Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

The history of the alimentation of Paris might be made the subject of an entire volume. Under the ancient monarchy it was the story of fat years alternating with lean years; which latter were at times years of famine. Famine, indeed, was one of the plagues of France until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Instead of allowing, as in the present day, supply to follow demand, the Government of the country maintained laws and regulations for particular provinces and privileges for particular corporations. Wheat had to be sold at fixed places and nowhere else, and often it was left to rot in one district, while at another, not many miles distant, the peasants were dying of hunger. The peasants, moreover, were burdened with such heavy charges, such distressing dues, that they sometimes gave up in despair the task of cultivating their fields.

Desperate and indignant at the oppression practised upon them, they would from time to time rise against their agrarian tyrants. “Jacqueries” were organised in which all sorts of horrors were perpetrated. But in the end the insurgent peasants were reduced to order. It was found necessary to “hang them a little,” according to the expression of Mme. de Sévigné—so amiable, so charming, when writing of persons in her own position of life. Then the poor man went back to his hut and took up once more the shovel and the hoe. For he had plenty of work to do, and out of the little he earned he had to pay taxes to the king, tithes to the clergy, and dues of all kinds to his lord and master, the landed proprietor. The last-named alone could claim from him so many days of free labour; so much for every lamb that was born, so much for every sheep that for the first time gave milk; every tenth animal from all the animals possessed by the peasant on Christmas Eve; a certain stipulated piece of meat from the carcase of every animal slaughtered; and, finally, a share—sometimes a full quarter—of the harvest, with all sorts of minor dues, such as the feeding of the proprietor’s hounds.

The obligations of serving in the army, and of lodging and feeding the king’s troops, were onerous indeed; and what with the charges imposed and the dues levied by the crown, the landlord, and the church, the position of the peasant was lamentable indeed.

The laws for the preservation of game were not the least oppressive of those by which the unhappy serf was crushed. He was bound to cultivate certain kinds of vegetables and grain to the taste of the birds, to leave the crops in the ground, and to allow the privileged sportsman to invade his farm and perhaps destroy everything of value upon it. Nor was it prudent to make any complaint on the subject, and the Parliament of Paris, in an edict of the year 1779, punished as rebellious the inhabitants of a parish which had claimed from sportsmen an indemnity for damages. A curious characteristic incident took place in Paris itself on the very eve of the Revolution. In the month of April, 1787, the Duke of Orleans, in the ardour of pursuit, followed a stag into the heart of Paris, down the Faubourg Montmartre, across the Place Vendôme, and through the Rue St. Honoré to the Place Louis V., upsetting and wounding numbers of persons as he tore along.

The nobility and clergy paid no taxes. Everything fell upon the labourer, who was borne down by imposts. M. Maxime Ducamp speaks of a caricature he has seen, published the year before the Revolution, in which a peasant, old and ragged, is represented leaning forward upon his hoe, so that he has the appearance of a three-footed animal. On his bended back rests a sleek bishop and a haughty nobleman. The harvest is being devoured beneath the peasant’s eyes by rabbits, hares, and pigeons. Jacques Bonhomme, the typical peasant, is pensive; but his features, strongly accentuated, express anything but resignation, and he mutters, in his own provincial dialect, “We must hope that this game will soon be at an end.”

In Alsace, at the time of the German invasion of 1870, an ancient traditional caricature might have been seen, evidently the outcome of feudal times, in which the position of the peasant was still more forcibly painted. Seven typical figures are presented. The Emperor says, “I levy tribute.” The nobleman says, “I have a free estate.” The clergyman says, “I take tithes.[{311}]” The Jew (mediæval type of the trader) says, “I live on my profits.” The soldier says, “I pay for nothing.” The beggar says, “I have nothing.” The peasant says, “God help me, for these six other men have all to be supported by me.”

In the glorious days of the ancient régime Paris itself suffered constantly from famine, and looked for its food-supplies to the provinces and to foreign parts, whence they often failed to arrive, from the effects of brigandage or of civil war. The bad state of the roads was another obstacle in the way of this most necessary commerce; and, worst of all, there were laws in force by which tolls and custom dues were levied at the entrance of each town through which the provisions had to pass.

In the “Journal du Bourgeois de Paris,” written in the reign of Charles VI., there are constant lamentations on the exorbitant prices charged for provisions. “Meat was so dear,” we read in one place, “that an ox, of which the ordinary price was eight francs, or at most ten, cost fifty francs. The laws adopted for remedying these evils were of the strangest kind. If wheat was worth eight francs the measure, it was forbidden to sell it for more than four francs; and the bakers were ordered to sell their bread at prices corresponding with the price fixed for the wheat. The result was immediate and inevitable. The corn-merchants ceased to sell, the millers to grind, the bakers to knead, and the whole city fell into a state of distress impossible to describe. In vain,” writes the chronicler just cited, “did people press round the bakers’ shops; there was no bread to be had. Towards evening might be heard through Paris piteous complaints, piteous cries, piteous lamentations, and little children calling out, ‘I am dying of hunger,’ while on the dunghills of the city, in the year 1420, might be found, here ten, here twenty or thirty children, boys and girls, who were starving and perishing with cold, so that no heart could remain unmoved. But it was impossible to help them, for there was no bread, nor corn, nor wood, nor coal.”

“This epoch,” says M. Maxime Ducamp, “was the very saddest of all our history; never was a nation so near its end. One might have thought that in this state of suffering, the nation, having reached the last point of prostration, must lie down and die. Nothing of the kind. Its morbid energy took possession of it. It gave itself to the devil—so, at least, say the ballads of the time. It turned into ridicule both famine and plague, became seized with a vertigo which pathology can explain, and danced that strange Danse Macabre—dance of death—which, for the starving, was a sort of consolation; for they were reminded that in presence of the eternal scythe we are all equal, and that tyrannical lords are mowed down equally with oppressed serfs.”

For France to issue from this period of darkness and torture alive, though wounded, a miracle was necessary: the miracle that produced Joan of Arc. Yet when the English troops had evacuated a good portion of the country in 1437, the year in which Charles VII. made his solemn entry into the capital he had reconquered, hunger and misery killed more than twenty thousand persons in Paris alone.