The pursuit of glory, p.42
The Pursuit of Glory, page 42
It did not have to be this way. Louis XV’s advisers did not have to continue the anti-Jansenist policies. They did not have to return to Versailles from Paris in 1723, keeping the king isolated from the rapidly expanding public sphere of the capital. They did not have to agree to the renversement des alliances of 1756, which most French people believed was contrary to the national interest–a belief that was strengthened by the military disasters that followed. Louis XV did not have to behave like a self-indulgent voluptuary, without a care for his public image. Nor did he have to acquire the reputation of being an irresponsible despot by his clumsy attempts to stifle opposition. He did not have to marry his grandson and heir to the Archduchess Marie Antoinette, thus ensuring that the unpopularity of the Austrian alliance would continue to blight the next reign as well. For his part, Louis XVI did not have to lock himself away at Versailles and the other palaces, giving the impression that he was interested only in hunting. When what proved to be the final crisis struck at the end of the 1780s, Louis did not have to relapse into a state of torpor, passively awaiting the end. When the Parisian crowd came to Versailles on 5 October 1789, they found the royal family and the court living in an ossified cultural world from which the spirit had long since departed. It was a museum avant la lettre. Of all the monarchy’s mistakes, it was this failure to adapt to the growing strength of the nation that was the most fatal. Louis XIV might well have said ‘L’État, c’est moi’, but Louis XVI could not say ‘La Nation, c’est moi’. That was left to the deputies of the Third Estate of the Estates General, supported by clerical and noble renegades, who declared themselves to be the ‘National Assembly’ on 17 June 1789.
PEOPLE
The ‘people’ formed the third part of the troika that pulled the political chariot of the late eighteenth century. In one form or another, it had been part of European political discourse since the very beginning. The task of assessing the concept’s importance is made difficult by contours which are blurred to the point of insubstantiality. This is revealed by the problems of translating it satisfactorily. While a dictionary lists ‘Nation’ or ‘Volk’ as German equivalents for the French word ‘peuple’, it only offers ‘people’ in English. On the other hand, both ‘Volk’ and ‘Leute’ can be translated as ‘people’ in English but in French ‘Leute’ is translated as ‘gens, monde, public’ but not as ‘peuple’. Similar uncertainties are to be found in the other European languages. One possible way forward is not to seek what the people were but what they were not, and what they most obviously were not was part of the political establishment. In what follows, the people and their adjective ‘popular’ will be applied to movements or events that were spontaneous, autonomous and free from direction or control by the regular authorities.
For that reason alone they were regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility by those who recorded their activities. So rudimentary were the police forces, if they existed at all, and so fragile was the social fabric, that fear of violent disorder was shared by almost anyone with anything to lose. So the preferred words to designate ordinary people were not neutral like ‘peuple’, ‘Volk’ or ‘people’ but pejorative like ‘foule’, ‘Pöbel’ and ‘mob’ (defined by Henry Fielding in Tom Jones as ‘Persons without Virtue, or Sense, in all Stations’). At the top end, the elitism of educated Europeans was well put by Frederick the Great in a famous letter to d’Alembert in 1770. He asked the latter to imagine a state with a population of ten million, from which one would have to exclude at once all peasants, labourers, artisans and soldiers, leaving around 50,000 of both sexes. Once all the women had been excluded, together with all stupid and unimaginative males, one would be left with, at best, around a thousand people capable of intellectual activity–and even among this tiny group there would be marked differences of ability. So, he concluded, there was just no point in trying to educate mankind [sic], indeed it would be positively dangerous. All one could safely do was to content oneself with being wise, taking good care to keep the mob under control but abandoning them to their ignorance and stupidity.
Even by the standards of crowned heads, Frederick was unusually snobbish, but his contempt for the unlettered masses was shared by the intelligentsia. As we shall see, Johann Gottfried Herder had great respect for the ‘Volk’, but he viewed with disdain ‘the rabble of the streets which never signs or creates, but roars and mutilates’. Moses Mendelssohn thought that words like ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘culture’ could never form part of the plebeian vocabulary, for ‘the mob scarcely understands them’. The French thinkers, or ‘philosophe’s’ were no less elitist. The radical d’Holbach, sometimes described as a ‘democrat’, made a sharp distinction between property-owning citizens and ‘the imbecilic mass of the population which because it is devoid of all enlightenment and good sense can at any moment become the instrument and the accomplice of restless demagogues seeking to disrupt society’, and concluded ‘let us never change that inequality that has always been so necessary’.
