Illustrations of political economy, Volume 4 (of 9)

by Harriet Martineau

At this moment, it entered some wise head that, if people would not lend money, they might lend or give something else; not corn or hay, or any of the necessaries of life; for every one knew there was still less of these things than of money; but gold and silver in any form. It would have been hard to say what lasting good this could do amidst the impossibility of procuring the necessaries of which gold and silver are only the representatives: but no matter for that. Nobody was asked to explain the affair, and apparently none troubled themselves to think about it; so delighted were all with the new notion of giving away trinkets to save the state. The idea of a patriotic contribution was charming,—a contribution in which almost everybody could join; women and children, and persons of many degrees below the class of capitalists. The court joined: the gentlemen sacrificing nearly half their watches and seals, and the ladies adopting simplicity as a fashion, and sending away the jewellery they could not wear as Arcadian shepherdesses and Sicilian nymphs. The Assembly followed, every member thereof stooping down at the same moment to strip his shoes of their buckles, so that their act of patriotic devotion made really a very fine show. This gave the signal to the whole country, and all France was forthwith unbuckled in respect of the feet. She became also quakerlike as to the hands, for not a maiden but took out her lover’s hair from his parting gift, and flung the ring into the lap of the nation; not a wife that did not part with the token of her wifehood in the cause. Pecks of gold rings, bushels of silver buckles, with huge store of other baubles, were at once in the possession of the state; and the people no longer doubted that all would henceforth be well.

And what was really the event?—The gold answered the same purpose as it does when a basin full of it coined stands on the banker’s counter during a run. It satisfied the ignorant that all must be safe where there is so much wealth actually before one’s eyes. It hushed the clamours of the people for a little while; and made the servants of the government willing to go on somewhat longer upon credit; so that more industry and briskness prevailed for a time, at the risk of ultimate disappointment, and an aggravation of popular fury,—now diverted but not dispersed. A mob went about to levy these voluntary offerings, an act ludicrously inconsistent with their next proceeding; if, indeed, any of the events of this extraordinary time could be regarded as ludicrous.

They called at Charles’s house among others, whence, as it happened, no such offerings had yet gone forth. Charles had resisted Pauline’s wish to lend the queen her thimble, and Julien’s offer to pay his first tax with the silver-tipped riding-whip grandpapa had given him. Neither would he allow Marguerite’s few ornaments, all keepsakes, to be thrown away in any such manner. He would give the coat off his back to the state, he said, when it could do any service; but the proposed gifts could only help to make jewellery a drug, without supplying one more person with bread, or lessening by so much as one scruple the burdens of the state. He was disposed to be vexed when he came home one day, and found a short allowance of spoons at the dinner-table, the clock on the mantel-piece gone, and his wife as destitute of external ornament as any Arcadian shepherdess at Versailles. He laughed, however, at his wife’s apologies for having made a voluntary offering against her own will as well as his, and hoped that she would be as little the worse as the state would be the better for the sacrifice. Goldsmiths and jewellers of enterprise and capital would profit by the fancy, he observed, if nobody else did; and the many losers might find some comfort in sympathy with the very few winners.

The people, meanwhile, were bitterly complaining of famine, and the more gold was carried to the treasury, the more bread was bought up before the eyes of those who were deprived of it from its increased price. It mattered not that some was given away in charity by the king, and more, to suit his own purposes, by the duke of Orleans; the people were rendered unable to purchase it, and furnished with the plea of want, wherewith to make the streets of Paris echo. It would have been better to have let the exchange of wedding rings for bread be made without the interposition of the king or his ministers, even without taking into consideration the events which followed. A report was soon industriously spread that the bread furnished by court charity was of a bad quality. It was believed, like everything that was then said against the court; and the consequence was that an anomalous and melancholy sight was seen by as many as walked in the city. Clamorous, starving crowds besieged the bakers’ shops, and carried off all the bread from their ovens, all the flour from their bins; while the discontented among the mob politicians of the Orleans faction were on the way to snatch the food from the mouths of the hungry and throw it into the river, and to cut the sacks, and mix the flour with the puddles of the streets. Want and waste, faction and delusion were here seen in their direct extremes.

