Daily Life During the French Revolution (10 page)

Most of the time, it was impossible to move heavy loads
conveniently outside the well-paved postal roads, and, according to Adam Smith,
to travel on horseback was difficult. Mules, he thought, were the only
conveyance that could be trusted.

Despite the fact that roads in some places were excellent
by the standards of the day, others, such as the road from Aix to Marseille,
were, in the words of Mary Berry, “abominable”; she wrote, “The narrow wheels
of the loaded charrettes of this country would spoil the best road in a short
time, and the more so from the heavy weights being placed upon two instead of
upon four wheels.”

In 1780, the countess of Carlisle had a similar complaint
when she wrote from Montpellier that after heavy rains she was compelled to
delay her journey to Lyon, maybe for a month, and that the traffic in carts cut
the roads to pieces.

Other travelers, among them Arthur Young, found very little
traffic on the roads; 3 Doctor Charles Burney met not a single carriage, horse,
or foot traveler between St. Omar and Paris the entire day; and the lawyer
Harry Peckman found the road from Chantilly to Calais depressing partly because
it had so little traffic. Some years earlier, the naturalist Thomas Pennant had
spent a night in a wretched inn at Ecouen, fifteen miles from Paris. There were
few people at the inn and even fewer on the road to the capital, where he saw
only one coach.

Variations of coaches included the light, one-horse,
two-wheeled
cabriolet,
with a removable top and room for two passengers,
that was often used as a taxicab in the cities, as was the four-wheeled
fiacre,
with a high chassis for better viewing, glass windows, and room for four
people. The deluxe, four-wheeled
berline,
with good suspension,
comfortable seats, and glass windows, was pulled by six horses and was often
employed for long-distance travel, along with the six-horse
diligence,
a
kind of stagecoach with room for passengers and goods, which traveled at about
six miles per hour.

Some coaches were built for speed with space for
merchandise and dispatches as well as a few passengers. Others were
exceptionally sturdy and built to carry heavy loads of merchandise, such as the
fourgon.
The trip from Calais to Paris by
fourgon
took six days;
by
diligence,
the travel time was two and a half days. How much a person
was willing to spend decided on the manner of travel. The mail coaches, solid
but elegant with a high chassis, windows, was pulled by four to six horses; it
also took people and would make unscheduled stops along the route to pick up or
discharge passengers. Anyone interested in taking a trip could go to the
offices of the conveyer or look through the
divers
announcements in the
newspapers:

NOTICE

Proposed
Voyage Monday, the 7th of this month, at 7.00 P.M. precisely, a superb berline
with 8 new and solid seats, will be leaving Paris. Travellers are invited to
come and see it at the following address: M. Rebut, manufacturer of soft
drinks, rue Saint Denis, at the corner of rue Aux Ours. This berline can
transport all luggage, packages, trunks, effects and other important things as
well as the travellers, at the price set by the National Assembly. It is going
to Angers; the driver will do all that is expected of him to take travellers
who would like to go on to Nantes in a comfortable manner and at the lowest
possible price.

CP 3 May, 1792.

INNS

Tobias George Smollett arrived in Boulogne in June 1763 and
proceeded to Paris on his way to the Mediterranean coast. Frustrated by the
insolence of coachmen, he launched into a diatribe on the inconveniences of the
road, complaining that in France

if
you are retarded by any accident, you cannot in many parts of the kingdom find
a lodging, without perhaps travelling two or three posts farther than you would
choose to go, to the prejudice of your health, and even the hazard of your
life, whereas, on any part of the post-road in England, you will meet with
tolerable accommodation at every stage.

Having crossed France on his way to visit the Pyrenees Mountains
along the Spanish border, with the town of Luchon his ultimate destination,
Arthur Young also compared the lodgings he stayed in with those of England. He
found some French inns better than the English ones in two respects: the food
and drink were superior in France, and the prices cheaper. Otherwise, he
complained:

they
roast every thing to a chip, if they are not cautioned: but they give such a
number and variety of dishes that if you do not like some, there are others to
please your palate. . . . We sometimes have met with bad wine, but upon the
whole, far better than such port as English inns give.

He goes on to say that in the
French inns, there was

no
parlour to eat in; only the room with two, three, or four beds. Apartments
badly fitted up; the walls white-washed; or paper of different sorts in the
same room; or tapestry so old, as to be a fit nidus for moths and spiders; and
the furniture such that an English innkeeper would light his fire with it. For
a table, you have everywhere a board laid on cross bars, which are so
conveniently contrived, as to leave room for your legs only at the end.—Oak
chairs with rush bottoms, and the back universally a direct perpendicular, that
defies all idea of rest after fatigue. Doors give music as well as entrance;
the wind whistles through their chinks; and hinges grate discord. Windows admit
rain as well as light; when shut they are not so easy to open; and when open
not easy to shut.

Other comments include,

Mops,
brooms, and scrubbing-brushes are not in the catalogue of the necessaries of a
French inn. Bells there are none; the
fille
must always be bawled for;
and when she appears, is neither neat well dressed, nor handsome. The kitchen
is black with smoke; the master commonly the cook, and the less you see of the
cooking, the more likely you are to have a stomach to your dinner. . . . Copper
utensils always in great plenty, but not always well tinned. The mistress
rarely classes civility or attention to her guests among the requisites of her
trade.

Young found it awkward to live in his bedroom but observed
that everyone, regardless of rank, did so. The price of the room at Luchon was
about four livres a day; locating a place to stable horses was not always easy,
and, while hay and oats could be found, straw was expensive, and often there
was none at all.

