NEWSDEALER. PORTION OF THE L'ALMANACH NATIONALNEWSDEALER. PORTION OF THE "L'ALMANACH NATIONAL" OF 1791. Re-engraved by Pannemaker, after the original by Debucourt.
"Thehubainsexhibited a certificate setting forth that, having been bitten by a mad dog, they had been cured by the intercession of Saint-Hubert.
"Thesaboleuxwere false epileptics who were enabled to simulate convulsions by means of a piece of soap placed between their lips, which made a froth.
"Thecoquillardsrepresented pilgrims returning from Saint-Jacques or some other pilgrim shrine.
"Thecourtaux de boutange, beggars in winter, shivered with cold under their rags.
"Thedrilles, ornarquois, begged in military uniform, and said that they had received wounds which prevented them from working.
"The total number of these wretches had become so great, and their depredations in the city were so frequent, that it was resolved to use vigorous measures; in 1656, a veritable army of archers and of officers invaded the Cour des Miracles under the lead of several commissioners. The beggars and the truands endeavored to make their escape, but the quarter was surrounded.
"Thieves, beggars, and vagabonds were all arrested; then a selection was made; some were released, and the others remained in prison or were sent to the hospitals....
"But under François I, and especially at the period when the chevalier king was expiating at Madrid the loss of the battle of Pavia, the Cour des Miracles was in all its splendor, and those who inhabited it were a sufficiently lively cause of anxiety to theprévôtof the merchants and to the bishop-governor.
"On the 22d of May, 1525, the Assemblée des Vingt adopted a resolution to arrest a certain number of fraudulent beggars who were strongly suspected of being marauders of the worst kind, but, having been notified in time, they decamped.... The enterprises of the vagabonds, the thieves, and themauvais garçonsbecame more and more audacious; they had for chiefs three bandits, Esclaireau, Barbiton, and Jean de Mets, who spread such terror that the archers who were sent against them preferred to advise them to fly, through fear of being killed by them; however, the salt barges having been robbed on the 7th of June, near the Célestins, theprévôtof the merchants sent the night-watch against them; they defended themselves with arquebuses, drove the watch back as far as the Port Saint-Landry, and all but killed theprévôt.
"On the 14th, a troop of these rogues traversed the city, crying: 'Vive Bourgogne! À sac! à sac!'
"Immediately the watch turned out, there was a fight, and some thirty men were killed or wounded on both sides. Presently, the disbanded soldiers and theroutiers, coming from no one knew where, joined forces with the truands and spread terror among the inhabitants. One of the officers of the quarters, charged to take proceedings against them, asserted that there were eighty of them who frequented the hostelry de la Coquille, situated in the Rue Saint-Martin, and that there was a still greater number in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. Every one was quite convinced that these were soldiers who had not been paid their hire, and it was resolved that some sixty persons, honorable and of divers conditions (one of them was a president of the court), with twenty sergeants, should be sent against them, to seize all these adventurers and bring them to justice.
CAPTURE OF THE BASTILLE, JULY 14, 1789.CAPTURE OF THE BASTILLE, JULY 14, 1789.
"This was a mission sufficiently disagreeable to fulfil, and one which was not exempt from danger; the vagabonds, forewarned, joined the Italian and Corsican bands commanded by the Comte de Belle Joyeuse, who had been authorized by the regent 'to live upon the people,' and who gave themselves up to all the excesses which were compatible with such an authorization, quite in consonance with the manners of the times; when it was desired to raise soldiers for a campaign and there was no money with which to pay them, they were permitted to live upon the people, that is to say, to exact from the unhappy inhabitants of the town or the country whatever they pleased, to ransom them, to rob them, to pillage them, free to beat them unmercifully or to spit them like chickens, if they took it into their heads to complain. This was what was called the necessities of the troops.
"Presently, these adventurers, French or foreign, formed an effective force of four thousand men.
"If one imagine these four thousand armed bandits falling unexpectedly upon the inhabitants of Saint-Cloud, of Sèvres, of Montreuil, ravaging, destroying, robbing all, ransoming the nuns of Longchamps, threatening to pillage Le Landit, it can readily be believed that the merchants were so uneasy that they hastened to place their goods upon carts and to flee with them.
"There was certainly sufficient here to frighten the Parisians...."
All this took place in a period of general prosperity, of unexampled ease and comfort compared with what had gone before. "Bodin assures us," says Duruy, "that, from 1516 to 1560, there was more gold in France than had ever been collected there before in two hundred years. 'The bourgeois,' as the Venetian ambassador so well said, 'have become the masters of wealth.' Ango had amassed, like Jacques Cœur in another century, the fortune of a prince," And this was in full Renaissance. "It is the radiant awakening of human reason, the spring-time of the mind. After a long and rude winter, now behold the earth reanimating under the sunshine of the new birth! A generous sap circulates in her bosom; she adorns herself with a vegetation capricious, yet fruitful, which re-covers and conceals the old soil, while sustaining itself by it, like those vigorous plants which, born at the foot of an antique oak, embrace it and kill it in the clasp of their younger tendrils. Everything is renewed, art, science, philosophy; and the world, arrested for two centuries in the lower levels which it had found at the end of its passage through the Middle Ages, resumed its progress that it might mount into the light and the purer air. 'Oh! age!' exclaims Ulrich von Hutten, 'letters flourish, minds awaken;—it is a joy to live!' Even the least philosophical experience the sentiment of this renaissance of the mind. 'The world laughs at the world,' said Marot;—'therefore is it in its youth!'"