At this time, Charles and Marguerite did not allow their children to go out under any guardianship but that of their father, as it was impossible to foresee what might happen in the streets before they could get home again. They were as safe as any could be at such a time;—safer than the few who ventured abroad in carriages at the risk of insult wherever they turned; safer than the sordidly fed and clad, who were seized upon by the agents of faction to augment their mobs, and be made the instruments of violence under the penalty of suffering it themselves. The parents and children were also safer together than separate; as a domestic party, abroad to take the air, presented as unsuspicious a group, and one as likely to pass unnoticed, as could well be imagined. Yet they had their occasional alarms; and when there was no cause to fear for themselves, were too often grieved and shocked at what they beheld inflicted on others.

“O papa!” cried Julien, one day, as they were walking; “what are they doing at Maigrot’s shop? I do believe the crowd is coming there next.”

Maigrot was a baker, well known to Charles’s family, and much beloved by the children, on account of the little hot cakes which seemed to be always ready to pop out of the oven and into their mouths, when they went with the servant to deliver orders or pay bills.

Instead of his usual smiling face, Maigrot was now seen in a state of desperate anxiety, as well as could be judged from the glimpse of him at his door, trying first to slip out, and then to force his way between the two men who were evidently placed at the entrance as guards till the mob should come up. Foiled in his attempt, Maigrot disappeared, and Charles thought that it might depend on whether there was a way of exit at the back of the house, whether his head would presently be carried on a pike, between two loaves of his own bread, or whether he would be kneading and baking in peace ten years hence. There seemed to be just time to run and give a word of advice to whomsoever might be waiting in the shop, and Charles ran forward to do so. He was prevented entering; but seeing Maigrot’s wife sinking and trembling behind the counter, and looking absolutely incapable of any resolution whatever, he called out to her to assist in emptying the flour bins and distributing the bread, and to fear nothing, and all would be well. The woman tossed off a glass of water which stood beside her, and rallied for the effort. In such effort lay the only resource of sufferers under violence in those days; for the magistracy were unable to afford assistance; or, if able, were not to be depended on. The shop was presently emptied and gutted, and its stock carried away, without, however, being in this instance preceded by the horrible display of a human head. Maigrot had escaped and actually joined in with the mob in time to see his own flour cast into the Seine. Nobody thought more of the baker, and he took advantage of this disregard to learn a great deal of his own doings which he did not know before. He now overheard that his flour was mixed with hurtful ingredients by order of his customer, the king; that an inferior kind was sold at high prices as the best; and that there were stores of meal concealed somewhere about his premises, to victual the soldiers who were to be brought to rule the city, and give the king his own way. All this was news to Maigrot, who was compelled to listen to these falsehoods in silence: more fortunate than many who had lost their lives as well as their good name under similar charges. A defender sprang up, however, when he least expected it.

Charles and his little son could not help following to look on, when the mob proceeded with the flour down to the river. They stood on the outskirts of the crowd, watching sack after sack as, with hoarse shouts, it was heaved into the water so as to make the heaviest splash possible. A new amusement presently occurred to some of the leaders; that of testing the political opinions of the passers by by the judgment they should pronounce on the quality of the flour. Those who declared it good must, of course, be parasites of the court; those who made mouths at it were the friends of the people; and the moment this point was settled, every gazer from a distance was hauled to the water’s edge to undergo the test; every approaching carriage was waylaid and stopped, and its inmates brought on the shoulders of the mob. Of course, all gave judgment on the same side;—a thing likely to happen without much dishonesty, when the raw flour was crammed into the mouth by foul and sometimes bloody hands. It would have been difficult to pronounce it very good under such circumstances of administration.

Among the most piteous looking of those under test was the marquis de Thou, who was taken from a non-descript sort of carriage, on his way, as he vowed, to the duke of Orleans, but certainly attended by more than one servant of the royal household. While prosecuting his explanations with gesture and grimace, uplifted as he was above the crowd, he looked so like a monkey riding a bear that a universal shout of mockery arose. He was lowered for a moment, out of sight; and the laugh rose louder than ever when he reappeared, held at arms’ length by a hundred hands, powdered all over like a miller. His position made the judgment he had to give all the more difficult, for it enabled him to perceive the royal servants watching him on one side, the duke of Orleans and some of his fiercest followers on another, and the pitiless mob around.