NINE
Mignon, you are going to be a great King. Do not copy me in my love of building or in my love of warfare.
—Louis XIV on his deathbed, August 1715
ON THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV, Mme. de Maintenon withdrew from Versailles, declaring that he had died “like a hero and a saint.” She herself followed four years later. At Versailles the atmosphere of gloom-bound piety lingered on for a while, at least until the new King, Louis XV (1715–74) would be old enough to take over. It was a melancholic place (in many ways it still is), haunted by phantoms and memories:
Round and round the ghosts of beauty glide
Haunting the places where their honour died.1
What glamour was left there had died with the old King. On the accession of the Regent, Philippe Duc d’Orléans, the court—and life itself— moved back to Paris, after an exile of thirty-five years. Once again, it became the true centre and soul of France. The Regent had been living in Richelieu’s Palais-Royal for many a year. It now became his official residence.
Philippe was forty-three, but he looked older. Too many drunken evenings had taken their toll. Under his Regency, and in part in reaction against the rigid etiquette of Mme. de Maintenon’s Versailles, France entered perhaps the most dissolute period of its history. Mme. de Maintenon groaned: “I would prefer not to paint you a picture of our current mores,” as she commented on an orgy. Even the Regent’s mother deplored how “Our state of general debauch is dreadful . . . youths of both sexes . . . conduct themselves like pigs and sows . . . Women . . . particularly those of our highest families . . . are worse than those in houses of ill-repute.” 2 It was also a time of cruelty, where one drunken count could kill peasants for sport the way other men went hunting. Yet Philippe was also a man of great charm, and wit. He was voraciously well read, in literature as in philosophy, and was gifted with a remarkable memory. Though he was rumoured to have seduced his own daughter, to have poisoned the Dauphin, and even the King, he was in fact more compassionate and tolerant than most of his contemporaries. His principal handicap was that the Roi Soleil had permitted him to play no part in public life so he was totally lacking in political experience.
Nevertheless, the man with the daunting task of running the country in the wake of Louis XIV, the third in a line of three consecutive regents of France, proved himself in the arts, soldiery and diplomacy more than just a Rabelaisian profligate. He encouraged Watteau and the melancholy gaiety of the fête galante. He helped bring to an end Louis’ wars that were ruining France; he opened the prisons and liberated the galley slaves—one of the most dreadful abuses left over from the Middle Ages, encouraged by Louis. In his efforts to educate the silent and reserved child-King, Louis XV, he did his best, with a light touch, saying: “But are you not the master? I am here only to explain, propose, receive your orders and execute them.” Philippe could also claim advanced, and—to say the least—venturesome ideas on how to restore the stagnant economy; but here he came unstuck, with disastrous consequences that were to bring revolution closer.
He brought in John Law, an Edinburgh financier (and one of the few anglo-saxons to rate entry in Le Petit Larousse). Law introduced paper money, setting up in 1716 a “General Bank” to discount commercial paper, which in 1718 became the Royal Bank with the state as its sole shareholder. This was followed by an adventurous scheme to settle the wastes of Louisiana (named after Louis XIV; New Orleans was named after the Regent, Philippe). A wave of ill-conceived speculation swiftly spiralled out of control. Greed—or prescience—persuaded the Prince de Conti to arrive with three waggons, demanding gold in exchange for his 14 million shares. Nervous bourgeois speculators followed, swamping the bank with paper money and swiftly cleaning out the reserves; the full vulnerability of “Law’s System” was exposed. By May 1720, an edict had slashed the value of paper shares and notes by half. Commented Saint-Simon: “every rich man thought himself ruined without resource, and every poor man saw himself a beggar.” With the collapse of Law’s empire, the contagion even spread to London, where the “South Sea Bubble” was also shortly to burst.