The question of the social evil had been taken up in this city as early as the time of Charlemagne. That great lawmaker had endeavored to banish from his capital all public women, but they defied even his imperial authority. He ordained that they should be punished with the lash, and that all those who had lodged them, or had been found in their company, should carry them around their necks to the place of execution. But the number of these whippings, and of these singular processions, was so great that a policy of toleration was, perforce, substituted. Philippe-Auguste also undertook to regulate this disorder, as the number was constantly increasing of thesefemmes amoureuses, orfilles folles, as they were called; they were grouped in a corporation, honored with a special tax, and with special judges to consider their delinquencies; they were given the liberty of certain streets, the names of which have been preserved, in each of which they were furnished with a building (clapier, a sort of hutch, or retreat), which they were to keep clean and "render agreeable and comfortable." Here they were to confine themselves from ten o'clock in the morning till curfew—six o'clock in the evening in winter, and between eight and nine in summer, and nowhere else whatever. Every year they walked in solemn procession on the day of Saint Mary Magdalen. "Those of them who followed the Court were obliged during the month of May to furnish the bed of theroi des ribauds."
THE CRYING EVIL.THE CRYING EVIL. WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE CARRYING THE CHURCH AND THE STATE.Reproduction of one of many contemporary engravings issued to excite the people against the clergy and nobility.
This functionary had been established by Philippe-Auguste for the double purpose of policing these offenders, and of forming a body-guard of resolute men for the monarch himself. "The ribauds were armed with maces, and watched night and day over the person of the king, who feared the assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain and the bravoes of Richard of England. Theroi des ribaudswas an important personage, in the enjoyment of very considerable prerogatives and privileges. He mounted guard at the sovereign's door, and saw that no one entered without authority. He was the judge for crimes committed within the enclosure of the royal residence, and carried out himself the sentences which he pronounced; he was thus at once judge and executioner. We find him in the exercise of his office as late as the fifteenth century."
Under Saint Louis, there was further legislation against these women,les ribaudes, and renewal of the edicts forbidding any citizen to let his house to them under penalty of confiscation. Thus early do we find in use one of the least ineffective of modern measures for correcting this evil. This king, who had a weakness for cruel and excessive punishments, notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) his sanctity, also commanded that these disturbers of public morals should be stripped of all their property, wherever found, and imprisoned at hard labor. This being found impracticable, he modified his ordinance, and directed that they should be restricted to certain streets, that they should not be allowed to wear embroideries, or silver or other ornaments appertaining to honest women. Three of these streets being in turn denied them under Charles VI, in 1387, the proprietors appealed to Parliament, which by a decree restored to them the Rue de Baillehoé. In 1367, in 1379, in 1386, and in 1395, there were further ordinances forbidding them numerous other streets; in 1446, the week before Ascension, proclamation was made by the public crier of the furs, silver girdles, reversed collars, and other articles of feminine adornment which were forbidden them. There were at this date between five and six thousand of them in Paris, and all classes of society, ecclesiastics, monks, magistrates, openly paraded their immoral mode of life. The very churches and bath-houses were used as rendezvous. Henry VI, King of England and France, had, in 1424, forbidden the sergeants and the archers of the municipality to confiscate to their own use the girdles, jewelry, or vestments of thefillettes et femmes amoureuses ou dissolues, but this regulation seems to have been no better enforced than all the others.
Under Louis XI, we find the same bold Cordelier, Olivier Maillard, who had not hesitated to preach against the king himself, denouncing all the sins of the Parisians at once from his pulpit. He reproached them with their games of chance, their playing cards, their taking the name of God in vain in their oaths, their turning their houses into dens of prostitution, their selling their daughters to the seigneurs; he accused their wives of deceiving their husbands for the sake of fine gowns, embroidered and furred. "Is it not true, mesdemoiselles," he cried, "that there are to be found among you, here in Paris, more debauched women than honest women? Is it not fine to see the wife of an advocate who has bought his office, and who has not ten francs of income, dress herself like a princess, display the gold on her neck, on her head, on her girdle? She is dressed according to her station in life, she says. Let her go to all the devils, she and her station! And you, Monsieur Jacques, you give her absolution? Doubtless she will say: 'It is not my husband who has given me such fine clothes, but I have earned them with the labor of my body!' To thirty thousand devils with such labor!"
