Daily Life During the French Revolution (35 page)

Bread, the primary ingredient in the sans-culottes’ diet,
was the principal source of nourishment for the poorer classes. The daily
ration of the average adult has been estimated at three pounds, that of a child
one and a half pounds. The sans-culottes demanded that their bread be of the
same quality as that of the rich—made with pure flour. Under the old regime, a
family of four or five would consume about 12 pounds a day at a cost of three
sous a pound. The budget for bread, then, could be as high as 36 sous a day for
a working man who made three livres a day, or about 60 sous. The remainder of
the wage might go to rent and a little wine. The poor sans-culotte would return
home to his attic after a day of backbreaking work, climb the stairs, and enter
his one room to find his children crying or fighting and his wife perhaps
pregnant and exhausted. He would sit down at a rickety table on a half-broken
chair and eat his dinner of stale bread moistened by a little red wine before
dropping onto a dirty cot, pulling a torn blanket over him. Often not even a
newspaper could relieve his or his wife’s ennui because neither of them could
read.

Knowledge of the events of the day and of the revolution in
general was gained at work sites or in city squares and, in small towns, by
means of public readers who expounded on the events described in the newspapers
to an audience of workmen gathered around for the occasion. In this way people
learned something of the words of Rousseau and the philosophers and were
inspired by the new ideas of liberty, justice, and equality. The newspapers
were purchased with individual donations of the workers. For the man or woman
who could read, there were ample posters, placards, and news sheets, as well as
newspapers, to keep them informed. The patriotic papers of the popular
societies were also read in the evenings.

Angered by their poverty and by their concomitant hatred of
wealth, the sans-culottes insisted that it was the duty of the revolutionary
government to guarantee them the right to a decent existence. They demanded an
immediate increase in wages, along with fixed prices, and an end to food
shortages. Further, they demanded that hoarders be punished and, most important,
that the existence of counterrevolutionaries be dealt with. In terms of social
ideals, the sans-culottes wanted laws to prevent extremes of both wealth and
property. They favored a democratic republic in which the voice of the common
man could be heard. Their ideology was not unlike that of Thomas Paine, the
English-American radical who argued that the best form of government was the
one that governed least. During the revolution, they were represented by Père
Duchesne, an artisan and family man of the people whose name Hébert took for
the name of his radical, generally vulgar, newspaper.

A sans-culotte as seen by other
sans-culottes.

A sans-culotte as seen by the
English, along with comments such as “long live the guillotine!”

12 - RURAL LIFE

Up
to the time of the revolution, agriculture provided some three-quarters of
France’s gross national product. Only about a million inhabitants lived in the
large cities, and another 2 million populated the smaller towns. The remaining
23 million or so lived in the countryside, either on farmsteads or in small
villages and hamlets around which they worked the land.

With no political power, the peasants were nevertheless
heavily burdened by taxes—on income for the king (
taille
), on land and
on their crops for the lord of the manor, and, through the
dîme
, for the
church. In addition, there were taxes on wine, cider, tobacco, and salt. If a
peasant sold a piece of land, he paid a sales tax. He also had to provide free
labor about 10 days a year for the crown, a system known as the
corvée
.
He was forbidden to kill any game animals, such as deer, boar, rabbits, and
birds, even as they ate the crops and his family was starving. When his sons
reached manhood and were needed on the farm, he could expect to see them forced
into the army. Sometimes, desperation led to protests and violence.

Taxes had always imposed a hardship on the peasants, but
toward the end of the eighteenth century peasants’ growing resentment began to
be aimed at the seigneurs, who often left the land in the hands of an agent
while they lived in town. Frequently, peasants did not know their lord
personally. Seigneuries could also be bought and sold, and wealthy bourgeois
sometimes purchased them, being more interested in making the maximum profit
possible than in honoring traditional obligations. Such changes were always a
problem for the peasant, who then had to adjust to new ways and to new lords
who, too often, raised the rents.

