These views, it is true, were predictable, given that the primary assem-blies of the Third Estate in towns were organized by guilds and corporations, so that one would expect the opinions of the master-craftsmen rather than journeymen to predominate, as indeed they did. But it would be equally naive to assume that masters and employees were necessarily divided about the threat of unregulated labor simply because other issues—principally the living wage—were a regular bone of contention. In most of the larger cities, hostility was of long standing between long- settled artisans in trades like tailoring and immigrant labor producing pieces for sale at improvised market stalls. Even in Paris, where the labor market was fluid, it is by no means clear that the cahier of the women florists and hat decorators did not represent workers as well as patronnes of the guild. They were particularly concerned that "these days anyone thinks they can compose a bouquet" and that "unprincipled women" were reducing "honest florists to the last extremes of poverty by their chaotic practices." It was not the guild baronesses but "mothers of families, having to pay out thirty sous a day for food," who were being driven to ruin by the free market. And they were particularly hostile to the practice of women from the outer faubourgs coming in at the break of day and offering flowers below agreed prices. No one, they demanded, should be allowed to sell before four a m. between Easter and Saint Martin's Day (November 11) or earlier than six during the rest of the year.
In a smaller provincial town like the English Channel port of Le Havre, these animosities became even clearer. In the same cahier that complained about the inadequacy of pay, the guild of ship's carpenters objected strongly to the shipbuilders' practice of hiring casual labor on a day-by-day basis. Similarly, the coffee-lemonade-and-vinegar sellers took exception to unlicensed competition that filched supplies from unladen ships and set up cut-price stalls. And the hatters insisted that the twice-weekly Havre open market was actually destroying the community, since "the public
was cheated by persons who without any knowledge insinuate themselves into the trade." The rise in theft, drunkenness and violent brawls in the town was due, they thought, to this floating, undisciplined element.
On the shifting frontiers between town and country, these conflicts were particularly sharp. The usual scenario was the difficulty townsmen had in enforcing regulations about the marketing of produce brought in from the suburban hinterland. But occasionally it could be the farmers of the villages "outside the walls" who felt themselves victimized by commercial exploitation. The affaire des boues (best translated as the "muck business") was the major concern for the many little communities to the south and west of Paris—now so many termini on the Metro—like Yanves, Ivry, Pantin and
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La Villette. For a long time these bustling little hamlets had been held hostage by the Paris butchers' guild, which had heen given the right to pasture its livestock in their fields. Under this monopoly, the radial zone around Paris had, in effect, been requisitioned to feed the great belly of the city. Local farmers were not permitted to raise animals or sell them to the city on their own account.
They were, however, allowed to grow cabbages and onions, carrots and beans. And in recognition of having surrendered their meadows to the Paris butchers, the villages had been given the right to collect street ordure, gratis, from the city: muck worth its weight in gold as market garden fertilizer. Since the late 1770s, the cahiers complained, barriers had been set up to charge their dung carts fees to freight the precious cargo out of the city, violating the quid pro quo. While exploited by this new business practice, they in their turn had not been allowed to charge the meat merchants anything at all for pasture. Redress, in their view, lay not in the liberal solution of allowing each party to charge the going rate for the service, but rather to restore the traditional terms of the agreement. If nothing was done they threatened to clear the butchers' stock in their own direct way.
Many other processes of economic modernization triggered angry responses. A syndicate formed by an entrepreneur, Defer de La Nouerre, to divert a tributary of the Seine, the Yvette, to a new canal provoked violent opposition from all the riverain parishes along its course. The plan would rob the faubourg Saint-Marcel of a major water supply, ruin the Gobelin tapestries and worst of all deprive sixteen water mills of their capability to produce flour. In February 1788 the Parlement of Paris banned the enterprise and ordered Defer to repair any damage he had done in the early works as well as restore the river to its original course. But both Brienne's and Necker's governments favored the project, and with its status uncertain, the cahiers of affected communities bristled with indignation lest the operation go ahead.
It was these kinds of highly specific, local grievances that could arouse mighty passions in the winter and spring of 1789. As cases before the Parlements, they had been isolated instances of the conflict between nascent capitalism and community rights. Woven into the texts of the cahiers and the procedure to elect deputies for the Estates-General, they contributed a great deal to the politicization of the Third Estate. In this sense at least, the politics of the Nation was composed as much of a myriad of local material
complaints as it was of the high-sounding epithets of
constitution-making. And as would he the case during the Revolution, the interests of center and locality, elite and rank-and-
file did not always pull in the same direction
While the cahiers of the liberal nobility offered an alluring picture of a briskly modernizing France that would consummate the great alterations of the 1770s and 1780s by shaking off restrictions like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, those of the Third Estate wanted, very often, to return to the cocoon. By implication they suggested a mythical France, governed by an all-seeing, just and benign monarch, cared for by a humble and responsible clergy. In that ideal commonwealth, administration would somehow manage to be both everywhere and nowhere, present in the local community when needed (as in the strengthened marechaussee constabulary that many cahiers requested) but careful not to ride roughshod over local rights. Such a government would thus succeed in establishing just and reciprocal relations between citizens and between citizens and government.