Even a small sample of the intermittent attempts by ‘the blind and noisy multitude’ to participate in the political process appears to lend support to this dismissive attitude. Just as our period began, in 1647–8 revolts in Palermo and Naples succeeded in wresting power for a few months from the Spanish viceroys before collapsing in confusion, bloodshed, anarchy and recrimination. In Palermo it was the common people themselves who co-operated with the Inquisitor Trasmiera to carry out a counter-coup, which included the bestially brutal murder of the revolution’s ‘captain-general’ Giovanni d’Alesi and twelve associates. Yet no sooner had they decapitated their movement than they lurched back into violent attacks on the government and the nobility. Divisions within the insurgency, coupled with the traditional hostility between Palermo and Messina, eventually allowed the Spanish government to claw back control, together with all the concessions made along the way. The same sort of self-defeating incoherence was apparent in Naples, where the insurrection was led by the fisherman ‘Masaniello’ (Tommaso Aniello), first made captain-general by his followers and then beheaded by them. Quickly, albeit posthumously, rehabilitated, his body was exhumed, reunited with his severed head and given a funeral fit for a hero. Like another charismatic leader who soared before plummeting, Cola Rienzi, Masaniello became the subject of a nineteenth-century opera–La Muette de Portici with music by Daniel Auber and a libretto by Eugène Scribe. It was an opera moreover that itself sparked off a revolution, for its performance at the Théatre de la Monnaie in Brussels on 25 August 1830 is usually given credit for starting the insurrection that led to the establishment of an independent Belgian state as well as marking the beginning of a new genre–French Grand Opera.
A revolution that ends up being presented as an opera, especially one whose improbable heroine is a deaf-mute, is perhaps difficult to take seriously. Yet, as Helmut Koenigsberger and Peter Burke have shown, there is more than meets the eye to the events in Palermo and Naples. In Palermo the forty-nine new laws–capitoli–agreed between d’Alesi’s brother and the viceroy indicated that a wide cross-section of the population had been involved. If the abolition of unpopular taxes and the granting of an amnesty were designed to placate the rank-and-file, the proposals to involve the guilds in the administration and to reform legal procedures indicated a longer-term plan for the city’s future. In Naples what may have seemed to be mindless violence, not least to Masaniello as he faced his assassins, turn out to have been carefully choreographed rituals of legitimation, which expressed the cohesion of the community at the same time as it created it.
Denied the anthropological insights that have allowed this interpretation of popular revolts, contemporaries were less generous. When the demos took charge, law and order inevitably collapsed, or so they concluded. No wonder that ‘as it entered the eighteenth century, democracy was still very much a pariah word’ (John Dunn). For much of the century there was little or no reason for this attitude to change. As we have seen, the population of most European countries began a sustained increase in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, putting growing pressure on relatively inelastic grain supplies. The result was a wave of bread riots whenever a poor harvest drove prices beyond the average. These usually took the form of ‘taxation populaire’, as consumers sought to force bakers to sell bread at a ‘fair’ price. The rioters were not seeking to loot, rather they had a clear notion of what was right and what was wrong about the way in which grain was stored, milled, baked and marketed. In short they imposed a ‘moral economy’ (Edward Thompson). This instinctive sense of injustice was also lent biblical support: ‘He that withholdeth Corn, the People shall curse him: but Blessing shall be upon the Head of him that selleth it’ (Proverbs 11:26). They became especially angry when they suspected that grain was being hoarded by unscrupulous producers or merchants waiting for a further rise in prices, or when they saw grain being moved out of their district.
Once the popular genie was out of the bottle, of course, the way was open for it to be sent this way and that by malcontents with more ambitious agendas. A good example was the riots which erupted in Madrid in the spring of 1766, this always being a particularly tense time of the year because the previous harvest was running out but the next had not yet been reaped. In 1765 Charles III’s reforming government had relaxed traditional restrictions on the domestic grain trade, in the hope of promoting greater productivity. Unfortunately, it coincided with a poor harvest, so when prices began to climb early the following year, there was a scapegoat conveniently close at hand. The rioting began in Madrid on 23 March, launched by ‘a monstrous crowd of the lowest classes…a low contemptible people, without permanent residence and altogether abandoned and worthless’, as one alarmed observer noted. From there it spread out into the rest of Castile, eventually involving some seventy communities. The forms of protest were traditional: the opening of granaries, the imposition of a just price, the sacking of officials deemed to be corrupt, the election of replacements, and so on, although often purely local issues were also involved. Although these aspects were also apparent in Madrid, other fish were being fried too. Behind the bread riots and the simultaneous agitation against a decree banning the traditional wide-brimmed hat and long cloaks (a public order measure), there appears to have been a conspiracy organized by nobles, clergy and perhaps even the French ambassador too against the Sicilian first minister Esquilache. Although Charles III was frightened enough to flee to Aranjuez, the rioters achieved nothing apart from the departure of Esquilache to Venice, where he served as Spanish ambassador until his death in 1785. Even the hat-and-cloak combination was gradually abandoned, after being cunningly presented by Esquilache’s successor, Aranda, as the sort of dress worn by executioners.
