Daily Life During the French Revolution (7 page)

In 1789, the service of the public debt alone absorbed 300
million livres a year, or a little more than half the total revenue of the
state. To its creditors, the government owed some 600 million livres, while
many of these creditors were themselves in debt, having borrowed money to
finance the enterprises they took on for the government. The mismanagement of
state finances, which in the past had affected only the crown and its
administration, now began to ruin many private businesses, and, as a result,
merchants, manufacturers, financiers, and businessmen began to demand reform of
the country’s monetary system.

HEAVY INDUSTRY

In spite of economic growth, up to the time of the
revolution industry was still in a rudimentary state. More than half of
production was in textiles; other significant manufactures included metal
working, glass-making, and construction. The process for the extraction of coal
for both home heating and industrial furnaces was still primitive.

Nevertheless, coal production throughout the country
increased, rising from around 60,000 tons in 1700 to 600,000 tons by 1790. The
Anzin coalmines at Valenciennes employed 4,000 workers, who lived in miserable
shacks and in unhealthy conditions and who worked long hours.

Philip Thickness, an English army officer, noted that many
people in France thought coal was not only noxious but even dangerous to burn
and that some servants refused to live with English families that burned it.
The soap factories at Marseille used vast quantities of coal, much of it
brought by ship from Newcastle for its better quality and price. One such
factory employed between 800 and 1,000 people.

By the time of the revolution, heavy industry was also
producing more and more iron, although it did not meet domestic demand. Here,
also, methods of production were outdated.

Another traveler to the area around Valenciennes remarked
about the developing steel industry:

Wood
is almost universally used throughout France for fuel, but in the neighbourhood
of the place coal is found, which they call charbon de terre. They have also some
considerable works, which, upon inquiry, I found were steel ones; the French
are daily gaining ground in the art of tempering this metal, and giving it that
lustre and polish which has been carried to such perfection in this country
[England].

At Montcenis, another foundry visited by Arthur Young cast
and bore cannon on a large scale, using steam engines, forges, and a
horse-drawn railway. On August 3, 1789, he stated that the establishment was
very considerable and employed from 500 to 600 men besides colliers.

Before the revolution, wood was the most important fuel,
although it was rapidly becoming in short supply, which pushed the price up. In
February 1787, an army officer wrote that wood was the most extravagant article
both in Rouen and in Paris. A stick about two feet long and six inches in
diameter, split in half, cost 12 sous. Keeping a moderate fire, the officer
explained, used up 22 of these sticks in one day. Firewood was floated
downstream on the Seine for many miles on rafts to reach Paris. Wading into the
muddy water, men unloaded the precious fuel and carried it ashore on their
backs. It was obvious to many that as the forests declined, the population
increased, and wood prices rose, coal would have to be used more generally for
private use.

LUXURY INDUSTRIES

A number of people found employment in industries whose
products were bought by the wealthy. The famous glassworks at St. Gobain was
seen by Young in October 1787. The works employed some 1,800 men.

He described the procedure: when all was prepared for the
running of the glass, an official entered and bolted the doors, and a man
striking an iron bar on the ground gave the signal for silence. If anyone spoke
thereafter, he was fined. The furnace was then opened and the 18-inch pots containing
the melted glass were extracted. They were placed on a wheelbarrow and taken to
the copper table by two men; a windlass was used to raise the pots and empty
them onto the table. A great copper roller was then slowly pushed along over
the glass, moving on two iron bars, flattening the glass by its weight. The
thickness of the bars determined the thickness of the intended plate glass. The
glass sheet was then pushed forward from the table into the oven that was
heated to receive it for annealing (gradual cooling to prevent cracking). Young
admired the simplicity and dexterity of the process. The abundance of wood for
the fires was the reason the factory was established in the great forest owned
by the duke of Orleans, from whom the company rented space.

Mirrors were made in Paris on the rue St. Antoine and seem
to have delighted many tourists, among whom was Alexander Jardine, who was very
impressed with the process and commented on the superiority of the mirrors,
whose manufacture employed 800 people.

TEXTILES AND OTHER PRODUCTS

The cities of Lyon and Nîmes became major centers of the
silk manufacture in the eighteenth century. John Moore wrote that, after Paris,
Lyon was the most magnificent city in France, enlivened by luxury industries
that made it famous. Visitors or locals there could watch the making of gold
and silver thread for the lace industry or the intricate making of velvet. In
other places of any size, smaller but numerous commercial enterprises seemed to
thrive. Arthur Young mentioned that the town of Montpellier had “narrow,
ill-built, crooked streets, but full of people, and apparently alive with
business; yet there is no considerable manufacture in the place.” Products
included verdigrease (a green or blue pigment), silk handkerchiefs, blankets,
perfumes, and liqueurs.

Most small towns had a few artisans, bakers, shoemakers,
harness makers, wheelwrights, and blacksmiths, but more important for the
locals were rural industries, such as textile manufacture, located throughout
the country, that employed thousands of people, working out of their own homes.
Urban entrepreneurs, resorting to rural production to avoid high wages and the
continuous labor strife in the cities, supplied the materials and yarn to the
private weavers, who were paid by the piece. The cloth was then sent back to
city workshops for finishing. Some of the major linen and woolen centers were
Lille, Reims, Beauvais, and Amiens.

In Châteauroux, Young found some 18 private weavers working
in their own houses, producing cloth that was sold on both the national and the
international markets. Women and children were an essential part of these
cottage industries, and the spread of manufacture to the countryside allowed
many poor peasant farmers with small plots of land to supplement their incomes.
How much improvement was made to their lives is debatable, however. The rural
weavers were generally the poorest in the countryside, more so than the village
blacksmith or baker or the general mass of cultivators.