In the following reign, the Court and Parliament took extraordinary measures to prevent the spread of the contagious disease which was calledle mal de Naples, because it was said to have been first brought into France by the soldiers of Charles VIII on their return from the Italian campaigns. This statement, however, is very doubtful. An ordinance was drawn up, with the approval of theprévôtsof Paris, the merchants and theéchevins, by which all those affected with this malady, and having no regular residence in the city, were directed to leave it within twenty-four hours under penalty of the halter, and in order to facilitate their return to their own homes, they were directed to rendezvous at the Portes Saint-Denis or Saint-Jacques, where they would give their names in writing to an official stationed there for that purpose and receive each four sous parisis. Those who possessed houses in the city were requested to immediately shut themselves up in them and remain in them; the curés and churchwardens of their parishes were to see that they were furnished with food. The homeless poor were to congregate in the Faubourg Saint-Germain-des-Près, where they would be lodged, fed, and cared for; they were expressly forbidden to leave until they were cured. Theprévôtof Paris gave orders that those affected with disease were not to be suffered to go about the city, but were to be driven from it, or put in prison; theprévôtof the merchants and theéchevinsput guards at the city gates to prevent any of these persons entering the capital.
In 1560, during the short reign of François II, the States-General issued a positive prohibition of all prostitution,—which was as ineffective as all the preceding regulations had been. Under Charles IX and Henri III, the evil constantly increased,—the example offered by the corrupt court not being conducive to the growth of a sound public opinion. Those persons who were convicted of bigamy were condemned to be publicly flogged, and, sometimes, to be afterward hanged,—in the latter case, they were executed between two distaffs. Those convicted of the crime of bestiality were usually burned at the stake, the animal undergoing the same penalty. Thefilles de mauvaise viewere more numerous than ever, and all the streets formerly assigned to them were still occupied by them. In 1619, a new decree of the Parliament against them forbade all persons to let them houses or lodgings, under penalty of confiscation of their property for the benefit of the poor, and directed allvagabondsandfilles débauchéesto quitla ville et faulxbourgs de Pariswithin twenty-four hours, under pain of imprisonment. Every bourgeois and citizen of Paris was required to aid the first huissier, or sergeant of the Châtelet, or any other officer of justice, who called upon him to do so, in enforcing this regulation, under penalty of a fine of a hundred livres parisis.
All these legal penalties, necessarily inefficient in themselves, were rendered doubly so by the dissolute code of morals,les mœurs Italiennes, as they were called under Mazarin, that obtained in all classes of society. Under Louis XIV, an ordinance of 1684, drawn up by Colbert, was especially directed against those unfortunate women who were afflicted with disease: on entering the hospital they were first whipped, and then subjected to hard labor and the most rigorous confinement. Under the Regency, in 1720, Paris was greatly outraged by the tragic death of the Comtesse de Roncy, a very pretty young wife, who, justly suspicious of her husband, courageously went to seek him one day at the house of a certain charmer whom he was in the habit of visiting. On this occasion, he was not there, but the unhappy wife recognized his portrait on the bracelet which her rival was wearing; the controversy soon became heated, the neighbors of this Rue Gît-le-Cœur flocked in and took sides against the intruder, who, in the end, was thrown out the window and died on the following day. The murderesses were all sent to the Châtelet. Under Louis XV, the prodigal luxury displayed by the actresses and opera-dancers, thefemmes à la mode, who were calleddes impures, and the effrontery of the grand seigneurs and rich bankers who maintained them in this state, became, if possible, more scandalous than ever; it was said, for example, that the minister Bertin, who had lived for fifteen years with Mlle. Hus, of the Comédie Française, had given her a set of furniture that was valued at five hundred thousand livres.
"Mlle. Grandi, of the Opéra, a dancer of mediocre talent and with a very commonplace face, was complaining one evening at the theatre of having lost the good graces of a protector who had given her a thousand louis in five weeks; one of those present said to her that she would readily find some one to take his place. Mlle. Grandi replied that it was not so easy as might be supposed, but that, in any case, she was firmly decided not to accept any new liaison excepting on the condition that she received a carriage and two good horses, with at least a hundred louis of income assured to maintain this equipage. The conversation then ended, but the next day there arrived at Mlle. Grandi's lodging a magnificent carriage drawn by two horses and followed by three others led behind it, and in the carriage was found one hundred and thirty thousand livres in specie."
Sometimes these scandalous chronicles took another turn. Mlle. Guimard, also of the Opéra, "a celebrated dancer, who was openly protected by the Maréchal de Soubise, did not shine by any excessive faithfulness to her protector; she accepted a rendezvous in one of the faubourgs of Paris, and saw that there was so much misery in this quarter that she distributed a portion of the two thousand écus which she had received as the price of her complaisance among the poor people whom she encountered and carried the rest to the curé of Saint-Roch, requesting him to have the goodness to distribute it among the poor."