Above all it was to be a France free of the corruptions of modern life. Innumerable cahiers of the Third urged the abolition of gaming houses, of lotteries—in some cases even of cafes—as places of ill repute that swallowed their young people in poverty and debauchery. For the scum of the gilded world—bankrupts, usurers, grain speculators—they reserved their fiercest punishments, like branding. Many of them urged the abolition of the petits spectacles—the boulevard theaters—with a fervor that would have warmed the heart of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As if following the apocalyptic rhetoric of Mercier, they wished to lance the poisoned carbuncle of city life and clean it of its mess.
This was, of course, to ask for the impossible. But asking for the impossible is one good definition of a revolution.
iv DEAD RABBITS, TORN WALLPAPER March-April 1789
The first heavy casualties of the French Revolution were rabbits. On March 10 and 11, 1789, the villagers of Neuville formed themselves into platoons, armed with clubs and sickles, and searched meadows and woods for their prolific little enemies. What dogs they had accompanied them, and the shout of "Hou, hou " signified to the rest of the hunting party a satisfactory kill. Where none were found, traps were laid in defiance of draconian game laws that had long terrified the peasantry into sullen obedience.
Throughout the Ile-de-France and elsewhere in northern France, from the estates of the Comte d'Oisy in Artois to those of the Prince de Conti at Pontoise, similar invasions took place. Disregarding the game laws that had protected birds and animals, and the brutal "captaincies" that enforced
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them, hobnail boots trampled through forbidden forests or climbed over fences and stone walls. Grass was mown in grain fields to reveal the nests of partridge and pheasant, snipe and woodcock; eggs were smashed or fledglings left to the dogs. Warrens were staved in, hares rooted out from behind rocks. In daring villages, pit traps were even set for the most prized game, which was also the most voracious consumer of green shoots: roe deer. The most spectacular assaults were on those chateaux in miniature: dovecots, from which the peasantry had seen aerial raiding parties launched against their seed, returning in absolute safety to their seigneurial compound. They were, said one cahier, "flying thieves." In one district of
Lorraine, no less than nineteen cahiers called for their outright destruction, while another sixteen insisted that doves and pigeons should, at the very least, be firmly shut up for fifteen days after sowing.
It could hardly be called poaching since there was nothing furtive about the onslaught. In some cases, the slaughtered game was hung from poles like trophies and paraded about the village. Initially the gangs ran into mounted patrols serving the captaincies. But there were simply too many determined peasants who, with their winter crop destroyed by the climate, were not prepared to see their spring crop turn into rabbit fodder. In some places, like the estates of the Prince de Conde near Chantilly, villagers simply ignored the game laws and hunted at will. When they ran into gamekeepers, as on March 28, they shot them dead on the spot.
Faced with this kind of mass disobedience, systematic attempts at repression faltered, and before long authorities turned a blind eye to much of what was happening. At Oisy a united confederacy of villages overran the local count's game. At Herblay, where the onslaught had been particularly fierce, its ringleader, the aptly named Toussaint Boucher, was briefly apprehended, but later released. In defying the captaincies of game and in risking sentences of flogging, branding and banishment, the rabbit and bird killers obviously believed that they had Right—in the form of the King's will—on their side. One of the cahiers of the Ile-de-France had insisted that it w as "the general will of the Nation that game should be destroyed since
it carries off a third of the subsistence of citizens and this is the intention of our good King who watches over the common good of his people and who loves them."
To the desperate, there was something particularly satisfying about smashing in a dovecot. But when its mutilated contents were strewn over the lawn ol a country estate, an unsubtle but eloquent message was being
conveyed to the seigneurs ol France. The game riots announced a
move-ment from verbal complaint to violent action. It was as though the royal consultation of the people had produced the
assumption that the Kins
now licensed what had been unlawful; that his law, and by extension the will of the Nation, overrode the selfish appropriations of privilege. Killing game was not only an act of desperation, it was, by the lights of 1780, Patriotic.
Killing the game of the seigneurs, after all, was preferable to turning anger on their persons. And it is striking that throughout the rural
insurrections of 1789 a succession of animal or inanimate targets was selected for the visceral discharge of hatred. Bloodshed through surrogate sacrifices, be they the mannequins burned on the Pont Neuf, prize white doves strangled in their cots or more inanimate targets like violently defaced coats of arms on carriages or church pews, all performed the same symbolic function: an oblation for freedom.
Attacks on grain transports, which broke out at about the same time, followed the same pattern. As in the "flour wars" of 1775, the rioters believed they were more faithfully carrying out the King's will than the authorities who had usurped his name. He had decreed, so it was rumored, that the price of a setter of wheat should be reduced from forty-two to twenty-four livres—as though there were a primitive justice performed in the transposition of the numbers. Bread was to be priced, justly, at two sous a pound instead of the market rate of nearly four. The King's enemies were the same as the People's: speculators, hoarders, fraudulent millers, profiteering bakers. The vacuum of power announced by the elections to the Estates-General reinforced this impression and made the leadership of the attacks on barges, wagons and flour stores more audacious.
