Prof: This is the
beginning of the French part of the course.
Today I'm going to talk about
the Enlightenment and the cultural concomitants of the
French Revolution, and how people began to imagine
an alternate sense of sovereignty in the nation.
You're in for a treat on
Monday, because I have one of the only bootlegged copies of
the live speech and then the execution of Louis XVI.
I'm going to play that and also
the death of Citizen Marat in the bathtub at the hands of
Charlotte Corday. That will be on Monday.
Then I'll talk
about--inevitably, though I don't particularly
like him--Napoleon on Wednesday. The next three times are about
la belle France, but because the Revolution is
terribly important and, indeed, in lots of ways in many
places--it's well worth doing. So, I'm going to do four things
today. I'm going to first talk about
your basic outline of what difference the Enlightenment
made, followed by--with reference to
my good friend Bob Darnton's work,
The Social History of Ideas--and look at
surprising ways that Enlightenment influence was
felt. I'm not talking about the
big-time people like Rousseau and Voltaire,
but the Grub Street hacks. Then I'm going to talk a little
bit about the public sphere, taking two examples.
One from the work of David Bell
and one from the work of Sarah Maza,
in which you can see this emergence of this possibly
different way of viewing sovereignty residing in the
nation and not in a king. Then look again at what
difference, in a very strange way, the Enlightenment made in
all of this. First, the kind of classic
stuff, just to review for you. If you had to summarize six
ways that the Enlightenment mattered, you might list them
like this. First of all, without question,
Enlightenment thought--although the Enlightenment thinkers
disagreed on many things, and a few were atheists,
but not many, most were Deists and believed
that God was everywhere--the Enlightenment did weaken the
hold of traditional religion, particularly the role of the
Catholic Church as a public institution in France.
Of course, if you read in
high-school French or wherever Candide,
which is blatantly antireligious,
of Voltaire, you'll see the most extreme
example of that. Secondly, and related to this,
Enlightenment thinkers taught a secular code of ethics,
one that was divorced from religious beliefs.
That they were engaged with
humanity. They loved humanity.
They thought people were
basically good, and this shouldn't be just a
valley of tears awaiting eternal life, and went out to make such
claims. Third is that they developed a
critical spirit of analysis not to accept routine tradition.
Truths that were passed down
from generation to generation, particularly those passed down
by the religious establishment and--not to accept routine
tradition, such, for example,
routine hierarchies. This was part of their spirit
of analysis. Fourth, they were curious about
history and believed in progress.
They were convinced that France
had a special role to play in this.
To be sure, the Enlightenment
was to be found in many places in Europe, and in what became
the United States. Paris particularly played a
central role in that. Fifth, that they differentiated
absolutism from despotism. In order to understand what
happens in this remarkable series of events in 1789 and in
subsequent years, as I said before,
there weren't ten people in France who considered themselves
republicans, that is who wanted a republic
in 1789 and how it was that two or three years later,
in 1793 it became easy for the majority of the population to
imagine a life without any king at all.
Sixth--and here's the role of
the Grub Street hacks, of the third division of
Enlightenment thinkers that I'll talk about in just a few
minutes--they heaped abuse against what they considered to
be unearned, unjustified privilege,
and--;how can one put this--disrespected the monarchy
and the nobles who hung around the king.
One can say in hindsight,
because we know what happened next,
that the Enlightenment helped prepare the way for the French
Revolution and that the French Revolution transferred power,
transferred authority to people who were very influenced by the
Enlightenment. The classic example which I
will give, because I enjoy talking about
him so much and he is important, is Maximilian Robespierre,
who in many ways was a child of the philosophes.
As you know,
the philosophes, which is such an important word
in French, became a word in English.
The philosophes were the
thinkers of the Enlightenment. Robespierre,
born in Arras in the northern part of France and now what is
the Pas de Calais, was very much influenced by
Enlightenment thought. As the twelve of the Committee
of Public Safety sat around that big green table making decisions
that affected the lives of lots of people in France,
Enlightenment influence was certainly there.