The gardens of the Palais-Royal figure largely in the history of Paris as the scene of many of the more important incidents of the constantly changing social life of the capital. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this locality was so much the favorite resort of thefemmes galantesthat the honest bourgeois and their wives were finally compelled to abandon it altogether; in the latter part of 1771, the former were accordingly all expelled, but by the summer of 1772 they had all returned. It is related that the Duc de Chartres, walking here one day, passed one of these ladies and was so much struck by her appearance that he turned to the gentlemen accompanying him and said: "Ah! how ugly she is!" To which the offended fair promptly replied: "You have much uglier ones in your seraglio." The prince did not judge it expedient to discuss the subject, but he related the incident to the lieutenant of police, and the next day these promenaders were more rigorously expelled than ever. In consequence, "to-day," relates a chronicler of the period, "excepting on days of the opera, the Palais-Royal is nothing but a vast solitude." In 1784, the streets back of it, inhabited by a dissolute and degraded population of both sexes, had become "veritable cloacæ." On the evening of the 31st of October, 1785, at a moment when the evening promenade was more crowded even than usual, a dragoon, having one of thesefilleson his arm, pushed by the throng, happened to step on the foot of the Abbé de Lubersac, walking near him; the latter made use of a strong expression, to which the soldier replied in kind; the young woman endeavored to make peace by saying: "After all, it is only an abbé, who is not worth stopping for." The churchman, still further forgetting himself, permitted himself to kick the young woman quite as if she were a man; the dragoon took him by the collar; theSuissesof the palace hastened to quell the riot, but their numbers were quite insufficient; the Duc de Chartres, seeing the tumult, but not daring to show himself because of his great unpopularity, summoned the city guard to what by this time had become a "regular field of battle," and the disturbance was finally quelled. Among the wounded who were carried off was a Chevalier de Saint-Louis, "disemboweled;" and thereafter the Suisses prohibited the entrance of the gardens to all women of doubtful virtue.
It may be remembered that, in the celebrated affair of the diamond necklace, the young person who was persuaded by the adventuress, Madame de la Motte, to personify the queen, Marie Antoinette, and to meet the duped Cardinal Rohan in the park of Versailles at ten o'clock in the evening for the purpose of giving him the fictitious authority to purchase the necklace, was afille du mondewho lived in the Rue du Jour at Paris, and was known as "la d'Oliva." For playing this part, the young woman was promised fifteen thousand livres. Themémoirethat was afterward drawn up by the avocat of Madame de la Motte "excited the interest of all sensitive souls by relating that the demoiselle, enceinte at the moment of her arrest, had been delivered in the Bastile, and was nursing her infant herself."
PILLAGE OF THE ARCHBISHOP'S DWELLING.PILLAGE OF THE ARCHBISHOP'S DWELLING, FEBRUARY 15, 1831. Engraved from an unpublished drawing by Raffet.
One of the most celebrated resorts of the ladies of the monde and the demi-monde, the cabaret of Ramponneau at Belleville, was closed a few years before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789. Its renown seems to have been established, in the early days of the Regency, by the fact that wine was there sold at three sous six deniers the pint, that is to say, at one sou less than the usual price. "It was so crowded that there were as many persons outside, waiting their turn to enter, as inside, although the accommodations were very considerable in size. This crowd excited the curiosity of persons of distinction, who wished to see for themselves this prodigy." It is described as a species of cellar, decorated on the exterior with a vine painted on the wall, and with a sign bearing the legend, "Au Tambour Royal," and a picture of the proprietor astride of a cask. It was furnished in the interior with wooden benches and crippled tables, around which crowded a multitude drawn from all classes of society, high and low.
The fame of the proprietor became so great that he was offered by the two managers, Gaudon and Nestre, of a theatrical establishment on the Boulevard du Temple, in 1758, ten livres a day if he would consent to show himself on their stage daily for the space of three months. The contracts were all signed, the songs prepared for him, when Ramponneau, worked upon by the Jansenists, suddenly refused to appear. In a statement drawn up before a notary, we read: "To-day appeared before me, the Sieur Jean Ramponneau, cabaretier, living in the basse Courtille, who has of his own free will and volition declared that the serious reflections which he has made upon the dangers and the obstacles to the salvation of those persons who appear upon the stage of a theatre, and upon the justness of the censures which the Church has pronounced upon these individuals, have determined him to renounce, as in these presents, through scruples of conscience and for the purpose of so contributing, on his part, to the purity of manners which it becomes a Christian to maintain, and in which he prays God always to maintain him, he renounces appearing, and promises to God never to appear, on any stage, nor to perform any function, profession, or act which is in the nature of those performed by those individuals who appear on the theatrical stage, whoever they may be," etc. The case was conducted on both sides by the most eminent avocats, and finally compromised by Ramponneau paying a large sum to have the agreement cancelled. He still had left one hundred thousand livres, with which he established himself at the Porcherons, and purchased from the Sieur Magny the cabaret de la Grande-Pinte, on which he expended sixty thousand livres more, and where he had the same success as at the Courtille. The court and the city thronged his establishment, which became the restaurantà la mode.
A very celebrated wine-shop, known as the Petit-Ramponneau, was established, in 1859, at Montmartre, and was the last in which wine was served in little crocks or jugs. The proprietors, MM. Lallemand, made a fortune in thus dispensingvin bleuand portions at six sous the plate.
