Daily Life During the French Revolution (20 page)

The best work of the period, far superior to the others,
was
Les Liaisons dangereuses
(1782), written by Pierre-Ambroise-François
Laclos, a French general and writer. Another exception to the run of
undistinguished novels was
Delphine
(1802), written by Madame de Staël;
this work was critically noted as a landmark in the history of the novel. The
Journal
de Paris
stated that the streets of the city were empty the day following
the book’s publication; everyone was indoors reading
Delphine
.

The poetry of the period was dominated by classical
tradition and was generally uninspired. Many poets were alienated by the
revolution. One of the most promising, André Chénier, enthusiastically greeted
the revolution, but when he protested the excesses of the Terror, he was thrown
into Saint Lazare prison. Four months later, in 1794, at age 28, he was condemned
to the guillotine. Other poets, such as Abbé Delille, who among other things
translated Virgil and Milton, left the country and did not return until
Napoleon was in power. Dispirited by their social surroundings, poets spent the
time translating Latin, Greek, and English poetry. The genre was to revive,
however, as outstanding poets such as Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny,
and Victor Hugo appeared after the revolution.

Freedom of the press permitted
news sheets to proliferate.

A newspaper stand during the
revolution.

WRITERS AND GOVERNMENT

Before the mid-1770s, political news could be obtained only
from abroad, from cities like as Geneva, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, and other
places where Huguenots were often responsible for the publications.

Inside France itself, only two journals were officially
licensed: the
Gazette de France
and the
Mercure de France
. Both
were dull and filled with articles and essays on uncontentious events. In 1778,
the
Mercure
was drastically altered; its pages were enlarged and it
began reporting news from European and American capitals, along with reviews of
musical, theatrical, poetic, and literary works, and even puzzles and riddles.
The
Mercure
spread throughout the country from the salons of the aristocracy
to the unpretentious households of the bourgeoisie. On the eve of the
revolution, the
Mercure
was read by people in many regions of the
country, and Paris began to blossom with newspapers—some mocking the censors
with such notices as “printed in Peking.”

Initially, the revolutionaries abandoned all forms of
censorship and control over publications, setting off a veritable explosion of
printed matter. Journalists vied with one another to acquire readers and hold
their attention. Hundreds of broadsheets and newspapers began to appear in the
street stalls, reflecting the spectrum of opinion from the antirevolutionary
Ami
des Apôtres
to the scurrilous, coarse
Ami du Peuple,
published by
Jean-Paul Marat, which encouraged revolutionary violence and advocated the
execution of aristocrats. Marat’s widely circulated paper preached the kind of
justice that only the guillotine could give in order to rid France of so-called
traitors. Using the language of the workers and the streets, Marat aided the
political rise of the sans-culottes. Placards, which were posted and read out
at building sites, markets, and street corners, were illustrated with symbols
of liberty, equality, and justice and supplemented the newspapers for the
illiterate portion of the population. The much-liked, vulgar
Père Duchesne,
was
put out by Jacques-René Hébert after the demise of Marat. Hébert named the
paper after a folk hero and printed anticlerical views. The
Père Duchesne
and
the
Feuille Villageoise
disseminated anti-church dogma and exposed
conspiracies, imaginary or real, against the revolution, mostly in the
countryside.

For leaders of the revolution, writers, pamphleteers, and
journalists were crucial ingredients of inspiration and action, usurping the
church’s former role as the disseminator of values and symbols for the general
society. Writers, confident of their own ability to guide the people along the
true path of regeneration, believed that journalism would spread quickly the
ideas of liberty and democracy while a plodding government lagged far behind.

Many revolutionary leaders had their own publications,
which ranged from cartoons plastered on public walls to highly sophisticated
and elegant journals that sometimes blended political and pornographic
material. The source of the funding for much of this material is now obscure
and its impact indeterminate but clearly powerful. The involvement of the
press, which often created events based on half-truths, vague rumors, and
images of abstract concepts, seems to have been a major revolutionary catalyst.

Not only were religious beliefs attacked by a storm of
intellectual activity, but groups of people became interested in promoting the
ideas of the philosphes and discussing the laws of government and the structure
of the state. New conceptions of government, a willingness to finish with the
institutions of the past, confidence in the promise of the future—all took
possession of French literature and French society.

The newspaper
Révolutions de Paris
, published by
Louis-Marie Prudhomme from July 1789 until February 1794, was one of the most
influential papers, with an estimated 250,000 subscribers. It presented a
factual narrative account of the previous week’s events. Its orientation was
radical but not inflammatory. Prudhomme chose to disband his paper under the
Terror.