Conspicious in that leadership were women. At Viroflay it was women who set up a checkpoint on the road between Versailles and Paris, stopping convoys and searching them for grain or flour before permitting them to pass. At Joiiy another attroupement of women demanded that grain be sold well below the market rate and the most substantial farmer of the neighborhood, a man named Bure, wisely let them have it at whatever price they asked. In a wide radius of countryside around Paris, from Bourg-la-Reine to Rambouillet, the story was the same.
In the early spring of 1789, the geography of popular intervention was much wider than it had been fourteen years earlier. Mid-March to mid-April saw attacks on bakeries and granaries throughout the Nord, from Cambrai and Valenciennes to Dunkirk and Lille. In Brittany, violence had never really died down since the street fighting of January in Rennes but had fanned out into smaller towns like Morlaix and Vannes. Between March 30 and April 3 a riot at Besancon led by women enforced maximum grain prices and went on to smash up the houses of recalcitrant
Parlementaires.
The breadth and intensity of the disorders in the countryside required troops to contain the movement before it became a general insurrection. But the epidemic of disturbances in provincial towns spread available forces too thin. Increasingly, it was left to local communities to fend for themselves as best they could. As early as April 1788 Troyes had set an example by forming an urban militia responsible to local authorities rather than the officers of the crown. A year later, meetings convened for electoral purposes gave more momentum to this devolution under stress, and volunteer guards were armed in Marseille, Etampes, Orleans and Beaugency. It was a crucial moment in the collapse of royal authority. First came the recognition that the pere nourricier—the King-as-Father-Provider—could not feed his subjects. Then followed the ample evidence that neither could he protect them.
It was in Paris, of course, that that anger and hunger were most dangerously joined. Collectively, the city was already indignant because it had been precluded from assembling on the model of the Dauphine, as a united "Commune" (its medieval title). The twenty electoral assemblies of the nobility of Paris (as well as many of those of the clergy) all preceded their cahier with a formal complaint that they had thus been deprived of the blessings of patriotic fraternity. And whereas about one sixth of the citizens had been disfranchised by tax qualifications elsewhere in France, in Paris a higher tax qualification of six livres ensured that the proportion rose to one quarter. A typical pamphlet protesting this exclusion commented angrily that "our deputies are not going to be our deputies. Things have been so arranged that we can have no part in electing them, and the city of Paris, divided into sixty districts, will be, in every respect, like sixty flocks of sheep."
The Parisian worker was thus the first to experience, in short order, the euphoria of national representation followed by the sting of alienation. Aside from the industrial depression, the frozen Seine had taken livelihoods from the gens de riviere—dockers, bargemen, log floaters—and bitter condi-tions lasting into spring added to their number unemployed masons, house painters and carpenters. When the weather abated somewhat in April twelve thousand of the neediest were sent to dig at the buttes of Montmar-tre; others scraped the quais or dredged rivers and canals. But the scale of distress overwhelmed these modest work projects.
In the bakers' shops, the price of the all-important four-pound loaf fluctuated between twelve and fifteen sous. In February twenty-seven bakers were each fined fifty livres for exceeding the permitted ceiling of
fourteen and a hall sous. Their guild immediately protested that, given
shortages and high wholesale prices, it was impossible for them to sell at
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this level without cheating on wheat or dangerously polluting the loaf with
makeweight substitutes. Newspapers reported that men were exchanging their shirts for bread and, in one case, a woman removed her corset and gave it to the baker for a loaf. In such circumstances a Cahier of the Poor appeared arguing for a statutory minimum wage and guaranteed subsistence for all able-bodied working men and women. A similar Cahier of the Fourth Order, written by Dufourny de Villiers, urged a substantial tax on the rich to support the poor, since cupidity had created a society where "men are treated as though they are disposable."
At the end of April, a week after the Third Estate of Paris had held their much delayed primary assemblies, misery and suspicion boiled over in violence. The occasion was a rumor, circulating in the faubourg Saint-Antoine (immediately to the east of the Bastille), that the wallpaper manufacturer Reveillon had said he would cut his workers' wages to fifteen sous a day. Reveillon and his fellow victim the saltpeter manufacturer Henriot indignantly denied the story. He was, in fact, one of the more conscientious employers in Paris, paying on average between thirty-five and fifty sous a day and keeping much of his force on the books during the bitterest period of the winter when weather made their work impossible. But he was precisely the kind of capitalist entrepreneur guaranteed to provoke the wrath of both the independent craft artisans and journeymen who made up the majority of the population of the faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Reveillon's career was an exemplary story of the self-made businessman not uncommon at the end of the old regime. He had begun as a simple apprentice paperworker but had left the guild-controlled industry for the newer and freer line of wallpaper manufacture. Marrying well he had used