"It had long been said that the third estate paid with its property, the nobility with its blood, the clergy with its prayers. Now, the clergy of the court and of the salon prayed but very little, the nobility no longer constituted in itself the royal army; but the third estate, remaining faithful to its functions in the State, still paid, and each year more. Since its purse was the common treasury, it was inevitable that the more the monarchy expended, the more would it place itself in a condition of dependency upon the bourgeoisie, and that a day would arrive when the latter, weary of paying, would demand its accounts. That day is called the Revolution of 1789."
A MAID'S DUTY IN FRANCE.A MAID'S DUTY IN FRANCE.
The engraving onpage 245is a reproduction of one of the many that appear at this day of settlement, with the object of exciting the people against the clergy and the nobility, and of illustrating forcibly the two principal vices of society as then constituted,—the privileges and the inequality of taxation. To suppress these privileges, and to make this inequality disappear,—this was the task of the Revolution. In the engraving, from the collection of M. le Baron de Vinck d'Orp, of Brussels, we see a woman of the people bending under the double burden of a nun and a lady of the nobility; the title is "Le Grand Abus."
As to the origin of the famous phrase, the sans-culottes, the following statement is made by some historians. Two ladies of the nobility, but favorably inclined toward the new ideas, were one day present at a session of the Assembly, and were commenting very audibly and very critically upon a speech which the Abbé Maury was delivering. The orator, finally losing his patience, interrupted his discourse, and, indicating his unappreciative hearers with his forefinger, turned to the presiding officer:
"Monsieur le President," he said, "make these twosans-culottes—unbreeched, trouserless—keep quiet."
This appellation, applied to the two ladies, naturally turned the laugh against them, and the phrase, repeated from mouth to mouth, was adopted by the people of the faubourgs as a title glorifying their miserable condition and their aspirations.
Another of these Revolutionary prints, from theNational Almanacfor 1791, engraved by Debucourt, and preserved in the collection of M. Muhlbacher of Paris, gives an ingenious and picturesque presentation of one of the numberless sources of supply of that literature of journals and pamphlets on which the Revolution was so largely fed. Thismarchande de journaux, who adorns a page in the calendar, sits between two benches covered with papers and pamphlets, and set off with ribbons, flowers, and patriotic emblems mounted on rods; her costume and her attitude are also patriotic and a trifle dishevelled, and she is shrilly proclaiming the new decree concerning the value of the assignat which she holds out. Behind her, a couple of elderly aristocrats are about to come into collision with two younger citizens, representatives of the newer ideas, and absorbed in reading some catechism for patriots. On the sidewalk are two boys in the costumes of their elders, one of whom is supposed to be pointing to the date of July 14th in the calendar. This plate is referred to in theArt du 18esiècle, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.
CHEZ LES HÉTAIRES.CHEZ LES HÉTAIRES.Caricature fromLa Journée du Poëte Décadent.
It is worthy of remark that even this sacred date of the 14th of July, that of the national fête, is nowadays not exempt from that curious self-criticism which in every tone of mockery, semi-seriousness, and grave apprehension occupies so considerable a proportion of contemporary French literature, from theSiècleto theBulletin de la Société d'Economie Sociale et des Unions de la Paix Sociale. So persistent had this criticism become that the national authorities this year (1898) in the capital thought it fit to tack on to the national and municipal celebration of a great political event, in order to give it greater weight and dignity, the commemoration of the birth of a not veryAN ADMIRER OF L'INTRANSIGEANTAN ADMIRER OF "L'INTRANSIGEANT.important literary man! M. Gaston Deschamps, in the usually ribaldFigaro, claimed much of the credit of this innovation for himself. In a long leading editorial on theSanctification du 14 Juillet, he thus lays sacrilegious hands on the taking of the Bastile itself: "Last year, I demonstrated, very readily, that our fête of the 14th of July, already discredited by the desertion of the wealthy classes, by the scepticism of the public functionaries, and by the frivolousness of the populace, was destitute of that character, national, republican, and humanitarian, which should be in a democracy, the characteristic of every solemnity.
"This fête seems to have been instituted for the special aggravation of those Frenchmen who believe that the history of France did not begin with the 14th of July, 1789. It is no longer, to employ the energetic expression of Gambetta, anything but 'a rag of the civil war.' It glorifies an event which, according to the testimony of contemporaries the least suspected of moderation in politics (Marat, Saint-Just), had not the importance nor, above all, the beauty which our present system of primary instruction attributes to it. Historical research has verified the opinion of these witnesses. It is impossible to relate the taking of the Bastile Saint-Antoine without recognizing the silliness or the unworthiness of the citizens who were the principal actors in this enterprise. This old prison had just been put out of commission by a royal ordinance which decreed its demolition. Very many of the 'conquerors of the Bastile' cried 'Vive le Roi!' as they went down the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The number of prisoners at that time confined in this jail reduced itself to seven, to wit: four forgers, two lunatics, and a crapulous old gentleman. The Bastile was garrisoned by the Frenchinvalidesand by the Swiss guards. The assailants swore to injure no one if they were permitted to enter. The gates were opened. The Frenchinvalides, who had trusted in the promise given, were massacred without being able to defend themselves. The Swiss guards were taken for 'captives' (because of their uniform). They were carried off in triumph. The brewer Santerre (at that time demagogue, and later monopolist in national property) proposed to set the edifice on fire with poppy oil. His friends preferred the demolition pure and simple, which had the effect of turning out in the street the poor devils whose shops were built against the walls of the 'monument of tyranny.'" And he cites the works of a number of modern historical writers to prove the truth of his statements.