An anonymous soldier, visiting Rouen in 1787 and walking in
the surrounding countryside, noted women and children at work in the villages
for the local linen factory. The fields were covered with linen of various
colors, and some was twisted around the trees that lined the streets. Every
rivulet turned two or three mills. The women and children all seemed to be
employed, and all were very diligent. He looked into a number of their huts to
see what benefits they derived from the labor and noted that they “were the
picture of misery & famine.”

On the outskirts of many of the older cities, cottage
industries proliferated. For example, in and around Grenoble, 60 master glovers
employed about 6,000 men and women who cut, dressed, and scented hides and then
stitched and embroidered the finished product.

By the eighteenth century, cotton goods were manufactured
in Rouen, where their production increased threefold around the middle of the
century. A factory at Jouy-en-Rosas, near Paris, had 800 workers by the time of
the revolution. Throughout the country, 300 printed cloth manufacturers
employed 25,000 people by 1789.

Arthur Young provided information on the state of French
industry in Beauvais in 1787. He examined a tapestry works, a calico printing
house, and a textile establishment where the primary fabric was wool. The
industry in town and in the adjacent countryside employed 7,000 to 8,000
workers. Using French wool, they made “course stuffs for the clothing of the
country people, for men’s jackets and women’s petticoats. . . . There are also
stocking engines at work.”

He also visited the Normandy cloth factories at Louviers on
October 8, 1788. This was one of the principal cloth manufacturing towns in the
country, and at least one of the mills, according to him, produced the most
beautiful and the finest materials he had ever seen. It came from pure, natural
Peruvian wool, not from sheep (presumably from llamas). Other fabrics, such as
Spanish wool, were spun in the nearby countryside, where a good spinner could
do a pound a day.

Industry in Rouen had a boost from a few capitalists who
imported English equipment and created modern spinning factories. By the end of
the old regime, this city, with a reputation of being the worst-smelling and
most unhealthy town in northern France, was producing woolen hose, hats,
porcelain, paper, refined sugar, glass, soap, copper products, and sulfuric
acid, among other items.

In 1762, a Parisian merchant transferred his gauze factory
from the capital to near Saint-Quentin, no doubt to find a cheaper and less
unruly labor force. Here, 1,000 of his looms turned out mixed silk and cotton
gauze. The manufacture of tapestries at the Gobelins factory attracted
countless visitors, as did the producers of royal porcelain at Sèvres, owned by
the crown. Both drew clients as well as the curious. Thomas Bentley was in
Paris for about three weeks in the summer of 1776, and he left notes in which
he states:

This
manufactory [at Sèvres] was begun and is supported at the expense of the King
in a very magnificent building about 5 miles from Paris, on the left hand side
of the road to Versailles. I have been through the magazines and several of the
workshops, and find a great many fine things and a great many people employed:
about 1 dozen carvers or modellers and near 100 painters, and other workmen of
course in proportion. The workshops are very commodious and well fitted up, and
there are several fine appartments left for his Majesty when he chooses to
visit the manufactory.

By the time of the revolution, France was producing more
porcelain, wine, and brandy than anywhere else. Philip Thickness advised
English travelers that they need go no further south than Lyon, “a rich, noble
and plentiful town, abounding with everything that is good, and more finery
than even in Paris itself.”

Beer was popular in northern Europe, but less so in France.
There was a huge decline in beer drinking between 1750 and 1780, and the number
of brewers in Paris fell from 75 to 23. Production dropped from 75,000 hogheads
(each containing 286 liters) to 26,000. Many brewers turned to producing cider,
which depended on apples, most of which came from Normandy. There was no
improvement in beer production up to the time of the revolution. Wine was the
choice of the people. From 1781 to 1786, total wine consumption in Paris rose
to 730,000 hectoliters (73 million liters), while beer consumption was about
54,000 hectoliters—a 1:13 ratio.

WAGES, CURRENCY, AND COST OF LIVING

In large cities, the majority of manual workers and
artisans were engaged in the food, textile, and construction industries. Such
workers made up about half the population of Paris. About 16 percent of the
inhabitants were in domestic service, and about 8.4 percent were in the king’s
service. A mass of unskilled workers and beggars accounted for somewhere around
25 percent of the population. The census of 1791 recorded 118,784 paupers.

A little prior to the revolution, there was a 65 percent
increase in prices, primarily for food, and above all for bread, which seems to
have made up half the expenses of the average household. This rise in prices
was occurring while the general wage increased only 22 percent. The population
of France increased notably in the eighteenth century, and the resulting
surplus of labor contributed to a reduction in workers’ wages. It has been
estimated that in the 1780s, coalface workers received 20 to 25 sous per
workday, while those who removed the coal from the mine earned between 10 and
20 sous. Both the St. Gobain glassworks in Picardy and the Tubeuf coal-mining
company in Languedoc were among those that used child labor (boys 7 to 12 years
old) for menial jobs such as sweeping out the ashes from the furnaces of the
glassworks or pulling baskets of coal along pathways like donkeys. The pittance
they earned, five or six sous a day, helped in a small way with family
expenses. At the glassworks, unskilled laborers could make up to 20 sous a day,
semiskilled workers up to about 30, and skilled workers up to 60 sous. Often,
entire families had to work to make ends meet, but women were generally paid
about half as much as men.