In scenes not witnessed since the Frondes social discontent transformed into civil disorder, with murders and robberies rampant. In July, Law—recognised by the mob—narrowly escaped being lynched; one woman clutched the bridle of one of his horses, screaming “Bastard, if there were only four other women like me, you would be torn to pieces.”3 At one point, it looked as if the Regent himself was at risk as pamphlets proliferated, shrieking: “Save the King, kill the Tyrant . . .” Punishments were desperately meted out to stem the tide of revolt. The legendary bandit, “Cartouche,” was finally cornered, having terrorised the wealthy quarters of Paris for many months. He was broken on the wheel, facing the dreadful death with remarkable composure, in front of an eager crowd of thousands gathered at the Place de Grève. Able-bodied vagabonds were sent off by the hundreds for transportation to the wilderness and disease-ridden swamps of Louisiana. A talisman of the times, Abbé Prévost’s heroine Manon Lescaut ended up dying in the “burning sands.”
Excoriated as “that miserable Englishman” (unfairly, as of course he was a Scot), Law resigned, retiring to die quietly in Venice nine years later, “a sorry beggar, timidly making excuses.” But Law and his over-optimistic “System” had made the monarchy totter. The bourgeoisie, created and enriched by the Roi Soleil, had been ruined; worse, they had become dangerously disillusioned with the regime. A new and trustworthy Banque de France would not be established for another eighty years, and would need the genius of a Bonaparte. Then in 1723, drained out by his debaucheries and the Law catastrophe, Philippe died—in the arms of a mistress. A grisly story circulated that, at his post-mortem, one of his Great Danes jumped up and ate his heart. Had he lived longer, might Regent Philippe, debauched but enlightened, possibly have made young Louis XV move faster to modernise France?
LOUIS XV was then still an immature child of thirteen. Whereas his illustrious great-grandfather had been hardened by the Frondes, Louis XV was brought up to know only flattery and licentiousness, “a handsome young man, frail and gloomy, with the pretty face of a girl, unfeeling and cold.” He succeeded in being both timid and violent. Where the Roi Soleil sought the spotlight, Louis XV preferred privacy and was rarely seen by the public. Moving back to Versailles after the death of the Regent, he was to find himself, “forever caught in the web spun by his terrible ancestor,”4 and cut off from his people. He found little diversion in literature, music or the arts—until Mme. de Pompadour came along. Nor did he seem to have any particular purpose in life—except the pursuit of pleasure and the maintenance of the status quo created by his great-grandfather. Government had become much more complicated, with ministers grown more independent and administration bogged down by a plethora of intendants across the country. Then, from the 1730s, there was a steady rise in prices to discomfort government.
At first, following Philippe, young Louis turned over the governance of France to Cardinal Fleury, described by the French historian Jules Michelet as “an agreeable nobody.” When Fleury died, aged ninety-eight, in 1743, the King allowed himself—and France—to be ruled by his mistresses. In marriage, he affronted Spain by his change of intent, wedding the daughter of the Polish claimant, Maria Leszczinska. Without ever addressing more than a word or two to her, Louis gave her ten children in ten years. (“Always going to bed, always being brought to bed,” sighed the unhappy Queen.) She bored Louis, and then closed her bedroom door to him when he was only thirty. Possessed of the true Bourbon temperament, he had affairs with four (de Nesle) sisters in a row. When the last of them died—poison was rumoured—Louis, out hunting, picked up a Mlle. Poisson. Of modest birth, but considerable character, she was promoted Marquise de Pompadour. Denigrated by Carlyle as that “highly rouged, unfortunate female of whom it is not proper to speak without necessity,”5 Mlle. Poisson, too, appears to have become frigid after a while, keeping a hold on the King by supplying him with a succession of young girls—including, allegedly, her own daughter. The Parc-aux-Cerfs at Versailles—visited nightly by Louis for assignations arranged by Pompadour—gained an infamous reputation.
Here lies one twenty years a maid, Fifteen a whore, and seven a procuress was the epitaph the pamphleteers gave her when she died, aged forty-three and of natural causes, in 1764.