The Enlightenment stretched
across frontiers. I think there's a map in the
second edition of the book that you are kindly reading where you
can find copies of Diderot's famous encyclopedia.
You could find it in South
Africa. You could find it in Moscow.
You could find it in
Philadelphia. You could find it in New York.
You could find it in papal Rome.
You could find it all over the
place. One thing that's interesting is
that twenty or thirty years ago, when I was starting out,
when people did what they used to call intellectual history,
intellectual history was the big ideas.
You call it the Via Regia of
history, where you've got one idea
moving along and it hooks up with another idea,
and then a third idea comes as a result of that idea.
It's rather like traditional
art history where you try to discover where it is that
Pizarro got his red ochre as a color,
or where such and such a Baroque painter got the idea of
painting cherubs in a certain way.
In the very early ‘70s,
my colleague, retired a long time,
a great historian Peter Gay, coined the phrase "the
social history of ideas." Ideas, too, have a history.
Who understood Rousseau?
Who read Voltaire?
Who read the Encyclopedia of
Diderot? How do we know how these ideas
were used? He called for the social
history of ideas. A number of people,
including Bob Darnton who is now at Harvard,
but taught at Princeton for decades and who turned out the
finest historians of old regime France,
took this very seriously. So did another friend of mine,
Danielle Roche, who did work on the
académies, which I'll discuss in a while.
They began to look at how
Enlightenment ideas got around. How did copies of
Candide, which was illegal in France,
censored. How did these things turn up in
France? Let me just say a couple things
about this. Enlightenment ideas really came
into elite popular opinion, in what we call the public
sphere--that is, people who are interested in
ideas, and people who became
interested in politics--in really three major ways in
France. There are equivalents of these
in other place. The Scottish example because
the Scottish Enlightenment is very important.
You can read about it in the
book. One of these will be quite
clear there. First, through,
académies. An academy was not a university.
It has nothing to do with a
university. They still exist.
I'm a member of one of these
academies, an obscure one in the Ardèche.
An academy was a group of
erudites, sometimes including clergy, many nobles,
many bourgeois people of education.
The population that was
literate increases in Western Europe decidedly in the
eighteenth century. They would get together and
discuss ideas. They had contests where people
who wanted to make a little money would answer a question
put out by the académie.
They would write responses to
questions about science, religion, and big ideas.
Robespierre wins one of these
contests. These académies meet in
smaller rooms than this, but they discuss ideas.
These ideas are putting in
sharp analysis, or re-evaluation,
the role of the church as an institution.
They have to get around some
way. People have to know about them.
The academy is one way this
happened. A second one,
moving to number three, are Masonic lodges.
Masonic lodges still exist.
There's one,
I don't know if it's still active, but there's a big
Masonic building out on Whitney on the right.
I think it became an insurance
building. One of the horrors of my
seventh grade life was having to be dragged off to the dancing
school in Portland, Oregon,
which met in a large building which was a Masonic lodge.
Masonic lodges begin in
Scotland. They are secularizing
institutions that the members mostly all agree,
agreed in the eighteenth century,
that the church's public institution role is too
important. Masonic lodges talk about these
ideas as well. They talk about Rousseau,
Diderot, Montesquieu, and all of these people.
This is a second way in which
these ideas get out. The third is the salon.
There's another French word
that's so important it became an English word.
A salon was a gathering of
pretty elite people, but interested in the life of
the mind. They were hosted by hostesses,
again, the role of women in the Enlightenment.
I give you in the book the
example of Madame Geoffrin, which was the classic one.
People would come together to
eat, to drink, and to discuss ideas.
When British guests came to
Paris, the salons, they said, "All they do is
eat and drink. They spend all their time
eating and drinking, and they don't discuss ideas
that much." In fact, they did.