"The taking of the Bastile was an act of anarchy, which, if it were repeated to-day, would be immediately suppressed by our Minister of the Interior, Monsieur Brisson. The Republican police no longer permits, God be thanked, this particular form of diversion. This was very evident the other day when several hundred gentry, intoxicated, perhaps, by the approach of this untoward anniversary, wished to sack Mazas prison.
"No, I cannot bring myself to consider this killing of Frenchmen as the most glorious event of the French Revolution. There is too much of fratricidal murder in this affair. I cannot rejoice to thus see the blood of our nation flow. Every time that it is wished to make an apology for this excess of contagious folly, we find ourselves reduced to invoking the approbation of foreigners. It appears that Kant was so well satisfied with this outbreak that he forgot, for the first time in his life, the hour of his luncheon. The English ambassador wrote to his Gracious Majesty that he was very well pleased. The Venetian ambassador judged it to be a 'noble revolt.' So be it. But neither the Prussian Kant, nor this Englishman, nor that Venetian, had the same reasons that we have for grieving over an incident that divided France against herself....
"Last year I succeeded in stirring up a very sufficient number of protestations for having ventured to deduce, from a collection of self-evident facts, a judgment which I still maintain. It may well be believed, moreover, that I was not wrong, since the Government and the Municipal Council have, this year, taken the initiative of adding to the ceremonies and to the diversions usual on the 14th of July, the celebration of an illustrious memory, which will heighten the dignity of the official fête, and which should give to the French people the opportunity to reunite in the unanimity truly national of a common admiration.
"On the white posters which the administration has just placarded I read as follows:
"'Fête Nationale,'
and underneath:
"'Fêtes du centenaire de Michelet.'
"This coincidence is intentional. It is significative.
"Michelet was born on the 21st of August, 1798; the date of his centennial therefore falls regularly in the coming month. It has been decided to celebrate to-morrow the commemoration of his birth. It has been desired, by means of this addition, to purify, to sanctify the 14th of July by a sort of pious eve.... If these fêtes contribute toward fixing in the souvenirs of the populace an idea of the life and of the work of Michelet, this 14th of July, ennobled, embellished, will not have been misplaced. A hateful date will justly have been transformed into a fête of union and of fraternity."
Lamartine says of the murder of M. de Launey, Governor of the Bastile, hacked to pieces by the crowd in the street after he had surrendered: "A victim of duty, he yielded only with his last breath the sword which had been confided to him by his master. The court, the army, the royalists, the people, basely endeavored to throw upon him the responsibility for their want of forethought, their cowardice, their blood shedding."
Thevainqueurs de la Bastilletook upon themselves such airs of superiority and claimed so many privileges over their fellow-citizens that the municipal authorities finally, wearied with their arrogance, issued a proclamation in the latter part of December, forbidding them to assemble and to deliberate, and directing the procureur of the commune to prosecute any author, printer, or distributor of decrees which the aforesaid "conquerors" issued without any legal authority.
VERY'S RESTAURANT.VERY'S RESTAURANT, BOULEVARD MAGENTA, DYNAMITED BY ANARCHISTS IN 1892.
Michelet gives some details of one of the most celebrated of the innumerable murders of the Terror, that of the pretty Princesse de Lamballe, which may serve to illustrate the quality of the populace. She was confined in the prison de la Force, where during the night of the 2d of September, 1792, a Revolutionary tribunal condemned the prisoners to death after a mock trial. In the morning, two of the National Guards came to tell her that she was to be transferred to the Abbaye, to which she replied that she would as soon stay where she was. Taken before the tribunal, she was ordered to take the oath of liberty and equality, of hatred of the king, the queen, and royalty. "I will willingly take the first two oaths," she said; "I cannot take the last, it is not in my heart." A voice cried to her: "Swear; if you do not swear, you are dead." "Cry 'Vive la Nation!'" said several others, "and no harm will be done thee." "At that moment, she perceived at the corner of the little Rue Saint-Antoine something frightful, a soft and bloody mass upon which one of the participants in the massacres was trampling with his iron-pegged shoes. It was a heap of corpses, stripped, quite white, quite naked, which they had piled up there. It was upon this pile that she was required to lay her hand and take the oath;—this trial was too much. She turned around and uttered a cry: 'Fi! l'horreur!'"
