Daily Life During the French Revolution (43 page)

Anyone who had by speeches, writings, associations and
conduct shown himself or herself hostile to the revolution was considered
suspect and subject to arrest. This standard applied to anyone who appeared to
favor monarchy or federation, as well as to those who were unable to prove
their means of livelihood; those who could not demonstrate that they had
fulfilled their civil duties; and those who had been refused a certificate of
civil loyalty, an official document vouching for the bearer’s civic virtue. The
surveillance committees throughout the country, generally under the guidance of
the Jacobin clubs, were responsible in overseeing the issuance of arrest
warrants signed by six citizens in good standing.

Any public official who had been stripped of his post by
the National Convention, former members of the nobility or clergy who had not
consistently demonstrated devotion to the revolution, and all
émigrés
were
on the list of suspects. A person could be challenged for the most trivial of
reasons, such as addressing someone as
monsieur
instead of “citizen” or
employing the
vous
, the polite form of “you,” instead of the familiar
tu.
A neighbor could report another neighbor for making a derogatory statement
about the government, whether he had done so or not, for reasons of spite or
jealousy, and an arrest warrant would be issued. Under these extreme, harsh
conditions, no one was safe from imprisonment and even death, yet few dared
complain.

POLICING TOWN AND COUNTRY

Police informers and spies attended nearly all political
meetings, watched over the ports, and pretended to be inmates in the prisons in
order to keep an eye on other prisoners. The Committee of General Security gave
the Jacobin government the most effective police service in the history of the country.
The work of the Revolutionary Tribunal was watched over by Fouquier-Tinville,
the public prosecutor, a man totally lacking in compassion. He developed the
technique of condemning prisoners to the guillotine in batches; innocent or
guilty, all stood together in the dock and received the same sentence of death.

The detention centers were suspected bastions of conspiracy
against the government. During the Terror, they were overcrowded, and the
prisoners were in constant danger of
les moutons
(the sheep), that is,
government secret agents who were quick to report anything suspicious. The
sans-culottes never wearied of conjuring up visions of plots hatched in the
prisons.

Executions with drums rolling were a carryover from the old
regime, but what was now different was the revolutionary rhetoric, the
uniforms, and the scale of the executions. In Lyon, for example, Fouché and
Collot d’Herbois, perhaps finding the guillotine too slow, ordered hundreds of
victims to line up before open graves and dispatched them with cannon-shot. Dead
or alive, the bodies were covered over. Carrier, at Nantes, maybe short of
gunpowder, drowned 2,000 prisoners, many of whom were priests, in the Loire
River.

In the vast countryside, policing was less well organized
than in the cities. Unlike in Paris, where the head of the police was a high
government official, in the provincial towns he and his men were only a part of
the municipality and were generally short of money. The national network of
mounted police, the
maréchausée,
a kind of highway patrol, was thinly
spread, and four or five men had to cover hundreds of square miles. A report
shows that, in the 22 years between 1768 and 1790, the
maréchausée
detained
some 230,000 individuals in government workhouses. They were not prepared to
handle mass civil disorder, however. The king could, of course, call upon the
army from the local garrisons to quell disturbances in the countryside, but, as
the government realized, sending troops against the population too often would
only cause lingering resentment and further problems.

Most men and women incarcerated in French prisons before
the revolution were small-time thieves; in many cases, their crimes had been
motivated by desperation. A piece of fruit stolen from the market, some clothes
ripped from a drying line, an armful of firewood taken from its owner, an
attempt at pickpocketing among an urban crowd at a fair or festival were all
offenses that could lead to the whipping post, prison, or even an appointment
with the hangman.

Violent crimes were probably no less frequent but often
were not subject to judicial punishment. Up to and into the period of the
revolution, domestic servants, children, and apprentices could be physically or
mentally punished for any perceived misconduct. Wives were subject to abuse,
verbal or physical, by their husbands, who acted with no fear of legal
retribution.

Among the noble classes, male servants could be sent to
inflict pain, usually by beating someone who might have insulted a member of
the family. The law and the force of arms in the country were on the side of
the seigneur. His right and that of his agents and even his servants to go
around armed rendered the unarmed peasantry impotent. The laws to keep the
peasant disarmed were designed to maintain the power of the nobility, as well
as to protect its hunting monopoly. Before the revolution, there were
occasional sweeps through the countryside by soldiers and mounted police, who
scoured the areas for illegal arms. There were a few places, such as eastern
Languedoc, far from Versailles and Paris, where armed peasants flouted
authority and the seigneurs were the ones reluctant to leave their châteaux.

DAILY LIFE IN PRISON

Under the old regime, most prisons were abominable places.
The poor, especially, could not pay the price to the warders for the few
available luxuries and thus were obliged to sleep on filthy straw mattresses in
rat-infested cells. The threat of disease was always present. As usual,
prisoners with money were treated especially well.