There's still a wonderful
place in Paris called the Palais Royal where you can go,
and on very hot days--in the eighteenth century,
in the 1770s, you can imagine people meeting
there talking about the ideas of young Enlightenment hotshots,
those people who have become part of the canon of western
civilization. This is another way where these
ideas get along. Young, would-be
philosophes on the make coming up from the provinces,
what they want to do is be introduced to one of these
hostesses so that they will be invited to trot out their
intellectual wares at one of these gatherings.
These are concrete examples of
the way that these ideas got around.
People didn't pay any attention
to this before about thirty, thirty-five years ago.
Danielle Roche's book on the
académies, two huge volumes not
translated, are really marvelous in all of that.
That's something to keep in
mind. The high Enlightenment really
ends in 1778, traditionally.
That's a textbook kind of date.
But it does matter,
because that's when Voltaire and his great enemy,
Rousseau, both die. After that, there are no more
Montesquieus, or Voltaires,
or the big-time all stars of the philosophes.
There aren't any more.
But there is this next
generation of would-be philosophes,
people who could think and write and who want to hit the
big time. They see that Voltaire made big
bucks, big francs, big livre writing.
They want to be like him.
They want to be like Voltaire.
They want to be like Rousseau,
his archenemy who paced around his little farm called Les
Charmettes in Savoy outside of Chambéry,
and who hated Voltaire. They really couldn't stand each
other. But he also hit the big time.
What the Grub Street hacks,
Grub Street refers to--I don't know if it's a real street or
imaginary street in London where lots of would-be writers and
writers who are peddling their wares hung around.
These Grub Street hacks,
the third division of people who want to have the kind of
entry into the salon life to put forth their ideas.
They live on the top floor,
where the poorest people live. They're dodging their landlords
all the time. They don't have enough money to
pay. A lot of them live in Paris
around now around Odéon. It doesn't matter if you know
Odéon at all, but they live right around that
part in the Latin Quarter, but more in what now is the
Sixth Arrondissement, and they write.
But what do they write about?
They need to make money.
The big news here,
as Darnton discovered, is they write pornography.
They write scatological
pornography. They write what they call in
French libelles. They write broadsides,
really, denouncing the royal family, denouncing the queen
above all. Indelibly called "the
Austrian whore" by her many detractors,
who are omnipresent. They write against what they
think is unearned privilege, the kind of censorship that
they see is keeping them from hitting the big time.
The point of Darnton's many
wonderful books is that in the long run,
although these people were the Grub Street hacks,
Voltaire denigrated them as the canaille,
the rabble, the scribblers, jealous, eager, anxious,
hungry--;is that their attacks on the regime and against the
unearned privilege, as they saw it,
helps erode belief in the monarchy,
and helps suggest that the monarchy itself and the people
hanging around the monarchy at Versailles is lapsing into
despotism. So, they do make a difference.
Let me give you an example.
This is sort of a classic one.
Imagine you're a bookseller in
Poitiers. Poitiers is a very nice town
full of lovely old romance churches in central western
France. You are writing to Switzerland
to order books that you want to sell to people who have ordered
books, for example. He writes the following letter:
"Here is a short list of philosophical books (books
written by the philosophes) that I want
to order. Please send the invoice in
advance. They include:
Venus and the Cloister, or, The Nun in the
Nightgown; Christianity Unveiled (that
could be the subtitle, too);
Memories of Madame la Marquise de Pompadour;
Inquiry on the Origins of Oriental Despotism;
The System of Nature; Teresa the Philosopher;
Margot the Camp Follower. This is not exactly the stuff
of Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and these other
people. But yet, those who penned such
things imagined that they were philosophes and wanted to
have the same kind of impact that Voltaire and the others
had. These were la canaille,
the kind of rabble of Grub Street.
Why was he writing Switzerland
to begin with? Again, this is the question of
how do these ideas get around? One of the things that the Grub
Street hacks didn't like is that you've got censors.
You've got paid censors who
work for the government who say, "This can't be
published" or "Un-uh.
You shouldn't have published
that baby. That wasn't a good idea."
The result is,
in a system in which privilege, of which monopolies,
of which guilds controlled the production and distribution of
almost everything, that book-selling and
book-printing are monopolies controlled by the state.