Relief from pressing duties and from taxes to pay for wars
and courtly extravagance was the hope of every peasant. It was no secret that
elegant and costly entertainment at Versailles filled the frivolous lives of
the king’s pleasure-loving courtiers while the peasants toiled from dawn to
dusk in all weather to pay for it.

Visiting France not long before the revolution, Arthur
Young noted that, in Salogne, “the fields are scenes of pitiable management, as
the houses are of misery”; in Brittany, “the country has a savage aspect,
husbandry not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons,
. . . the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg,
one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows,
and a pavement so broken, as to impede all passengers.” From Montauban he
wrote, “one third of what I have seen of this province seems uncultivated, and
nearly all of it in misery.” He thus described the condition of a large part of
the French people and their deplorable lot, which he justly attributed to bad
government and feudal exactions; he found only privilege and poverty.

In the same vein, the Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand wrote that
the people of the Auvergne were in terrible misery, living without furniture or
any comforts and facing taxes so heavy that they could hardly feed their
families.

To survive, much of the rural population undertook
nonagricultural work when time permitted. While nearly half the land was owned
by peasants (with certain restrictions), the land itself usually amounted to a
small patch whose yield was barely big enough to feed the family. In the
vicinity around Orléans, for example, some 80 percent of the peasants owned
less than four hectares, and around Limoges about 60 percent owned and
cultivated less than two hectares. In winter, many went to the towns and cities
in search of any kind of work to help sustain their families. Similar
circumstances occurred in most regions of the country. The most fortunate
peasants could find some kind of industrial work near home. By the end of the
eighteenth century, textile manufacture for export had grown considerably; in
Flanders, there was a long tradition of woolen manufacture, and, in southern
Anjou, there was a center for the textile industries. In these and other
places, peasants could find extra work.

Land use differed considerably from region to region. The
Paris basin, the
pays de grand culture
, had a zone of about 100
kilometers extending out from the city of large farms where high-quality grain
was grown for the city bread consumers. These farms generally belonged to
absentee landlords who rented them to farmers. They in turn hired landless
laborers, who made up the majority of the rural population, to work them.
Interspersed in this area, also within a day’s travel from the city, were
patches that grew fresh produce for the Parisian markets. Along the sides of
valleys, there were vines growing on numerous small holdings whose proprietors,
like the landless workers, were forced to buy their food from markets or farms.
North of Paris, in the region of Beauvais, peasants cultivated small holdings
of rye and oats for their own consumption and supplied cheese, hemp, flax,
pigs, and cattle for the markets.

In the Cévennes, north of Nîmes, another kind of
agriculture was practiced. Here, groves of mulberry trees produced the leaves
that fed the farmed silk worms. Thousands of families reared these worms,
unwinding the silk from their cocoons. This job was generally done by young
women, who worked with their hands in the scalding water needed to soften the
silk.

Ancillary jobs associated with silk included mining coal
from shallow pits to provide the fuel to heat the water. Wagon-men hauled the
coal from the open mines to its place of use. Coal was also delivered to nearby
lowland towns; on the return journey, the same horse-drawn wagons carried wheat
to the hills to feed the silk-producing inhabitants.

The seigneurial regime of France had been steadily eroding,
and, by 1789, only relics of it remained in existence. In most areas, the lords
had become landlords, and the relationship of lord to tenant resembled a
business transaction involving rent, a share of the harvest, and fees for
transfer of property, rather than feudal obligations.

In some outlying regions, remnants of the feudal system
still applied, however. In Burgundy, for example, the villages had the
obligation to give the tongue of every ox slaughtered to the lord of the manor
for his table. In the Vosges, the bull’s testicles had to be handed over. The
concept of
mainmorte
, which required that a peasant obtain permission
from his lord to sell his land or bequeath it to anyone but a direct relative
who had lived on the land with him, was still alive in some regions.