Daily Life During the French Revolution (8 page)

In Paris, an exceptional journeyman printer earned about
680 livres per annum. A journeyman builder made around 472 livres a year if he
managed to work 225 days. In most cases, work was not available every day, or
other matters such as illness might keep workers at home, for which they
received no pay. It has been estimated that journeymen silk workers in Lyon
earned 374 livres a year in 1786; no provision for their lodging and meals was
provided. It has also been reckoned that 435 livres annually was the minimum
needed to maintain a family of four at subsistence level. Near the end of the
eighteenth century, the unskilled worker made about 350 livres a year.

In the manufacture of printed fabrics, wages varied from 40
to 80 sous a day for skilled work, but unskilled workers, usually women, earned
only about 10 sous, about enough for a four-pound loaf of bread. Any surplus
went to rent and supper, if the woman was single, in a cheap cafe.

The time people spent working was long by any standard. An
Englishwoman, Mary Berry, traveled in France from February 1784 to June 1785 24
and left the following account:

Went
in the morning to several manufacturers, to silk mills, and to see cut velvet
wove—the most complicated of all the looms. A weaver working assiduously from 5
in the morning to 9 at night cannot make above half a yard and a quarter a day
of a stuff for which they are paid by the mercers eight livres a yard. A weaver
of brocade gold-stuff, working the same number of hours, cannot make above half
a yard, and the payment uncertain. All these weavers, lodged up in the fourth
and fifth stories of dirty stinking houses, surprised me by the propriety and
civility of their manner, and their readiness to satisfy all our questions.

Young reports a similar situation where a day’s work in
fabrics meant 15 or 16 hours; there was time off for meals.

There were about 2 million domestic servants in France in
1789. They were paid low wages, but room, board, and uniforms were provided.
Before the revolution, male servants in Aix were paid some 90 livres a year,
whereas a woman servant earned only 35 to 50. A male cook made 120 livres per
annum, a female cook half as much. Wages were higher in Paris, where some
40,000 servants worked. Stableboys there could earn anywhere from 120 to 450
livres a year; in provincial cities, however, their income might only be 60 or
70 livres. By 1789, wages had risen about 40 percent for women and only marginally
for men, but the daily wage for an unskilled worker was still little better
than that of a peasant.

UNEMPLOYMENT AND MIGRATORY WORKERS

It was believed by most people that there was always work
for those who wanted it. In the rural areas, work could be found in the fields,
while in the urban environments there were jobs for doormen, street porters,
water carriers, and couriers to pick up and deliver luggage, goods, or letters.
Some institutions that hired men and boys for such tasks included the courts,
the markets, and the prisons. Street sweepers and bootblacks were common, the
latter especially so since animal dung on one’s shoes was a constant nuisance.
All these people, however, were looked upon with suspicion by the police since
they were not property owners. For almost anything unusual, they were likely to
be detained and sometimes exiled from the locality.

It was common for the unemployed to migrate from rural to
urban areas looking for work, and sometimes the movement went the other way
around, but movement from one place to another was also suspect. Itinerant
vendors and tinkers found it advisable to openly display their wares and tools
to avoid police inquiries and made sure they were always able to show where
they got their merchandise. Farm migrants and journeymen on the move needed to
obtain papers from their local authorities to prove they were not vagrants and
to avoid the charge of gens sans aveu, or people for whom no respectable person
would vouch. Incarceration was always a definite prospect if identity papers
were missing. The step from migrant to vagrant or vagabond in the eyes of the
police and the general public was quick and easy; it often led to the next
step, which everyone feared— brigandage. Beggars, often unfit for work, were especially
mistrusted.

AGRICULTURE

Eighteenth-century France was predominantly agricultural,
as the country had been since Roman times. Of the population of about 26
million in the last decades of the century, some 21 million lived by farming.
While about 40 percent of the land was owned by peasants, the great majority of
them possessed fewer than 20 acres, about the size necessary to support a
family. The church, nobles, and rich bourgeoisie owned the remainder.

At the time of the revolution, agriculture accounted for
around three-quarters of the national product. Yet, grain surpluses were slight
and hardly sufficed for feeding the towns and areas of low productivity. The
people of Paris, of course, consumed an enormous amount of grain.