So, if you're a Parisian
printer, unless you're risking being
thrown in the slammer, the slammer (that's not
a real word in French, obviously),
you can't print this stuff out in Paris.
So much of the Enlightenment
literature is published in--you'll not be shocked to
know--you already know this, Amsterdam, or in Brussels,
in the southern Netherlands, or Switzerland.
Bob Darnton,
when he was a young professor, before that a young graduate
student, he hit the jackpot. A lot of the stuff was printed
in Switzerland in Neufchatel, and he got hold of the archives
of this printing company. He was able to do the social
history of ideas. Who bought what?
By the way, before the Ryan Air
or any of these places, how do you get all of this
stuff from Switzerland, where there are big mountains,
into France? How do you get it to Poitiers?
How do you get it there?
Again, you have to look at the
way that this stuff is distributed.
The ideas, we've already seen
how they were distributed, but how literally do you get
these books, these bouquins,
these pamphlets, these brochures from
Switzerland or the equivalent, from Amsterdam or
Brussels--that's easier, a flat country is a little
different than mountains--into France?
Well, in France,
as in the German states, as in Italy,
there were peddlers. There were peddlers.
They would go on the road and
they had--like a medicine ball in a gym, they'd have these huge
leather bags. They'd be stuffed with all
sorts of things--pens and pins and--I think I mentioned this is
another context--and religious literature,
but also hidden at the bottom, beneath the religious
literature, they are smuggling into France
Enlightenment literature. They have drop-off points.
They go over the Jura
Mountains, that's not so easy to do, and they take them to a city
like Chaumont in the east, or Metz or Nancy.
Then somebody else carries the
stuff all the way. Avoiding the police around
Paris, the gendarmerie,
the maréchaussées
as they were called then, this stuff, Margot the Camp
Follower ends up pleasing this drooling guy in Poitiers,
who can buy it from his bookstore.
You can really follow not only
Diderot's encyclopedia--and how do we know where Diderot's
encyclopedia ended up, by the way?
Well, for example,
people who leave wills, that's how we know about
literature in the nineteenth century,
because the libraries in estates would be detailed,
so we know what books people had.
In the eighteenth century we
have a tremendous proliferation of ideas, of reading,
of literacy, and of ways of discussing these
ideas. I've already mentioned three of
them there, but if you look at the case of Britain,
you've got the coffeehouses. Coffeehouses follow the mania
of coffee. Coffee comes from where?
The colonies.
So, coffeehouses are part of
this sort of globalization of the economy, but also the
globalization of ideas. This stuff all kind of fits
together. Again, Voltaire,
Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot and the others
would be just horrified to think that anybody intellectual would
be mentioning some of these Grub Street hacks along with them,
because they didn't accept them and nor were they of the same
quality at all. Some of these guys, by the way,
there's one who I mention in the book,
a guy called Brissot, B-R-I-S-S-O-T,
who becomes an important leader of a faction in the Revolution
called the Girondins, from around Bordeaux,
who are against the Jacobins. More about that later.
Brissot is broke.
How is he going to pay the
landlord? He has no idea.
Where is he going to get his
next drink? What does he do?
He works for the police.
He works as a police informer
on the other would-be philosophes,
on the Grub Street hacks. How do we know this?
Darnton found the dossier in
which Brissot is being paid off by these people.
What are other ways that we
know how many of these characters there were?
There were about 200 to 300.
I don't remember exactly.
Why?
Because they want money.
On one hand they say,
"I don't like this censorship, it's keeping people
from recognizing my true genius."
On the other hand they write
little sniveling letters saying, "I am a writer and a very
good one, indeed. Therefore, I merit a state
pension." They write these letters to the
various equivalents of ministries,
saying, "Please give me some money,
because I am a really wonderful writer and instead of repressing
my work, you should be saluting my
genius." They write clammy letters like
that, that you find in the archives.
We piece this stuff together
gradually. Let me just race over here and
give you just an example of--where is this stuff?--here
we go. What would Voltaire think of
this? Here is one of these pamphlets
that's denouncing the high-livers out at Versailles.