Under the Terror, conditions grew worse because of the
overcrowding. The old-regime prison, the Conciergerie, on the Ile de la Cité
appears to have been one of the worst. Smelling of ordure and disease, plagued
by rats, it was an appalling place where residents slept on the floor in the
same spot where they had to relieve themselves. Those who could afford the
outrageous prices for a bed were more comfortable, and the money was a source of
revenue for the Revolutionary Tribunal, which supplied the beds. Perhaps as bad
as anything was the trauma of waiting each day for the roll call of those
destined to see the public prosecutor, with small chance of being found
innocent, or of those already destined for the guillotine.

There were about 50 prisons in Paris during the Terror,
many of which were converted monasteries, convents, schools, or former
poorhouse prisons such as
Salpêtrière
and
Bicêtre.
Some held only
a score or so of inmates, but others, such as the Conciergerie, held about 600
in 1793.

The former monasteries of Paris that had been transformed
into jails lacked the security found in other institutions built for the
purpose of housing prisoners. The inmates were relatively free to wander around
and socialize with each other. They lacked beds but were allowed to bring their
own. Some brought in entire bedroom suites. Windows without bars and doors
without locks made incarceration more tolerable. Mail and packages were not
censored or even opened, and food could be sent in to be cooked on portable
stoves placed in the corridors for the purpose. Games such as chess and cards
were organized, and there were ballgames in the courtyard. Poets wrote,
painters sketched and applied their brushes. It was not unknown for children to
share a cell with their parents and to keep pets. The previous home of the
Ursine nuns housed the actors of the
Comédie Française
who had been
confined for playing emperors, kings, queens, marquises, and other members of the
aristocracy on stage. The duke of Orléans, while confined in the prison of the
Abbaye,
was able to order in oysters and white wine for his final meal. On one
occasion, the fanatical gatekeeper at
Les Recollets
prison insisted that
the crowns on the heads of the kings and queens in a chess set be broken off
before he would allow the pieces into the prison area.

In some places, men and women were not strictly segregated,
and sexual liaisons were not unusual. If a woman was or became pregnant, she
was allowed, at least, a stay of execution. The Conciergerie prison was the
staging ground for those on their way to meet the prosecutor, as well as the
depository for those already convicted. It was here that the condemned awaited
the tumbrels to take them on their last journey, and it was here that
Marie-Antoinette awaited her appointment with the Revolutionary Tribunal. The
hatred of the high nobility knew no limits. On the same day that the queen
entered the prison, the Commune sent her eight-year-old son a toy guillotine.

VAGABONDS

Many honest citizens believed that jobs were available and
that vaga-bondage was the result of an unwillingness to work. Some thought that
beggars, rural or urban, had neither morals nor religion and were all
potentially thieves and assassins. This belief was tot always unfounded. If
handouts were not forthcoming in a village, derelicts passing through might try
extortion by threatening arson.

Initiatives were put in place in 1768 in which the
maréchausée
were issued new orders to arrest those who had not worked for six months in
a profession or trade and who had no property or position to help them subsist
and no one worthy of trust to vouch for their respectability. Individuals
caught in these circumstances received three years at hard labor or in the
royal galleys, which meant, in effect, imprisonment in a royal naval base,
since men were no longer chained to the oar.

A network of state-controlled institutions,
Dépots de
Mendicité,
was established to house the indigent in each of the 32
prerevolutionary administrative districts. Throughout the years heading into
the revolution, the police continued their policy of detaining socially
marginal people.

Vagabondage often led to brigandage. The Great Fear was
inspired by the threat of hundreds of beggars who banded together in gangs to
raid, loot, and ravish communities. Later, the Revolutionary Army, sent out
from Paris to police the gathering of food for Parisians, gave brigands an
opportunity. The basin around Paris had been the home of robber bands
throughout the eighteenth century. Now they could plunder anonymously wearing
the revolutionary uniform of the army. In October 1793, at Corbeil, a gang of
25 thieves robbed isolated farms at gunpoint.

Brigands on the rampage,
plundering an inn.

ARMY DESERTERS

Bands of brigands were augmented by deserters from the
army. Worn down and disillusioned by long service, many soldiers drifted away
from their units. Some were reintegrated into their home villages, but this was
not possible for everyone under threat of arrest for desertion. For these
people, there was little alternative but to take up a life of crime on the road
that also sometimes had political overtones. Throughout the last decade of the
eighteenth century, individuals and groups created severe local problems by
attacking property and persons. Buildings that held administrative documents
were targets for arsonists seeking to destroy birth records, which were used
for conscription.

Violent crime increased dramatically after 1789. The
near-collapse of public welfare and the many new military deserters, in
conjunction with the thousands of unemployed, greatly inflated the number of
thieves and bandits. Some of these pillaged the state services such as mail
coaches, while others raided granaries to eat or sell the contents. Blackmail
and extortion were common. Farmers and their wives were sometimes tortured by
having their feet roasted over an open fire by thieves trying to force them to
reveal their cache of hidden stores and valuables.

In the west, armed gangs of deserters from the Vendée
gathered. In the southeast, gangs of counterrevolutionary brigands were
reinforced by army deserters. Some of the bands grew quite large, numbering
more than 60 men, and ranged the countryside at will between the Pas-de-Calais
and Belgium.