Peasants, seldom fully outright owners of land, had
specific rights on it. While they might pass land on to their offspring, they
owed obligations and dues to the seigneurial lords. The value of these dues had
dropped considerably over the years, and landlords often tried to extract
additional money from the peasants or to reinstitute manorial rights that had
fallen into disuse. Another source of discord was the increasing curtailment of
common land on which the inhabitants of a village could graze their livestock.
As the commons were sold off, peasants had fewer places to feed their animals,
leading to more poverty.

From his harvest the farmer had to deduct the tithe to the
church, royal and seigneurial taxes, enough seed for the following year’s
planting and enough to feed his family until the next harvest. Then, if there
was a surplus, it could be sold at market and the money used to buy supplies
for the farm. The peasant-farmer’s position was always precarious. If bad
weather or other circumstances reduced his harvest by only 12.5 percent and he
was used to having a 25 percent surplus, his surplus, and thus his income,
would be cut in half, since his other obligations had to be filled first. The
impact on the markets and in the cities would also amount to a 50 percent reduction
in the availability of the product.

Many peasants were forced to seek paid but low-wage work
for part of the year on larger, more prosperous farms. When weather or disease
destroyed the crops and animals, people died by the thousands from malnutrition
or outright starvation.

The degree of agricultural growth in the eighteenth century
has been a much-debated subject, but overall it seems that development was slow
and methods outdated up to and beyond the period of the revolution. While more
and more land was cleared for agricultural development, the growing population
boosted consumption but did not provide greater surpluses for the cities and
towns. Cereal accounted for about half the crop, with wheat in the vanguard.

REGIONAL FAIRS

Fairs gave a boost to regional economies and attracted
people from near and far. At one fair in Normandy, French, English, Dutch, and
other merchants showed and sold their wares, endeavoring to open new markets
for their goods. One of the largest of such fairs was at Beaucaire, at the southern
end of the Rhône valley. It was visited by the dowager countess of Carlisle,
who described it in a letter dated July 1779:

The
addition of an hundred thousand people every day has not a little added to the
heat, or rather suffocation, but if afforded me a most agreeable spectacle for
the time, and I am very glad to have seen it. The Rhone covered with vessels;
the bridge with passengers; the vast meadow filled with booths, in the manner
of the race-ground at York; and the inns crowded with merchants and
merchandize, was very entertaining, although it was impossible, after seven in
the morning, to bear the streets. The kind of things the fair produced were not
such as you could have approved of for Lady Carlisle. The only thing I liked
was a set of ornamented perfumed baskets for a toilet, which were indeed very
pretty, but which it would have been impossible for me to have got over [to
England]. The fair, indeed, seems more calculated for merchants than for idle
travelers; no bijouterie, no argenterie, no nick-nacks or china. For about
thirty shillings, however, one can buy a very pretty silk dress, with the
trimmings to it; muslins are also very cheap; painted silks beautiful; and
scents, pommades, and liqueurs, very cheap.

On his way to Nîmes in 1787, Arthur Young remarked on the
fair at Beaucaire. Although he did not attend it, he wrote that the countryside
all around was alive with people and many loaded carts going to or coming from
it. The following day, at Nîmes, he described his hotel as being practically a
fair in itself, with activity from morning till night. From 20 to 40 diners
represented, in his words, the “most motley companies of French, Italians,
Spanish and Germans, with a Greek and [an] Armenian.” Merchants from many places
were represented there, but they were chiefly interested in the raw silk, most
of which was sold out within four days. The fair was still going on in the
summer of 1789 and attracting crowds.

Edward Rigby, a doctor from Norwich, encountered great numbers
of people on the road from Nîmes to Beaucaire on July 28, 1789. In the city,

The
streets were full of people, every house was a shop, and a long quay was
crowded with booths full of different kinds of merchandise. Besides these there
were a number of vessels in the Rhone, lying alongside the quay, full of
articles for sale, and no less crowded with people, access being had to them by
boards laid from one to the other.