"The public is warned that
an epidemic disease is raging among the girls of the opera,
that has begun to reach the ladies of the court and that has
been communicated to their lackeys.
This disease elongates the
face, destroys the complexion, reduces the weight,
and causes horrible ravages where it becomes situated.
There are ladies without teeth,
others without eyebrows, and some are now completely
paralyzed." People want to know what it is.
It's obviously a venereal
disease. He's obviously exaggerating
the--who knows? I don't know--but the results
of such a malady. What he's doing is he's
suggesting that what's really going on at Versailles is lots
of people--how do I put this politely?--hooking up all over
the place at the petites réunions,
while they're dressing up as peasants, or whatever,
and that the result is very demeaning for the French state
and for the French monarchy. So, does this have an effect?
It does.
It really does.
It contributes to what has been
called the desacralization of the French monarchy.
It is very hard to argue that
God has put absolute monarchs on earth to bring people better
lives if you've got these people--and ordinary people did
not get into Versailles, unless they were among the
15,000 lackeys working there. Lackeys would be the term given
by the people who employed them. You didn't know.
You had to surmise.
You had to guess what was going
on. I'll give you a couple of
examples in a while, and I'd better hurry up and do
this, in which you can kind of see how this works.
I'll give you kind of a
spectacularly interesting example, at least I think so,
at the end. By the way, just as an aside,
during the French Revolution Louis XVI decides to get the
hell out. He and Marie Antoinette,
improbably, dress themselves up as ordinary people.
They're not people who have to
set the alarm clock usually. They get up at 3:00 in the
morning and they get into this large carriage that's been
stuffed with silver and foie gras and all sorts of other
things. They hightail it toward what is
now the Belgian frontier, but they get further and
further behind. You can read about this when
you get to that chapter. It's an interesting story.
Finally, they get recognized.
She is not a governess,
she is the queen. One of the people that first
realizes this is the king has actually caught a glimpse of the
king himself by looking through the fence at Versailles at the
time of a wedding. He sees the king.
There aren't photographs.
He recognizes the king's nose.
He gets down on his knees and
says, "Sire, you are the king."
This guy can no longer pretend
that he's a mere hanger-on assisting a Russian baroness.
It's all over but the shoutin'
at that point. What these people do is they
helped break down this sense of automatic respect for the
monarchy as an institution. Of course, the fact that they
can't stand Marie Antoinette who, rightly or wrongly,
is accused of all sorts of things.
This is racing ahead of the
story, but Louis XVI was a big-time cuckolded guy.
His wife was seriously sleeping
around while he was taking apart and putting back together
clocks, which he liked to do in the big
house when his wife is out in the bushes,
to put it crudely. I forgot this is being
televised. Anyway, take that back.
Can you erase that, please?
Anyway, what these people do is
over the long run this helps erode respect for the monarchy,
and helps us explain why it was in 1789 you could imagine a
world without a king and a world without a queen.
When they bring them back,
they bring the old boy and his wife back from Varennes,
which is in the northeast of France,
the National Guard turns their backs in serious disrespect to
the carriage, and they hold their guns upside
down. At that point,
that's la fin des haricots,
the end of the green beans, as the French say,
for the king. But this process started
earlier. The third-string hacks of the
Enlightenment had something to do with it.
Let me give you a couple of
examples also from other friends, but really good serious
work has been done in the last twenty or twenty-five years.
Rocketing right along here,
let me give you another example of this relationship of the
public sphere to imagining a new source of sovereignty,
that is the nation, and give you an example of how
that works. This comes from the work of
David Bell, who is my colleague and still very dear friend who
teaches at Johns Hopkins. This is from his work on
lawyers in the eighteenth century.