"Release madame," said the president of the improvised tribunal. This was the signal for her execution. A little peruke-maker, Charlat, a drummer of the volunteers, struck off her cap with a blow of his pike, but in doing so he wounded her in the forehead; the sight of the flowing blood produced its usual effect upon the mob; they precipitated themselves upon her, "her breasts were cut off with a knife, she was stripped quite naked, Charlat opened her chest and took out her heart, then he mutilated her in the most secret part of her body." A certain Sieur Grison cut off her head; then the two wretches, taking on the ends of their pikes, one her head and the other her heart, set off down the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the Temple, followed by an immense crowd, "dumb with astonishment." They carried the head into the shop of a coiffeur, who washed, combed, and powdered the blond hair. "Now," he said, "Antoinette will be able to recognize her." Then the procession proceeded in the direction of the Temple again; but by this time it began to be feared that, carried away by their excitement, the cut-throats might inflict the same fate upon the royal family confined there, and the Commune sent hastily some commissioners, girded with large tricolored sashes. When Grison and Charlat arrived, they demanded permission to promenade under the windows of the apartments occupied by the king and queen, which was immediately granted them, and the king was even requested to go to the window at the moment when the livid head of the princess was elevated in front of him. "The march was continued throughout Paris, without any one interposing any obstacle. The head was carried to the Palais-Royal, and the Duc d'Orléans, who was then at table, was obliged to rise, to go to the balcony, and to salute the assassins."
The only relief to be found in the perusal of these chronicles is in some incident in which the executioners turn on each other. Among the most vociferous of the "citizenesses" was thebelle Liégeoise, called also la belle Théroigne de Méricourt, and thepremière amazone de la Liberté. From the garden of the Tuileries, the usual scene of her orations, she one day ascended to the terrace of the Feuillants, where she fell into the hands of the women of the party of the Montagne, who surrounded her, trussed up her petticoats, and gave her a public whipping. The "first amazon of Liberty" screamed, shrieked, but no one came to her rescue, and when her persecutors finally released her, it was found that she had lost her reason, and it was necessary to conduct her to an insane asylum in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.
A CONCIERGE.A CONCIERGE. From a drawing by Ludovico Marchetti.
All the chronicles of the times devote a paragraph to the "Furies of the Guillotine," the terrible women who habitually occupied the front places among the spectators at all the executions, and who interrupted their knitting only to hurl insults at the victims who mounted the scaffold. Thesetricoteusesaffected an exalted Revolutionary sentiment, they wore the red cap of liberty, and one day presented themselves at the Convention with an address in which they offered to mount guard while the men went off to combat in the armies on the frontier.
At the great gate of the Tuileries, between the two marble horses of Coustou, was a café-restaurant, painted a lively red, and which bore the sign: "À la Guillotine." "Needless to say, that the establishment was always full of customers." During the two years in which the instrument of public executions stood permanently on the Place de la Revolution, on the site of the present obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, so much blood was shed there that, it is said, a herd of cattle refused to cross the Seine on the bridge, terrified at the stale odor of slaughter. By the side of the scaffold was a hole destined to receive the blood of the victims, but this diffused such an infection through the air that "the citizen Coffinet thought it would be advantageous to establish, on a little two-wheeled barrow, a casket lined with lead to receive the blood, which might then be transported to thefosse commune."
On the 16th of September, 1797, the Central Bureau, "justly indignant at the debauchery and at the offences constantly committed against the public morality, whether by the impudent exhibition of books and pictures the most obscene, or by the prodigious multiplicity of women and girl prostitutes, or by the indecent masquerading of a great number of women in men's garments," issued a rigorous decree against all women who were found disguised as men, and very many arrests were made in consequence.
When Louis XVIII made his solemn entry into Paris on the 3d of May, 1814, it was in the midst of the popular acclamations; a numerous and very enthusiastic crowd swarmed in the Carrousel, the court of the château, the garden and the terraces, "this same crowd which, on the 10th of August, 1792, filled the air with its imprecations against Capet, which, on the 2d of December, 1804, acclaimed the Emperor and the Empress, and which, on this occasion, welcomed with cries of joy the orphan of the Temple after having applauded the decapitation of his father and his mother." When this same populace, turned Republican again, thronged along the boulevards and into the Place Vendôme in 1831, singing theMarseillaise, Maréchal Lobau, unwilling to fire on them, contented himself by ordering the hose of the fire-pumps turned on them, and deluging indiscriminately conspirators, orators on the public place, and spectators. "The Republicans had demonstrated on many occasions that they did not fear fire. But, like all Parisians, they detested water. Surprised at these unexpected douches, they fled in every direction, and the Place Vendôme was immediately cleared."
Well might Napoleon declare, repeating Rabelais's word, on one of the many occasions of popular manifestation: "This is not the first time that I have had occasion to remark that the population of Paris is only aramas de badauds."
Thepoissardes, or fish-women of the Halles, those "commères fortes en gueule" (shrill-voiced gossips), appear almost as frequently in these police and scandalous chronicles as the courtesans. They are frequently mentioned in the mediæval records; under Louis XIII, they and their resort were considered worthy of the following description: "You will see at the Halles a multitude of rascals who amuse themselves only by pillaging and robbing each other, sellers as well as buyers, by cutting their purses, searching in theirhottesand baskets; others, in order to better secure their prey, will sing dishonest songs and dirty ones, sometimes one and sometimes the other, without any regard for either Sundays or fête days,—things deplorable in a city of Paris! In the Halles and other usual markets, you may see women who sell provisions; if you offer them less than they want, were you the most renowned person in France, there you will be immediately blazoned with every possible insult, imprecation, malediction, dishonor, and the whole with an accompaniment of oaths and blasphemies."
