The state of Paris was shocking. Disturbances in the street were chronic, murders were frequent and robbery was usually accompanied with violence, especially in the long winter nights. The chief offenders were soldiers of the garrison and the pages and lackeys of the great houses, who still carried arms. A police ordinance finally forbade them to wear swords and it was enforced by exemplary punishment. A duke’s footman and a duchess’s page, who attacked and wounded a student on the Pont Neuf, were arrested, tried and forthwith hanged despite the protests and petitions of their employers. Further ordinances regulated the demeanor of servants who could not be employed without producing their papers, and now in addition to their swords being taken away, they were deprived of their canes and sticks on account of their brutal treatment of inoffensive people. They were forbidden to gather in crowds and they might not enter the gardens of the Tuileries or Luxembourg.
It was not enough to repress the insolent valets and check the midnight excesses of the worst characters. The importunity of the sturdy vagabond, who lived by begging, called for stern repression. These ruffians had long been tolerated. They enjoyed certain privileges and immunities, they were organised in dangerous bands strong enough to make terms with the police and they possessed a sanctuary in the heart of Paris, where they defied authority. This “Court of Miracles,” as it was called, had three times withstood a siege by commissaries and detachments of troops, who were repulsed with showers of stones. Then the head of the police went at the head of a strong force and cleared the place out, allowing all to escape; and when it had been thus emptied, their last receptacle was swept entirely away. Other similar refuges were suppressed,—the enclosures of the Temple and the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Près, and the Hotel Soissons, property of the royal family of Savoy, which had long claimed the right to give shelter to malefactors.
The prisons of Paris were in a deplorable and disgraceful state at this period, as appears from a picture drawn by a magistrate about the middle of the seventeenth century. They were without light or air, horribly overcrowded by the dregs of humanity and a prey to foul diseases which prisoners freely communicated to one another. For-l’Évêque was worse then than it had ever been; the whole building was in ruins and must soon fall to the ground. The Greater and Lesser Châtelets were equally unhealthy and of dimensions too limited for their population, the walls too high, the dungeons too deep down in the bowels of the earth. The only prison not absolutely lethal was the Conciergerie, yet some of its cells and chambers possessed no sort of drainage. The hopelessness of the future was the greatest infliction; once committed, no one could count on release: to be thrown into prison was to be abandoned and forgotten.
The records kept at the Bastile were in irremediable disorder. Even the names of the inmates were in most cases unknown, from the custom of giving new arrivals a false name. By the King’s order, his Minister once applied to M. de Besmaus, the governor, for information as to the cause of detention of two prisoners, a priest called Gerard, who had been confined for eight years, and a certain Pierre Rolland, detained for three years. The inquiry elicited a report that no such person as Rolland appeared upon the monthly pay lists for rations. Gerard, the priest, was recognised by his numerous petitions for release. The Minister called for a full nominal list of all prisoners and the reasons for their confinement, but the particulars were not forthcoming. This was on the conclusion of the Peace of Ryswick, when the King desired to mark the general rejoicings by a great gaol delivery.
Many causes contributed to fill the Bastile and other State prisons in the reign of Louis XIV. Let us take these more in detail. The frauds committed by dishonest agents dealing with public money, the small fry, as guilty as Fouquet, but on a lesser scale, consigned many to prison. Severe penalties were imposed upon defamatory writers and the whole of the literary crew concerned in the publication of libellous attacks upon the King,—printers, binders, distributors of this dangerous literature,—found their way to the Bastile, to the galleys, even to the scaffold. Presently when Louis, always a bigoted Catholic, became more and more intolerant under the influence of the priests, the revived persecution of the Protestants filled the gaols and galleys with the sufferers for their faith. Colbert had long protected them, but at the death of this talented minister who, as he wrote Madame de Maintenon, “thought more of finance than religion,” Le Tellier and Louvois, who succeeded him, raged furiously against the Protestants and many cruel edicts were published. A fierce fanatical desire to proselytise, to procure an abjuration of creed by every violent and oppressive means possessed all classes, high and low. The doors of sick people were forced to admit the priests who came to administer the sacraments, without being summoned.
On one occasion the pot-boy of a wine shop who, with his master, professed the new faith, was mortally wounded in a street fight. A priest visited him as he lay dying and besought him to make confession. A low crowd forthwith collected before the house, to the number of seven or eight hundred, and rose in stormy riot, attacked the door with sticks and stones, broke it down, smashed all the windows and forced their way in, crying, “Give us up the Huguenots or we will set fire to the house.” The police then came upon the scene and restored quiet, but the man died, to the last refusing to confess. Outrages of this kind were frequent. Again, the son of a new convert removed his hat when the procession of the Host passed by, but remained standing instead of falling on his knees. He was violently attacked and fled to his home, pursued by the angry crowd who would have burned the house to the ground. The public feeling was so strong that many called for the quartering of troops in Paris to assist in the good work of conversion, a suggestion which bore fruit presently in the infamous dragonnades, when the soldiers pillaged and laid waste the provinces.
The passion for proselytising was carried to the extent of bribing the poverty stricken to change their religion. Great pressure was brought to bear upon Huguenot prisoners who were in the Bastile. A number of priests came in to use their persuasive eloquence upon the recusants, and many reports are preserved in the correspondence of M. de Besmaus, the governor, of their energetic efforts. “I am doing my best,” says one priest, “and have great hopes of success.” “I think,” writes another, “I have touched Mademoiselle de Lamon and the Mademoiselles de la Fontaine. If I may have access to them I shall be able to satisfy you.” The governor was the most zealous of all in seeking to secure the abjuration of the new religion.
It may be noted here that this constant persecution, emphasised by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had conceded full liberty of conscience), had the most disastrous consequences upon French industry. The richest manufacturers and the most skillful and industrious artisans were to be found among the French Protestants and there was soon a steady drain outwards of these sources of commercial prosperity. In this continuous exodus of capital and intelligent labor began the material decadence of France and transferred the enterprise of these people elsewhere, notably to England. A contemporary pamphlet paints the situation in sombre colors;—“Nothing is to be seen but deserted farms, impecunious landed proprietors, bankrupt traders, creditors in despair, peasants dying of starvation, their dwellings in ruins.” On every side and in every commodity there was a terrible depreciation of values,—land nearly worthless, revenues diminished, and besides a new and protracted war had now to be faced.
Some idea of the condition of the interior of the Bastile in those days may be best realised by a few extracts from the original archives preserved from the sack of the hated castle when Paris rose in revolution. Some documents are extant, written by a certain Comte de Pagan, who was thrown into the State prison charged with sorcery. He had boasted that he could, when he chose, destroy Louis XIV by magic. His arrest was immediate and his detention indefinitely prolonged. His letters contain the most piteous appeals for money.