We'll give you an example of
how this fits together. It fits into the Enlightenment
stuff, because if Enlightenment
literature was censored and sometimes hard to get hold of,
though an encyclopedia was tolerated and then not tolerated
and then tolerated again, what Bell's work on lawyers
demonstrates is the way in which lawyers and legal briefs help
get these ideas around as well. Because you could not censor
legal briefs. To give you just an aside,
don't worry about this now. In the case of imperial Russia
in the late nineteenth century you had big-time censorship by
the police. In fact, when there were these
political trials, lots of what was said in the
courtroom got around as well and couldn't really be censored in
the way that ordinary publications could.
You had this same sort of
effect there. Let me give you a couple
examples. They're complicated examples,
but don't worry about them. The first would be from this
very strange not really heresy, but I guess the Catholic Church
considered it a heresy called Jansenism.
I remember once coming in to do
the equivalent of this lecture and having to look at my own
book for a good definition of Jansenism that I must have found
once, because it's so obscure.
There was a bishop who didn't
think he was obscure, but a Belgian bishop called a
Jansen who thought that the Catholic Church was becoming too
over-mighty, and full of Baroque masses and
huge expenses for archbishops who weren't doing a damn thing.
He imagined another kind of
religion and became very ascetic.
Somebody once called them
Calvinists who went to mass. They were still Catholic,
but they didn't believe in this high Baroque church.
Jansenism was in 1715 or so.
Then it comes back in the 1760s
or 1770s. It's extremely boring stuff.
Louis XIV didn't think it was
boring. He sent out the troops to burn
down Jansenist abbeys, the big one was called
Port-Royal outside of Paris. He thought that this was a
threat to the Galician Church, which was sort of the alliance
of the Catholic Church with the monarchy in France.
Rather like Carthage,
they were supposed to plow salt into the land and all this
business. So, they wage war on these
Jansenist people, who were rather like Calvinists
in many ways. But the only point of that is
that there are lawyers who begin to defend the Jansenists and
begin to see the actions of the king vis-à
vis this persecuted religious minority as despotic.
When lawyers are publishing
legal briefs--and there's enough references in the book,
so you can put this together, but I just want you to see the
point. When they begin to publish
legal briefs defending the Jansenists against these kinds
of attacks, these are published by thousands of them.
They can't be censored.
They begin to suggest at a time
in the eighteenth century, particularly after mid-century
when we can already begin to speak of French nationalism,
at least among the elite at the time of the Seven Years' War,
1756-1763, thus the Seven Years' War.
It begins to suggest two things.
That monarchies can behave
despotically, going beyond the accepted
limits of absolute rule, and that the nation,
this idea of the nation is being betrayed by bad
governments. If this doesn't sound like the
French Revolution, then nothing else will.
Those are very important
defining moments. The same things happen also in
the 1760s and 1770s, with various attempts to
liberalize the French economy that I describe in the book.
The king's attempt to dispense
with the parlements, which were really noble law
courts that were provincial. You can read about this.
But the same thing happens.
This is the point.
These lawyers begin turning out
these legal briefs that imply the same two things:
that absolute monarchy is risking stepping over the lines
of the acceptable and behaving in a despotic way,
and that there is something called the nation in which
nobody would have imagined that classes were all equal--the
discourse of liberty, fraternity and equality is a
hell of a long way away--;but that the traditional rights of
the nation are being betrayed by the monarchy and that things
isn't so good at Versailles. Again, trying to look ahead and
see what happens in 1788 and above all,
1789, which is one--I'm not a big guy on dates in history and
having to remember all these dates.
But 1789, like 1917,
that's a big one. That's a big one.
But in order to also understand
the emergence of a radical republic and the execution of
the king, one has to see that the nation
becomes invested with a sense of moral quality that makes it not
impossible to imagine a world without kings.
And, so, lawyers,
who are called barristers, play a major role in all of
this. Again, this has to be seen in
the context of a century in which more and more people can
read. The literacy rate in a country
like France is still well below fifty percent,
maybe forty or forty-five percent, something like that.
More men could read than women.
Not only literacy increases
among the elite, but the amount of things that
are published and the amount of newspapers that are published
expands dramatically. A point of reference would be
in Britain, you can read about this, the campaign of John
Wilkes, who was sort of a rascally character.