On account of her interference in high policy, her extravagance and her wanton influence on the King, Pompadour died unmourned, despised by the court as a bourgeoise, hated by the bourgeois of Paris as being in league with the tax-collecting monarchy. Nevertheless, France’s cultural heritage owes more to her than it likes to admit. The Petit Trianon, in Paris the École Militaire and the Place de la Concorde, not to mention Sèvres porcelain, all owe something to Mlle. Poisson. She also bequeathed to the nation the Élysée Palace as a home for future Republican rulers of France. When she died her place was taken by another of low birth, a pretty prostitute called Jeanne Bécu, later Comtesse du Barry. She was, so Louis confided to that great expert on the art of philandery the Duc de Richelieu, “The only woman in France who can make me forget that I am in my sixties.”6
Taking the lead from example at the top, the country’s moral code continued much as it had under the Regency. It was no accident that the age produced both Choderlos de Laclos, author of Liaisons Dangereuses, shocking at the time it was printed, and the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, it seems that the writing of pornography by the aristocracy, particularly in Provence where de Sade hailed from, was a far from uncommon hobby. The King was conspicuously more lenient towards the sexual misdemeanours of noblemen than were the bourgeois parlements. A blind eye was turned to pederasty (still a capital offence) among the-great-and-the-good, while the press was barred from reporting aristocrats’ misdemeanours. This was one good reason why, bar the occasional prison sentence, de Sade managed to emerge unscathed from the dreadful deeds he committed, and not only wrote about. Also, as a dedicated voyeur himself, the King seems to have derived pleasure from the reports on de Sade’s doings from his police chief, Louis Marais. Thus it is hardly surprising that, from mid-century onwards, the French bourgeoisie became progressively enraged by licence allowed the errant nobility. With it, understandably, went a notable decline in the nation’s affection for the monarch; from having been thebien aimé he found himself berated in the underground press as a “vile, imbecilic automaton,” “father of thiefs and harlots.”7 Although his amorous exploits were no more excessive than those of his Bourbon ancestors Henri IV and Louis XIV, because of his ineffectiveness as a ruler they became unpalatable.
There was never to be a Mme. de Maintenon who could bring Louis XV in his maturer years to a sense of gravitas. The surface frivolity of the life and times of Louis XV are reflected in the dramas of Marivaux, perhaps specially trivial when compared with Molière, let alone the tragedies of Racine; while such serious talents as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and the encyclopédistes—illustrious as they were—hardly lent support to a threatened dynasty. Painted by Pompadour’s protégé, Boucher (“His lovers are shepherds, but incapable of watching a flock,” said the critics), life at Versailles grew ever more feckless, pointless and removed from the real world. Indeed, the court there was composed notably of absentee landlords from estates that were falling into rack and ruin. Unlike their English counterparts, they never travelled or made the “grand tour,” so their preoccupations became ever more insular—incestuously French and aristocratic. More than a diversion, at Versailles sex became the principal occupation; it was acceptable that when Princes of the Blood such as the Chartres dined out, they would ask for the use of their hostess’s bed during the course of the meal. In contrast with Empress Maria Theresa’s respected and austere court in Vienna, Louis’ earned its reputation as the most corrupt in Europe—Mme. du Barry the symbol of the completeness of its corruption.
In Paris the tenor of life at court was embodied in the person of the wicked but brilliant Armand, Duc de Richelieu (1696–1788), Marshal of France and grand-nephew of the great cardinal. Adept equally at climbing in and out of bedroom windows, he married three times under three reigns and sired a child (illegitimate) in his eighties. Strolling round the Place Royale, the Duke was given to reminiscing happily that he had slept with the lady of every single household. Aged ninety-two, still en plein vigueur, His Grace chose prudently to die one year before the revolution.
FOR FRANCE, victories on the battlefield exonerate scandals; but Louis XV was a loser. Paying little heed to the last words of his predecessor, Louis likewise impoverished the country by his wars (though he hated battle). Plundering far into the eastern marches of Europe, Louis supported that new upstart, Frederick II (later “the Great”) of Prussia, but then turned against him. France was then roundly defeated by an embattled Frederick at Rossbach, and Prussia gained at France’s expense. Worse still, in the course of the bitter Seven Years’ War (1756–63), France lost her empire in Canada (scathingly written off by Voltaire as “a few acres of snow”), the Mississippi territory and India. Britain gained hers. French historians accept that the Peace of Paris, signed in 1763, was one of the saddest in the nation’s history. About the only territorial acquisition of Louis’ reign was Corsica, where an important protagonist and sometime successor was waiting to be born.
