Daily Life During the French Revolution (2 page)

Maps;

Physical map of France.

Provinces of prerevolutionary France.

Paris 1789.

Departments of post-revolutionary
France.

1 - THE SETTING

GEOGRAPHY

Mainland
France presents a diverse landscape that stretches for 600 miles from north to
south and for 580 miles east to west, with a total land area of 211,208 square
miles. The plains, the most extensive area of the country, are a projection of
the Great Plain of Europe and consist chiefly of gently undulating lowlands and
the fertile valleys of the rivers Seine, Somme, Loire, and Garonne. The south
central plateau, the Massif Central, is an elevated terrain rising gradually
from the plains on the north and is characterized by volcanic outcroppings and
extinct volcanoes. Farther south lie the Cévennes, a series of highlands rising
from the Mediterranean coast. These regions are separated from the eastern
highlands by the valley of the Rhône River.

Along the entire Spanish border lie the Pyrenees Mountains,
a climatic divide; the French slopes receive abundant rainfall, while the
Spanish side experiences little. They extend from the Bay of Biscay to the
Mediterranean Sea, and some peaks reach heights of more than 10,000 feet. The
north of France borders Luxembourg, Belgium, and the North Sea, and in the
northeast, partly separating Alsace from Lorraine, lies the Vosges mountain
range, running parallel to the Rhine and extending about 120 miles from north
to south. The highest summits rise to about 4,700 feet. The Jura Mountains
straddle the border between France and Switzerland, and, further south, the
French Alps dominate the region from the Rhône to the Italian border. The
highest peak, Mont Blanc, 15,771 feet, is on the Franco-Italian frontier.

PRINCIPAL CITIES AND POPULATIONS

There were about 28 million inhabitants in France in 1789;
today, there are about 60 million. Some three-fourths of the population are
currently classified as urban, but in the eighteenth century the overwhelming
majority were rural and engaged in agriculture. The capital and largest city of
France—Paris—had more than half a million inhabitants at the time of the
revolution. Today, in the Paris metropolitan area, there are well over 10
million.

The second largest city in 1789 was Lyon, with about
140,000 people, followed by Marseille, with 120,000, and Bordeaux, with
109,000. Once independent feudal domains, the regions of France were acquired
throughout the Middle Ages by various French kings, a process that continued
into the eighteenth century. For example, Brittany was incorporated by marriage
to the French crown in 1532, and the duchy of Lorraine was added in 1766. The
papal enclave of the city of Avignon and its surroundings was acquired in 1791.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Before the revolution, French society was organized into
three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the rest of the people. The two
top tiers of society, the First and Second Estates, dominated the Third and
monopolized education, the high posts in church and government, and the upper
echelons of the military. Within these privileged classes, there were wide
differences: wealthy nobles idled away their time at the king’s court at
Versailles, while others were often poor, dwelling in rundown châteaux in the
countryside, living on the fees they collected from the peasants who tilled
their land. Similarly, bishops and abbots, also of noble strain, enjoyed
courtly life, owned land and mansions, and lived well off peasant labor and
royal subsidies. The village priest or curate, on the other hand, was often as
poor as his flock, living beside a village church and surviving on the output
of his small vegetable garden and on local donations.

The upper crust of the Third Estate comprised a broad
spectrum of non-noble but propertied and professional families that today we
refer to as the upper middle class (the bourgeoisie). They were between 2 and 3
million strong and included industrialists, rich merchants, doctors, lawyers,
wealthy farmers, provincial notaries, and other legal officials such as village
court justices. Below them in social status were the artisans and craftsmen,
who had their own hierarchy of masters, journeymen, and apprentices; then came shopkeepers,
tradesmen, and retailers. They, in turn, could look down on the poor day
laborers, impoverished peasants, and, finally, the indigent beggars.

Throughout the history of France, as distinct historical
divisions were brought together under one crown, the king generally accepted
the institutions of each locale, such as local parlements, customs, and laws.
Hence, no commonly recognized law or administrative practices prevailed
throughout the realm, and, with the exception of certain royal edicts, each
area relied on its own local authorities and traditions to maintain order. In
northern France, for example, at least 65 general customs and 300 local ones
were observed. Such laws relating to inheritance, property, taxes, work,
hunting, and a host of trivial matters differed from one district to another,
as did systems for weights and measures, in which even the same terms could
have different meanings depending on where they were used.

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

The backward conditions under which many peasants lived and
toiled and their generally illiterate state were only some of the factors that
made them objects of amusement and jokes in high society. Another was the fact
that many did not speak French in their everyday lives, if at all. On the fairly
densely populated rocky Brittany peninsula, the generally poor native
inhabitants spoke Breton, the Celtic language of their ancestors, who had
arrived there from southwest England in the fifth and sixth centuries. Totally
different from French and Breton, Basque, a language of unknown provenance, was
spoken by the people of the southwest. The Basques occupied the western
Pyrenees Mountains long before Roman times.

Also in the southwest, Gascon, which developed from Latin,
as did French (but which was very different), was spoken in the former Duchy of
Gascony, annexed by France in 1453, while at the eastern end of the Pyrenees,
Catalan, another Romance language, seemingly an early offshoot of Provençal,
was spoken in the villages and on the farms.

Although French derived from Latin, the languages spoken
north and south of the Loire began to diverge, the former influenced by the
speech of early Germanic invaders. Two distinct languages emerged during the
Middle Ages, the
langue d’oïl
of the north and the
langue d’oc
of
the south. (The terms derive from the words for “yes” in each of the languages
at the time.) In the south, Provençal (sometimes referred to as Occitan),
derived from
langue d’oc,
became the language spoken by about one-fourth
of the population of the entire country. Many local dialects developed within
its orbit. One, Franco-Provençal, for example, refers to a distinctive group of
dialects spoken northeast of the Provençal area, extending slightly into
Switzerland and Italy.

By the time of the revolution, the French of
langue d
’
oïl,
with Paris as its social status symbol, was making inroads in the south and
reducing Provençal to the status of a rustic and socially inferior dialect.
Patois, dialects particular to a small region or hamlet, as in the Pyrenees
valleys and other remote places, continued relatively free from Parisian
influence.

In the east, a German dialect persisted in Alsace, a
formerly German-speaking region that came under the sovereignty of France in
1648, and another language, Flemish, related to Dutch, was spoken by a small
population near the Belgian border.

In most villages where French was not the language or where
the inhabitants were illiterate, there was usually a priest with enough
education to read and write when a villager needed someone with these skills.
Visitors to France, although speaking good French, reported many difficulties
with the language. Mrs. Thrale, who spent several months there in 1775 and
visited again in 1786, noted that when peasants in Flanders were addressed,
they did not understand a word of French and that most signs in French had the
Flemish translation as well.