But Wilkes--and the number
forty-five becomes virtually illegal,
because forty-five was the number of a newspaper in which
Wilkes and his supporters essentially call out the British
political system. Again, we're talking mostly
about Western Europe, and literacy is much higher in
the Netherlands and in Northern France and in Northern Italy and
in England than in other places. This is part of this cultural
revolution. It's important to see the role
of this, because in orthodox Marxist
interpretation you had to have the ever-rising bourgeoisie,
the rising in the fourteenth century.
There they are again in the
sixteenth century. They're like some sort of
runaway bread or something like that.
In the nineteenth century there
they are, the bourgeois century. I'll give a lecture on the
bourgeoisie, because they do indeed rise.
Nonetheless,
a kind of class analysis can't be completely thrown out.
Classes did exist and people
had a sense of themselves as being members of a social class.
It was not immutable--these
boundaries were more fluid in Britain than in other places,
but still are important. But now for the last thirty
years, people have paid more attention
to the cultural concomitance of revolution and what difference
Enlightenment ideas made, and what difference the
emergence of a sense of the nation and the infusion of
politics with a sense of right and wrong and morality.
It's an important part of all
this. In the last twelve minutes and
thirty seconds that I have today, let me give you another
example of this. I think this is a
fascinating--it's so fascinating I can't find it.
Let me give you an example.
This is drawing upon an
excellent book by Sarah Maza. It's a very well-known episode,
but it shows you and ties together the sense of the nation
along with the impact of this sort of third generation of
Enlightenment hacks after 1778, to understand their role in the
erosion of a sense that the monarchy was immutable in
representing the rights of the nation,
even if that construct was just coming into being.
In this book called--;what's it
called?--;Private Lives and Public Affairs.
Maza takes a couple of cause
célèbres. Cause célèbre
would be like one of the things that you find in the
tabloids in Britain or the U.S. I don't read that stuff,
so I really can't give any good examples.
But one of these actors and
actresses you always see running around, or whoever this person
is, Brittany Spears, or something like that.
A singer or actress,
I don't know what she does. But anyway, something like
that, that people focus their attention on these people.
They sort of dominate,
if you will--this is almost an insane comparison,
but the public sphere in that they're in the news all the
time. And, so,
what Maza did about the same time that David Bell was working
on the role of lawyers in the eighteenth century is that she
took a couple of these examples, and shows the way in which
private affairs that were kind of sleazy and not too cool--but
were sensational--helped bring these threads together and
contributed to kind of erode the prestige of the monarchy.
This fits into the sense that
I've already given you that was extremely pervasive,
particularly around Paris is that a lot of things that went
on at Versailles weren't so good.
The 10,000 nobles who were
clustered around Louis XVI and particularly his wife were
undermining the authority and the prestige of the monarchy,
and that wasn't a good thing. An incident called "The
Diamond Necklace Affair" is illustrative and mildly
amusing, not more than that. It also involves this Palais
Royal place in Paris before. A woman called Jeanne de
Saint-Rémy--the name doesn't matter at all--was a
poor noble. She claimed descent from the
royal family. She had a pretty good education.
She had important protectors.
She marries an officer of
rather dubious noble title, who was called,
quite forgettably, the Marquis de la Motte.
He met the fifty-year-old
cardinal called Louis de Rohan, whose name I should have put on
there, R-O-H-A-N. He was from a very famous old
family called Rohan Soubise. The national archives used to
be and now they're adjacent to it in this fabulous old--why
don't they ever have things that work in here?
It's just unbelievable.
I can't find anything to write
with. The family called Rohan
Soubise--there's this wonderful, wonderful palace or chateau in
the Marais, which is still there.
This cardinal is on the make.
He's very, very wealthy.
He's a cardinal.
That's why he's wealthy.
Or he's wealthy because he's a
cardinal. He thinks he's snubbed the
queen. He wants to be one of the
people who helped make important decisions,
but he thinks he's alienated the queen,
that this is standing between him and the power that he thinks
he should have. He writes missives to the queen
begging her to forgive him. He's met this guy, de la Motte.
