which they have been hearing such fine things. "_We_ belong to
the Third Estate!" they exclaim, with the triumphant glee of M. Jourdain
when he heard that he had been speaking "prose" all his life without
knowing it.
But peace and plenty did not come to the poor man's cottage, and the
caricaturists began to mock his dream of a better day. We see in one of
the pictures of 1790 a father of a family in chains, with his eyes fixed
in ecstasy upon a beam of light, labeled "Hope." In another, poor Louis
XVI. is styled "The Restorer of Liberty," but underneath we read the sad
question, "_Eh bien_, but when will that put the chicken in the pot?" A
devil entering a hovel is set upon by a peasant, who pummels him with a
stick, while an old man cries out, "Hit him hard, hard, my son; he is an
aristocrat;" and under the whole is written, "Is the devil, then, to be
always at our door?" Again, we have the three orders forging the
constitution with great ardor, the blacksmith holding the book on the
anvil, while the priest and noble swing the sledge-hammer. Under the
picture is the French smith's refrain, "_Tot-tot-tot, Battez chaud,
Tot-tot-tot._" From an abyss a working-man draws a bundle of papers
bearing the words, "The New Constitution, the Desire of the Nation,"
saying, as he does so, "Ah, I shall be well content when I have all
those papers!"
The popular pictures grew ill-tempered as the hopes of the people
declined, and the word _aristocrat_ became synonymous with all that is
most hostile to the happiness of man. A devil attired as a priest,
teaching a school of little aristocrats, extols the massacre of St.
Bartholomew. Citizens and soldiers are in full cry after a many-headed
monster labeled "Aristocracy." An ass presides over a court of justice,
and the picture is inscribed, "The Ass on the Bench; or, the End of Old
Times." The clergy came in for their ample share of ridicule and
vituperation. "What do we want with monks?" exclaimed an orator from the
tribune of the Assembly in 1790. "If you tell me," he continued, "that
it is just to allow pious men the liberty to lead a sedentary, solitary,
or contemplative life, my answer is, that every man can be sedentary,
solitary, or contemplative in his own room." Another speaker said, "If
England to-day is flourishing, she owes it in part to the abolition of
the religious orders." The caricaturists did not delay to aim their
shafts at this new game. We see nuns trying on fashionable head-dresses,
and friars blundering through a military exercise. The spectacle was
exhibited to Europe of a people raging with contemptuous hate of every
thing which had from time immemorial been held in honor.
[Illustration: President of a Revolutionary Committee amusing Himself
with his Art before the Session begins. (Paris, 1793.)]
As time wore on, after every other order in the State had been in turn
the object of special animosity, the royal family, the envied victims of
the old state of things, became the unpitied victims of the new. Until
their ill-starred attempt to escape from France in June, 1792, there
remained some little respect for the king, and some tenderness for his
children. The picture given elsewhere of the crucifixion of the king was
published by his adherents some months before the crisis as figurative
of his sufferings, not as prophetic of his fate. But there was neither
respect nor pity for the unhappy man after his blundering attempt to
leave the country. An explosion of caricature followed. Before that
event satirical pictures had been exposed only in the print-sellers'
windows, but now, as M. Bayer records, "caricatures were sold wherever
any thing was sold." The Jacobin Club, he adds, as often as they had a
point to carry, caused caricatures to be made, which the shop-keepers
found it to their interest to keep for sale.
[Illustration: Rare Animals: or, The Transfer of the Royal Family from
the Tuileries to the Temple. (Champfleury, 1792.)]
A large number of the pictures which appeared during the last months of
the king's life have been preserved. At an earlier stage of the movement
both friends and foes of the monarchy used the satiric pencil, but now
there was none to take the side of this bewildered family, and the
pictures aimed at them were hard and pitiless. The reader has but to
turn to the specimen here given, which was called forth by the transfer
of the royal family from their home in the Tuileries to their prison in
the Temple, to comprehend the spirit of those productions. In others we
find the king represented as a blind man groping his way; as a baby; as
an idiot who breaks his playthings and throws away his crown and
sceptre. The queen excited a deeper feeling. The Parisians of 1792
appear to have had for that most unhappy of women only feelings of
diabolical hate. She called forth all the tiger which, according to
Voltaire, is an ingredient in the French character. The caricaturists
liked to invest her with the qualities and the form of a tigress, living
in a monstrous alliance with a king-ram, and becoming the mother of
monsters. The foolish tale of her saying that she would quench her
thirst with the blood of Frenchmen was treated by the draughtsmen of the
day as though it were an unquestionable fact.
Never was a woman so hated as she was by infuriate Paris in 1792. Never
was womanhood so outraged as in some of the caricatures of that period.
Nothing relating to her had any kind of sacredness. Her ancestors, her
country, her mother, her children, her love for her children, her
attachment to her husband, were all exhibited in the most odious light
as so many additional crimes against liberty. Need it be said that her
person was not spared? The single talent in which the French excel all
the rest of the human family is that of subtly insinuating indecency by
pen and pencil. But they did not employ this talent in the treatment of
Marie Antoinette when she was about to redeem a frivolous life by a
dignified death. With hideous indecency they presented her to the scorn
of the public, as African savages might exhibit the favorite wife of a
hostile chief when they had brought her to their stinking village a
captive, bound, naked, and defiled.
And so passed away forever from the minds of men the sense of the
divinity that once had hedged in a king. But so congenial to minds
immature or unformed is the idea of hereditary chieftainship that to
this day in Europe the semblance of a king seems the easiest resource
against anarchy. Yet kings were put upon their good behavior, to hold
their places until majorities learn to control their propensities and
use their minds.
[Illustration: Aristocrat and Democrat. (Paris, 1793.)
_Aristocrat._ "Take care of your cap."
_Democrat._ "Look out for your queue."]