The Madrid riots exemplified the problem of popular riots. However elaborate their rituals of legitimation may have been, in practice they proved to be short-term in their objectives and short-winded in their implementation. Sooner or later the authorities regained control. That was also demonstrated by the most extensive and violent riots in pre-revolutionary France, the ‘floor war’ (guerre des farines) of 1775. As in Spain, they were preceded by the coincidence of an attempt to liberalize the grain trade with a poor harvest. By March 1775, the price of a four-pound (1.5-kg) loaf had increased from its normal average of eight or nine sous to eleven-and-a-half and then went on rising to thirteen-and-a-half by the end of April. At first concentrated on the region around Paris, the unrest then spread from market to market across northern France, attracting support mainly from the urban poor and those peasants whose plots were not large enough for self-subsistence (the majority). Much violence was directed against the usual targets–the better-off peasants, grain merchants, millers and bakers, in other words anyone suspected of driving up prices by hoarding stocks. Although the Île de France and four adjacent provinces were briefly out of control, the government responded vigorously, not to say brutally, sending in the army with orders to fire on those who failed to disperse. By the end of May 1775 it was all over. Louis XVI gave the following rather complacent account in a letter to the King of Sweden, Gustavus III:
The bad harvest and the wicked intentions of a few people…led some scoundrels to come and pillage the markets. The peasants, led on by them and by the false report–sedulously circulated–that the price of bread had been lowered, joined them and they had the insolence to pillage the markets of Versailles and Paris, which forced me to order in troops who restored perfect order without difficulty. After the extreme displeasure I felt at seeing what the people had done, I had the consolation of seeing that as soon as they had been undeceived, they restored what they had taken and were truly sorry for what they had done.
For the time being, Louis XVI could relax, confident in the knowledge that his armed forces were loyal, that the insurrectionaries easily cowed and–above all–that this subsistence crisis had not coincided with political upheaval. Fourteen years later things were to be very different.
Paris was especially volatile because it was difficult to supply with grain in a bad year, separated from the sea by the long and sinuous Seine. London was quite different, being the greatest sea-port in the world and so easily supplied. Moreover, its vast, sprawling suburbs served as a buffer against infection by rural disorder. For those reasons, there were no bread riots there during the eighteenth century, although there were plenty in the provinces: nearly two-thirds of the 275 disturbances between 1735 and 1800 charted by George Rudé. In the capital there were certainly periodic eruptions of popular violence, but they were usually directed against government policy. In 1733, for example, there were noisy demonstrations against the new excise scheme currently making its way through Parliament, including the burning of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole in effigy. The targets of the London rioters were often national or religious minorities. Attempts to allow the naturalization of Jews in 1751 and again two years later, for example, provoked waves of popular anti-Semitism. The most destructive episode of the entire century was the ‘Gordon Riots’ of 1780, directed against the Catholic Relief Act. Although they lasted only a week, they caused £100,000 worth of damage and destroyed ten times more property than was destroyed in Paris during the entire French Revolution. On the night of 7 June a horrified Horace Walpole counted thirty-six fires raging on both sides of the Thames. When eventually the authorities pulled themselves together, they met violence with violence: 285 rioters were shot dead in streets or died of their wounds, 450 were arrested and 25 were hanged.
The Gordon Riots were led by Lord George Gordon, Old Etonian son of the Duke of Gordon. That an aristocrat should lead a mob of plebeians to inflict a ‘time of terrour’ (Dr Johnson) producing a ‘Metropolis in flames, and a Nation in Ruins’ (William Cowper) was viewed with grim satisfaction by those who believed that the future of British politics lay with the middle classes. Their attitude had been articulated most eloquently by William Beckford (1709–70), who as an immensely rich sugar-planter, slave-owner, merchant, financier, alderman of the City of London, Member of Parliament and country gentleman can be said to have personified the interests of his class. In a speech to the House of Commons in November 1761 he defined what he called ‘the sense of the people’:
I don’t mean the mob; neither the top nor the bottom, the scum is perhaps as mean as the dregs, and as to your nobility, about 1200 men of quality, what are they to the body of the nation?…When I talk of the sense of the people I mean the middling people of England, the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman, they who bear all the heat of the day…They have a right, Sir, to interfere in the condition and conduct of the nation which makes them easy or uneasy who feel most of it, and, Sir, the people of England, taken in this limitation are a good-natured, well-intentioned and very sensible people who know better perhaps than any other nation under the sun whether they are well governed or not.
As his own wealth demonstrated, Beckford was speaking at a time of unprecedented opportunities for middle-class men of talent, enterprise and capital. Yet when the period covered by this volume ended fifty-four years later, the scum were still in command and the dregs were just as difficult as they had ever been. What had gone wrong? One clue was provided by the agitation centred on John Wilkes, which was just getting under way at the time of Beckford’s speech. Wilkes (1725–97) was a rakish MP, satirist and journalist, who in 1762 launched a vicious public attack on the Earl of Bute, chief adviser to George III, who had come to the throne just two years earlier. Among other things, Wilkes insinuated that Bute had debauched the Queen Mother to gain influence over the King. Wilkes seemed to bring together all the elements in British politics: he owed his seat in the House of Commons to his connection with the greatest magnate in Buckinghamshire, Earl Temple; he was just at home in the middle-class public sphere through his journalism; and he also knew how to mobilize and manipulate the common people. This was how he positioned himself in his speech to the Court of Common Pleas in May 1763, when facing a charge of seditious libel:
The LIBERTY of all peers and gentlemen, and, what touches me more sensibly, of all the middling and inferior class of the people, which stands most in need of protection, is in my case this day to be finally decided upon: a question of such importance as to determine at once, whether ENGLISH LIBERTY be a reality of a shadow.