The revolutionary government usually conveyed its messages
through public orators, and the press was given freedom never before dreamed
of. However, when Robespierre came to power, the press fell mostly silent except
for its fawning adoration of the regime. The guillotine awaited those who
dissented from the new government’s policies and the dictates of its
controlling Committee of Public Safety.

CARTOONISTS

Political caricaturists and cartoonists of the revolution were
undeterred by tradition. The symbol of the wine press, a potent Christian
image, was used to turn the public against the clergy by the dissemination of
wood carvings and other art forms showing fat priests, whose girth represented
their social and economic privileges, about to be squeezed flat under the press
by partisans.

The common people could readily identify with such
(generally anonymous) drawings, which on one side might show an adult Frenchman
of the old regime—an obese, babyish-looking man with his bonnet and chubby
cheeks, pinwheels in one hand, a puppet in the other—stuffed into a child’s
playpen. His image is in contrast with that presented on the other side—a man
of the new era, a mustachioed militiaman in the uniform of the National Guard with
a battle ax in one hand, a lance in the other.

The artist had to be careful, however. The symbolism and
allegories could be misinterpreted or might offend powerful people. Jean-Louis
Prieur, many of whose drawings recorded revolutionary events, was arrested on
April 1, 1795, and sent to the guillotine on May 7 of the same year for the
trivial offense of drawing the heads of those accused by the Revolutionary
Tribunal (of which he was also a member). The first 69 of 144 engravings
depicting a record of the revolution,
Tableaux historiques de la révolution
française
, were drawn by Prieur. His busts of the duke of Orléans and of
Necker were destroyed.

PORNOGRAPHY AND CENSORSHIP

In the political climate of the 1780s, many clandestine
papers, generally circulated in manuscript form, arose that dealt with gossip,
scandal, the sexual aberrations of the court, and anything that might be dug up
to embarrass the church. Circulated throughout the country, these covert papers
reached their destinations via back roads, rivers, and canal barges, thereby
circumventing the custom houses en route. Most of the major cities were well
supplied with this pernicious literature, and in Paris it was sold on the
streets, in stalls, on the Pont Neuf, even in the lobbies of theaters. Vendors
who specialized in satire, vilification, and violent libel against the queen
seem to have had little fear of retaliation, for they had public opinion behind
them, and city officials were not eager to become a target of the perpetrators.

Pornography was used first to degrade the church and clergy
and later to attack the crown. An avalanche of lurid pamphlets appeared against
Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI that excelled in depravity, their purpose to
deny and discredit the dignity of the victim. Pornography was used as a
deliberate and calculated act in the destruction of the royal family.
Throughout the revolution, the French press pandered to the lowest instincts of
its readers, while ironically extolling the virtues of honor and justice. French
literature sank to depths unknown in Western history, even in the days of
decadent Rome.

Under the Directory, censorship became stringent, more so
when Napoleon rose to power and brought the press under his full control. Paris
had perhaps 70 newspapers around 1799. This number was soon reduced to 13 and
later, by the end of the empire, to 4, which were compelled to follow the
official government line. A department was created to censor letters, books,
and newspapers that was more efficient than similar institutions under the old
regime. After 1800, the most influential publication treating the arts and
sciences was
La Décade,
edited by Pierre-Louis Guinquené. It was careful
not to openly criticize the imperial government and so was tolerated.

In 1805, bulletins were published by the government that
recorded the exploits of Napoleon’s armies. These, along with the Bible, were
found on church lecterns, to be disseminated to the masses by the reinstated
priests. Under Napoleon, the press became the emperor’s servant. It was thought
wise to discontinue the bulletins in 1812, when Napoleon retreated in defeat
from Russia.

7 - FAMILY, FOOD, AND EDUCATION

Family
relationships and educational opportunities were transformed during the
revolution in order to give a measure of equality to those oppressed by
paternalistic and despotic heads of households as well as by a controlling
religious educational system.

THE OLD REGIME

Members
of noble families did not engage in demeaning manual work or serve someone of
inferior rank. Honor for the high-born meant keeping one’s word and paying
one’s debts (usually from gambling) to one’s peers or superiors, although money
owed to subordinates such as shopkeepers was not a matter of concern. Fidelity
to the king, to the family name, and to one’s calling—be it the military or the
church—was what mattered.

Most men, noble or not, thought it reasonable that
marriage, often a union of property and influence, should allow for a mistress,
and it was normal for men of noble birth and money, from the king down, to have
other women. Wealthy bourgeois agreed, as did the men of the lower classes,
although the latter could not afford it. Similar privileges were not extended
to their wives, whose infidelity could cause unwanted gossip and problems with
the inheritance of property if she became pregnant.