At home, a dispute over regional taxation and the national deficit led Louis to abolish the parlements and establish new courts. Immense opposition was aroused, with many writers joining in; the King was accused of being a tyrant, in violation of the “natural rights” of the citizen. The Paris Parlement called out the mob to attack Louis’ new courts.
BY THE 1750s Louis had already been forced to construct a Route de la Révolte whereby he could travel from Fontainebleau to Versailles, without traversing turbulent Paris. This foolish and costly King survived an assassination attempt by a half-mad serving-man, Robert François Damiens, in 1757. Only Louis appeared to be surprised: “Why try to kill me?” he asked, “I have done no one any harm.” Damiens was put to death as cruelly as Henri IV’s assassin, Ravaillac, a century-and-a-half earlier. His flesh was torn open by giant red-hot pincers and molten lead poured into the wounds, before he was pulled limb from limb by four horses. Even Voltaire approved of the punishment of the failed regicide, and neither torture nor the repugnant “wheel” was to be abolished in Paris until the eve of the revolution—so much for the “Age of Enlightenment.”
In May 1774, regretted by no one and horribly disfigured, Louis was carried off by smallpox at Versailles. His burial was performed in secrecy at Saint-Denis, for fear of the cortège being attacked by angry Parisians. With remarkable similarity to the end of Louis XIV, both the Dauphin and his wife had predeceased the King. So it was Louis’ grandson who inherited, as the nineteen-year-old Louis XVI (1774–92)—as popular as his predecessor had been unpopular, acclaimed with a fervour not seen since the days of Henri IV. Rather pathetically, he proclaimed, “I should like to be loved.” He immediately felt compelled to abandon Louis XV’s ill-conceived courts and reinstate the parlements—a serious admission on the part of the Crown. At least superficially, once again, the barometer looked set fair.
AT LEAST IN ONE RESPECT, eyes were distracted from the bad auguries on the ground to a spectacle in the air, where, in the last days of the ancien régime, was to be pioneered one of the modern world’s greatest inventions: human flight. On 5 June 1783 the Montgolfier brothers sent up their first hot air balloon. They were watched by a huge crowd, including Benjamin Franklin recently arrived in Paris full of scientific knowledge and fresh revolutionary zeal, who was to remark to those doubting the value of balloons his famous: “Of what use is the new-born baby?” The Montgolfier balloon flew for twenty-five minutes at an altitude of 100 metres across an astounded Paris. (One of the two pilots, the intrepid de Rozier, was killed soon after while trying to cross the English Channel—a success that promised a life pension from Louis XVI.)
The city that the pioneering balloonist looked down upon had been changing dramatically since the beginning of the 1760s. Ten thousand new houses were erected, accompanied by an immense amount of demolition—as witness the superb records painted by Hubert Robert (1733–1808), the chronicler supreme of ruins. The old wooden houses encumbering bridges like the Pont Notre-Dame were pulled down. Architecture settled down into the elegant classicism developed under Louis XIV that was being copied throughout Europe. By far the most lasting architectural achievement of the century, bearing the stamp of Pompadour’s influence, was the massive Place Louis XV. The ending of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748 brought little on which France could congratulate herself, but, while in England Handel celebrated it by composing his great Fireworks Music, in Paris the King generously offered a large open site just west of the Tuileries Gardens for a statue in Louis XV’s honour. No sooner was it was erected, showing Louis as a Roman emperor on horseback, than placards were attached to it damning the King’s vices45 and his indifference to the plight of the poor. It was to mark the site of the guillotine that would shortly remove the head of his grandson.