FOREIGN TRADE

In lean years of crop-destroying weather, grain was
imported from the eastern Mediterranean through the port of Marseille. The
prosperous city of Nantes was also a thriving seaport, and when Young arrived
there in 1788, he described the commerce:

The
accounts I received here of the trade of the place, made the number of ships in
the sugar trade 120, which import to the amount of about 32 millions; 20 are in
the slave trade; these are by far the greatest articles of their commerce; they
have an export of corn, [grain] which is considerable from the provinces washed
by the Loire.... Wines and brandy are great articles, and manufactures even
from Switzerland, particularly printed linens and cottons, in imitation of
Indian, which the Swiss make cheaper than the French fabrics of the same kind,
yet they are brought quite across France.

He was again impressed by the trade when visiting Le Havre
in 1788. On August 16, he found the city “fuller of motion, life and activity,
than any place I have been in France.” He continued:

There
is not only an immense commerce carried on here, but it is on a rapid increase;
there is no doubt its being the fourth town in France for trade. The harbour is
a forest of masts.... They have some very large merchantmen in the Guinea trade
of 500 or 600 tons but by far their greatest commerce is to the West-India
Sugar Islands.... Situation must of necessity give them a great coasting trade,
for as ships of burthen cannot go up to Rouen, this place is the emporium for
that town, for Paris, and all the navigation of the Seine, which is very great.

A few days later, on August 18, Young was in Honfleur,
seven and a half miles up the Seine from Le Havre on the south bank where the
estuary is still wide enough for large ships. He noted: “Honfleur is a small
town, full of industry, and a bason [sic] full of ships, with some Guineamen
[probably slave ships] as large as Le Havre.”

From records and from observers’ notes, it is clear that
French commerce in foreign trade, employing many thousands of people, was
flourishing up to the time of the revolution. In 1787, 82.8 percent of French
exports went to European countries and the Ottoman Empire, while 57.5 percent
of trade was in the form of imports such as sugar from the West Indies or
spices from the East. The re-export trade of colonial goods also thrived. Of the
9,500 kilograms of coffee that arrived in 1790, 7,940 were exported. Much of
the country’s commercial prosperity rested on the colonial economy, and very
profitable trade was conducted with the French West Indies, especially in
sugar. The cities of Bordeaux, Nantes, and Rouen were the major beneficiaries
of this commerce.

May 1787 brought a blow to French industry in the form of
the Eden Treaty with England, which removed many tariffs and angered French
manufacturers and their workers, since they all knew that they could not
compete in price with English products. Some French entrepreneurs wanted a war
with England to cut off the importation of their goods and to save their own
industries. The major problem was that England was buying very little in the way
of French fabrics, pottery, grains, meat, or anything else, while English goods
flooded into France and were readily sold. Some citizens of Paris held a more
optimistic view that English competition would in the long run improve the
quality of competitive French products and that eventually France would benefit
more than England. The revolution and subsequent war with England ended further
conjecture on the subject.

FISHING

The Loire was famous for salmon and carp, and the Rhine for
perch; but fishermen had to be authorized to fish, even in the Seine. More
lucrative perhaps was open-sea fishing. In 1773, records indicate there were
264 French boats of 25 tons and about 10,000 crewmen. The boats were primarily
cod boats used for fishing on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and in Icelandic
waters. Le Havre and Honfleur were the principal ports that supplied Paris with
cod, while Nantes supplied the Loire region, St. Malo provided Brittany and
Normandy with fish, and Marseille took care of the south. Two fleets went out
each year, the first leaving in January and returning in July and the second
leaving in March, to return in November. The fish was either salted or dried
for preservation. Paris also received cod caught off English coasts by English fishermen
and imported via Dieppe.

For Norman communities, especially St. Malo, cod was the
“beef of the sea,” and the French continued to fish from bases around the Gulf
of St. Lawrence and St. Pierre and Miquelon in spite of growing English
dominance. In northern regions, wet or salted cod was preferred, while the more
thoroughly processed dried cod went to the south. In 1772, the largest
distributor of cod in Europe was the port city of Marseille, which sent the
fish throughout the region and to Spain, Italy, and other Mediterranean
locations.

Besides cod, herring was imported and arrived in the large
cities such as Paris by river and by the chasse-marées who carried them on
horseback from the north coasts to the denizens of the city. They rode all
night, horses weighted down with herring and oysters, so that those who could
afford it could have fresh seafood. Imported herring from countries like
Holland carried very high tariffs, and most people could not pay the price.
Food from the sea was often supplanted inland by local fish from rivers and
streams, sold on the market by licensed fishermen.