They begin sending forged
replies from the queen that suggest that the queen now is
listening, and maybe all is forgiven and it's going to be
okay. They have this idea.
There's a famous jewel that had
647 flawless gems, worth 1.5 million pounds,
which is a whole lot of money in those days and still now.
Louis XV had commissioned it
for one of his mistresses and then backed down because it was
too expensive. In 1788 the necklace was
offered to Louis XVI for Marie Antoinette,
but he turned it down, saying the realm needs more
ships than it does more jewels, which was reasonable enough.
They con this old,
fairly horny cardinal into showing up at dusk at the Palais
Royal and introducing him to the queen herself,
whom I guess he'd met once. But it's dusk and his eyesight
isn't that good. What they do is they find this
prostitute, of which there were about 25,000 in Paris at any one
time, who looks vaguely like Marie Antoinette.
This cardinal,
de Rohan, thinks that his ship has come in, that everything is
going to be okay. This purchase order has been
forged, supposedly signed by the queen, and the real jewels are
delivered. Then, of course,
it's broken up into pieces and sold on the street for zillions
of francs, sold on the black market in London and in Paris.
But there's a problem here,
because the word gets out what has happened.
And de Rohan,
who has really been made a fool, there's no doubt about it.
But it's more serious than
that, because that he has done is he
could be accused of lèse
majesté, which is the ultimate kind of
insult, plotting against the queen by
identifying her prostitute as the queen herself.
To make a very long story
short, the monarchy, humiliated by all of this--the
cardinal is saying mass in his fancy robes in some cathedral,
probably Saint-Eustache, but I'm not sure.
It might have been Notre-Dame.
I don't know.
Well, Saint-Eustache isn't a
cathedral. But anyway, he's in his robes.
The police come in and arrest
him. What happens then is they put
him on trial. He is not a terribly loveable
guy or--not someone to be very much admired.
By an incredible series--or not
an incredible series, but an almost logical playing
out of what I've been saying, the lawyers who defend him and
the crowds who salute him portray him as a victim of a
regime that is crossing the line between absolutism and
despotism. He is a cardinal and he becomes
the darling of the people. Poor old Jeanne,
this noble, she and her boyfriend get branded and sent
off to the galleys, et cetera, et cetera,
predictably enough. But the parlement of
Paris acquits the good cardinal, and he emerges from the palace
of justice or the parement --still now on the Ile
de-la-Cité, the largest of the then three
but now two islands in the Seine in Paris--to popular acclaim,
saying that justice and the interests of the nation have
been served by his acquittal. What this sleazy,
unsavory incident does is it helps continue the
desacralization of the French monarchy.
Again, lawyers and the people
who see themselves as representing the interests of
the French nation are, in their own imaginary,
and in their own mental construction,
and in the eyes of people who follow these events in legal
briefs and in newspapers--the guy who's acquitted is seen as
somebody who had been done wrong to by a monarchy that has gone
too far. That exactly,
not much more than a year later, is what is going to play
out in the French Revolution itself.
To conclude,
Voltaire, de Rohan, Montesquieu,
who you've been reading and these folks have big-time impact
on the way we look at the world around us.
They had an impact on those
people who would become the organizers of the revolution and
indeed, the leaders of France and their
children, their successors in the
nineteenth century. But lawyers,
part of this culture of increased public sphere that was
Western Europe in particular but also parts of the rest of
Europe, too, in the eighteenth century,
had a role in all of this, and that by 1789,
not in any kind of inevitable process,
a revolution was not inevitable,
but the sense that the monarchy had gone too far and that there
was something called the nation out there,
was in the public sphere and the results of all of this would
be there to see in 1789. Now, have a good weekend and on
Monday you're going to hear the execution of the king,
the death of Citizen Marat in his bathtub.
I hope to make clear why some
people supported the revolution and others didn't,
and what difference it all made.
Have a great weekend.
See ya!