(The same author, speaking of the shop-keepers of Paris at this epoch, says: "They will damn themselves for a liard, gaining on their merchandise the double of what it has cost them, selling bad goods, and blaspheming and swearing by God and the Devil that they are excellent.")
In 1716, Jean-François Gruet, inspector of police and mountedhuissierof the Châtelet, was condemned to the pillory of the Halles for malversation of funds, and thepoissardesmanifested themselves on this occasion in front of him in great shape: "Huissier du diable! Gueule de chien! jardin à poux, grenier à puces, sac à vin, mousquetaire de Piquepuce, aumônier du cheval de bronze, poulet dinde de la Râpée," etc., until they were too hoarse to continue. In 1784, the winter began by heavy frosts, which were followed by a sudden thaw which flooded the city. "Paris has become a sewer; communication has been absolutely interrupted between the inhabitants, and for several days past there have been on foot only those who were compelled to it by necessity, by their occupation, or by their duty. Arms and legs broken, and many other accidents, have been the results of this intemperance of the season. In the midst of this species of public calamity, there are those who find entertainment in it, occasion for mirth, and much laughter. In the first place, there have been unlimited opportunities for sled races, and, also, there has been offered to the amateurs a more novel and more piquant spectacle. You went to the Halles to see thepoissardesin boots, in breeches, their under-petticoats trussed up to their navels, and exercising their trade in this species of masquerade while redoubling their quirks and their scandalous jests."
Nevertheless, so important was their corporation, that, on the birth of the dauphin, in 1781, they were admitted in a body to compliment the king, to whom they were formally presented by the Duc de Cossé, Governor of Paris. The spokeswoman had her discourse written out on her fan, and read it to his Majesty. They were all dressed in black, and they were all, to the number of a hundred and fifty, invited by him to dinner and to present their compliments also to the queen. They had at first manifested some reluctance to accepting these royal hospitalities; the last time they had been to Versailles on a similar mission, some evilly-disposed person had inserted in the tarts and pâtés some indigestible substances "and dishonest things." The lieutenant of police, however, assured them that this time nothing of the kind would occur, and they were, in fact, treated sumptuously.
But, "theémeutehad established itself permanently in Paris, and its effects were disastrous. This condition of intermittent political fever which threatened to become continuous, paralyzed business, ruined commerce, and filled all minds with keen anxiety." "The people became accustomed to substituting sudden overturnings for the regular action of institutions," says another historian, "...a habit which has cost us twenty revolutions in eighty years. England has proceeded differently. Since 1688, she has had, instead of bloody revolutions, only changes in the ministry;—everyone, high as well as low, has, with her, manifested respect for the law, and everything has been left to free discussion,—force is never used." And a later student of theMouvement Social, M. Jules Roche, quoted in the issue ofLa Réforme Socialefor May 16, 1898: "Every country well governed develops from an economical, industrial, commercial, financial, and political point of view. All those projects necessary to the grandeur and the prosperity of the nation are conceived, decided upon, carried out. At this time, France, so munificently endowed, enriched by all the favors of nature, inhabited by the race the most intelligent, the richest in resources of the mind and the imagination, is delivered over to hazards the most unforeseen and the most dangerous. No one knows in the evening what will happen the next morning, nor in the morning how the day will finish. There is no doctrine, no method whatever, in the direction of public affairs. A Chamber possessed by the electoral epilepsy; charlatans without shame abandoning themselves before the electors to every contortion, to the grossest declamations, to the most shameful manœuvres, in order to lead public opinion still further astray, instead of enlightening it,—this is the spectacle she presents to the universe. And there is no one to speak out aloud, frankly, and clearly! Silence, envy, cowardice, imbecility, where there should be courage, living reason, and action!" It might be thought that this gloomy presentation lacked in consistency,—this method of government could scarcely be practised by "the most intelligent race."
The street revolutions of 1831 and 1848, which finally expelled from power the royal houses of Bourbon and Orléans, presented the usual characteristics of these popular uprisings in the capital, in the result of which the nation always acquiesced meekly. One of the most senseless of the acts of excess in the former is illustrated in our engraving of the pillage of the archbishop's house, February 15, 1831, from an unpublished design by Raffet, in the possession of M. Cain, the sculptor. The mob had, the evening before, sacked the church and the presbytère of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and on this day, incited to higher game, they broke into the residence of the archbishop, adjoining Notre-Dame. Everything was broken, overturned, flung out of the windows and into the Seine, rare books, precious manuscripts, rich crucifixes, missals, chasubles,—"that which was, on this day of folly, lost for art and science is incalculable." The heart of Louis XVI, which the doctor Pelletan had placed in a leaden box, sealed with his own seal, and presented to Monseigneur Quélen, was thrown into the river. Louis Blanc, in hisHistoire de dix ans, relates that Monsieur Thiers, sous-sécretaire d'État in the ministry of finance, was seen walking about amidst this ruin with a satisfied countenance and a smile upon his lips.