A THICKSET MAN with a puffy face not brimming over with the light of intelligence, and bulging, myopic eyes, Louis XVI comes across now as an honest blockhead. He resembled more the Saxon side of his mother’s family than the Bourbon. (On seeing the unflattering portrait of him by Boze, Winston Churchill was to remark: “Now I understand why there was a French Revolution.”) Louis was pious and chaste— though this gained him little credit from his uncharitable countrymen, whereas Louis XV had been condemned for precisely the opposite. Probably Louis was also partially impotent, his marriage to Marie-Antoinette not being consummated for several years. His Habsburg brother-in-law, Joseph, helpfully suggested “he ought to be whipped, to make him ejaculate, as one whips donkeys.” Unlike his predecessor, Louis was humanitarian by instinct, well meaning but lethargic. But, with a fear of wielding power that perhaps harked back to the humiliations he had suffered as a child at the court of his grandfather, he was indecisive; too indecisive to revive the authority of the monarchy. Louis would estrange public opinion by such gauche moves as banning Voltaire as well as Beaumarchais’ hugely popular Marriage of Figaro.
Justly or unjustly, Marie-Antoinette will always be renowned for her bovine Habsburg extravagance; if she didn’t actually say “let them eat cake,” she might as well have done. Whatever good things she did accomplish, they would unflaggingly be annulled by the Frenchman’s ingrained hatred of the Austrian—dating back to Charles Quint, and beyond. While Louis was generally more intelligent than history allows (foolish, but not stupid, he played a significant part in planning the naval war during the American War of Independence), Marie-Antoinette seems to have suffered more from her lack of formal education—but nor was she innately stupid. At their lavish wedding celebrations in May 1770 at the still incomplete Place Louis XV, a stray rocket ignited a depot of fireworks and in the ensuing fire 133 panicking onlookers were killed in the narrow defile of the Rue Royale. The superstitious populace viewed it as the most sinister of omens. Observing from Berlin, the parsimonious Frederick the Great wrote simply that such festivities must help drive France into financial ruin; seven years later he would predict of Louis XVI, whom he had come to despise and whose predecessor he had roundly defeated in the recent Seven Years’ War, that mismanagement of his finances was such that revolution was inevitable.
Through no fault of hers, in 1785 Marie-Antoinette fell victim to a twenty-first-century-style scam, “The Affair of the Diamond Necklace,” which provided the scurrilous contemporary press with long-running delight. A tale of great complexity, it involved an unscrupulous jeweller, Boehmer, with a ff2 million bijou to market; a crooked countess, Lamotte; a forged letter purporting to bear the Queen’s signature; and a cardinal, Rohan, who found himself under arrest. The only innocent in the whole affair was the unfortunate Queen herself; yet it was the reputation of the poor, unpopular autrichienne (a crude play on words) that was never to recover.
At Versailles, Marie-Antoinette and her ladies cavorted, playing innocently at shepherdesses in her hameau, a phoney peasant hamlet constructed in the park, while real countrymen—even the rural nobility—were struggling against hunger and impoverishment. Nevertheless, as the ancien régime obliviously played out its final days, there were great plans on the drawing board. Paris would be surrounded with a new grand boulevard: there was to be a new Place Royale, all the houses cluttering the Louvre and the Tuileries were to be removed, the number of bridges and public fountains was to be increased, the quays embellished. (Ironically, almost all these projects were later to be carried out after the revolution by Napoleon, or Haussmann.) In power was the most reform-minded, humanitarian government of the century—yet it was to be damned for its intrusiveness. Liberalism had become positively respectable; yet, typically, it would be followed shortly by the introduction of far worse excesses than those which it sought to moderate.