“Horrible holes” was the way Young referred to the public
spa or baths of the town:

the
patients lie up to their chins in hot sulphureous water, which with the beastly
dens they are placed in, one would think sufficient to cause as many distempers
as they cure. They are resorted to for cutaneous eruptions.

This intrepid traveler, leaving Gange on May 30, 1787, and
arriving at Montadier, found it

a
beggarly village, with an auberge that made me almost shrink. Some cut throat
figures were eating black bread, whose visages had so much of the gallies that
I thought I heard their chains rattle. I looked at their legs, and could not
but imagine they had no business to be free. There is a species of countenance
here so horridly bad, that it is impossible to be mistaken in one’s reading.

Alone, and unarmed, Young now wished he had his pistols
with him. The master of the inn, not unlike his guests, procured for him some
wretched bread, but there was no meat, eggs, or vegetables and only abominable
wine. There was no corn, grass, hay, or straw for Young’s mule, so he took a
portion of the large loaf of bread for himself and gave the rest to his
four-footed friend, to the disgust of the innkeeper.

From there Young moved on to Lodève, which he described as
a “dirty, ugly ill-built town, with crooked close streets, but populous, and
very industrious.” Here he found “excellent, light and pleasing white wine.” On
another occasion, he had reason to complain about the inn at St. Geronds (St.
Girons), where the Croix Blanche was, in his words, “the most execrable
receptacle of fifth, vermin, impudence, and imposition that ever exercised the
patience, or wounded the feelings of a traveller. A withered hag, the daemon
[demon] of beastliness, presides there.”

Young tells us that he lay, not rested, in a chamber over a
stable whose odor, entering through the broken floor, was the least offensive
of the perfumes afforded by this hideous place. An English hog would have
turned from this place in disgust. He could get nothing to eat here but two
stale eggs, for which he paid 20 sous. He did find some reasonable inns along
the way, but the bad ones, which were the majority, seemed to stick in his mind
the most. However, on September 22, 1788, Young discovered at Rennes what he
considered to be one of the best hotels in France. He found the quarter of the
Comédie
most agreeable, with streets at right angles and of white stone, where the
Hotel Henri IV contained 60 beds for masters and 25 stables. The rooms were
clean and reasonably priced; for merchants the cost was five livres per diem
for room, dinner, supper, and wine; the charge for a horse was 35 sous.

In August 1789, he was in the Ardèche with the purpose of
examining some volcanos in the region. Making inquiries about hiring a mule and
a guide, he aroused suspicion among the local people. Why would anyone want to
see mountains that did not concern him? He was refused both. A little later, he
received a message from the marquis Deblou, seigneur of the parish, who
cautioned him about taking any excursion away from the main road, as people in
the area were suspicious of him. That night, at eleven o’clock, after he had
fallen asleep, about 20 of the local militia burst into his room armed with
muskets, pikes, and old swords. The commander demanded his passport. They had
decided that he was a pretended Englishman and a spy for the queen and the
count d’Artois, as well as for the count d’Entragues, who owned property in the
area. They insisted he was there to measure the local fields in order to raise
the people’s taxes. With difficulty Young proved to them, through letters and papers,
that he was English and quite harmless. Finally, they bade him good night and
left.

On December 2, 1789, having stopped at Nemours, Young met
the most conniving innkeeper he had yet encountered. Supper consisted of a thin
soup, a partridge, a roasted chicken, a plate of celery, a small cauliflower,
two bottles of poor local wine, and a dessert of two biscuits and four apples.
Including the room and fire, the bill was extortionate at 19 livres, 8 sous. He
complained, but to no avail, and then asked the innkeeper to sign the bill,
which he finally did under protest, writing a false name for both the inn and
for himself. When his ruse was discovered, he ran off and hid until the guest
departed.

Travelers, including Young, generally found good lodging in
the major cities and sometimes on the rural roads, but too often the country
inns were unpleasant even on the main roads. Young describes his experience at
Guingamp, in Brittany, on his way to the naval port at Brest this way: “This
villainous hole, that calls itself the
grand maison,
is the best inn at
a post town on the great road to Brest.” The lack of reasonable inns suggests
that the circulation of people around the country must not have been of great
importance.

CUSTOMS BARRIERS AND OTHER INCONVENIENCES

Not only were foreign travelers inconvenienced by the
numerous custom stops, but also the French businessman, trader, migrant worker,
or tourist had to waste time having bags examined by petty officials or reach
deep into his purse. The country was plagued with such customs barriers, both
official and private, and various fees on persons and goods passing from one
region to another were collected in excise taxes or tariffs. Duties on goods
shipped down the Saône and Rhône Rivers from Franche-Comté to the Mediterranean
were paid at 36 separate customs barriers. The city of Paris was surrounded by
no fewer than 54 customs stations linked by a stone wall. Taxes were levied on
all goods entering the city, and these detested houses were some of the first
places to be attacked as the revolution got under way.

Smollett referred to customs officials as “those vermin who
examine the baggage of travellers in different parts of the kingdom” and
resorted to bribery to expedite his passage. On his arrival at Lyon, he noted,
“at the gate [of the city] of which we were questioned by one of the searchers,
who, being tipped with half a crown, allowed us to proceed without further
inquiry.”

From people passing through Flanders we learn that at
Péronne all persons on the road were thoroughly searched for contraband goods
such as lace, fine linen fabrics, tobacco, and snuff, on which a very high duty
was charged. Lady Mary Coke was many times in France, the latest in the 1770s.
She described the strict custom searches in Calais and at Péronne and added: “I
lay at Peronne in a terrible dirty Inn, & had again the pleasure of having
all the boxes of the inside of my Coach search’d.” Her coach was scrutinized
again at St. Quentin, but, with bribes, travelers could reduce inspectors’
vigilance.