LOOKS AND AUGURIES were against Louis XVI; so too were circumstances. Predominantly Louis was unlucky. Neither Louis XV nor he was an especially malicious king (nor, for that matter, was the last of the Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas II), and in ordinary times Louis XVI (as well as Nicholas II) might well have survived. But these were not ordinary times. Whereas under the first of the Bourbons, Henri IV, absolutism seemed acceptable, under Louis XVI it was intolerable. The times were out of joint for him. In Paris, serious riots in 1725 and 1750, accompanied by lynchings and displays of anti-clericalism, would come to seem like a preamble to 1789. Right from the beginning, Louis’ reign coincided with a prolonged period of economic stagnation. On the other hand, by 1789 there was a widespread belief that a time of prosperity was at hand, coupled to an era of universal felicity. The cost of the American Revolution, supported ardently by men like the young Lafayette, both tallied with the Enlightenment and hit at the traditional foe, England, but it cost more than the country could bear; in addition to the financial burden, the echoes set up by the attractive precedent of overthrowing a monarchy were to return to Versailles—and be reinforced in Paris by such highly articulate Republicans from the New World as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Meanwhile, since the days of the Roi Soleil, the press had grown immeasurably in strength and virulence; between 1745 and 1785 alone the number of periodicals had risen from fifteen to eighty-two. The lifting of censorship, in 1788, created a sense that every citizen had a right to say how the government should operate.
That right was reinforced by the remarkable Encyclopédie and its contributors. Read throughout France (and also immensely profitable), it had a span across all the literate classes which made it a kind of eighteenth-century website, bringing to the widest public the sceptical thinking ofphilosophes such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot. Though as individuals they differed greatly from one another, their net impact shook all the assumptions and beliefs that lay at the foundations of French society. In a direct line from Descartes, the message of the philosophes was based on reason as opposed to faith; thus, by extension, they challenged the existing order and the divine right of kings, as well as providing a fountainhead for anti-clericalism. Though they were wedded to thought rather than action, and none played any part in public affairs, between 1750 and 1770 the influence of Enlightenment reasoning was throughout France profoundly discrediting to the ancien régime in all its facets. Their very volatility, however, made it hard for thephilosophes to be held accountable; and, besides, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were all gone well before the storm—which they had done much to blow up—burst on France.
Another powerful influence, though it is not easy to generalise, was the striking social role of French women before the revolution. From the days of a century previously, when a grande courtesane like Ninon de Lenclos could reject a royal summons to Versailles, the power and position of women of the upper and bourgeois classes had risen inexorably. In no other country was it as great. England’s Joseph Addison was quite shocked to discover that they were “more awaken’d than is consistent either with virtue or discretion,”8 while the Scottish philosopher David Hume was equally shocked to discover how France “gravely exalts those . . . whose inferiority and infirmities are absolutely incurable.”
Among the working-class women of eighteenth-century France, reputation was based by and large on moral “purity.” It was not so among men of the proletariat, nor of women of the upper echelons of society; yet, at both ends of the spectrum, the role of women as “opinion-makers,” indeed as a branch of the media, was not to be underestimated. During the revolution, mégères and tricoteuses like Mme. Defarge were not simply products of the fertile imagination of Charles Dickens. Unsophisticated visitors from the infant United States, like young Gouverneur Morris, would be amazed at the “cut and thrust” of gossip they found in the salons of Mmes. Necker and de Staël—“the upper region of wits and graces,”9 where absolutely nothing was sacred. He was impressed by the fierceness of the women, chiding Louis XVI for his “uncharacteristic chastity,” and by the volatility of their ideals. “A Frenchman,” Morris wrote perceptively, early on in his stay: loves his king as he loves his Mistress to madness, because he thinks it great and noble to be mad. He then abandons both the one and the other most ignobly because he cannot bear the continued Action of the Sentiment he has persuaded himself to feel.
For the past hundred years, ever since the Roi Soleil, the monarchy’s splendid absolutism had entranced, overpowered and provoked the French people, catching them between helpless admiration and despair. Now Louis XVI was to suffer the end of the affair—and the recriminations. One wonders whether a Philippe-Auguste, a Henri IV, a Louis XIV or even a Bonaparte could have averted what befell him. Equally, it is amazing that the “deluge” hadn’t burst on France a hundred years previously. With all the blithe unfairness of which Fate is capable, Louis XVI would pay for the wars and extravagances of both his predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV. So the sombre acceleration of events piled up, hastening the Bourbon caravan towards its final crash.