At Amiens, as inspector of manufactures, Roland had a still better opportunity to see the defects of the financial and commercial system of France. At that time, in almost all the villages of the kingdom, the exercise of the different arts and trades was concentrated in the hands of a small number of masters, united in trades-unions, who alone could make and sell certain objects. The man who wished to enter a trade could only do so by acquiring a maîtrise. To do this he must go through a long and painful apprenticeship and spend much money to satisfy the numerous imposts and exactions. Frequently a large part of the sum which he needed for setting up his shop or store was consumed in acquiring his license. Certain unions excluded all but sons of masters, or those who had married the widows of masters; others rejected all who were born in another town—foreigners, as they called them. In a number of the unions a married man could not be an apprentice. To practise his trade after having served his apprenticeship, a linen-dealer must pay twenty-one hundred livres; a dyer, thirteen hundred and fifty; a mason, seventeen hundred; a butcher, fifteen hundred; a potter, twenty-four hundred; and so on through all the trades of the community. One could not work if he would, unless the union gave him permission, and all classes of citizens were obliged to submit to the dictation of the unions as to whom they should hire. So narrow was the spirit of these organizations that women were not allowed to carry on even such industries as embroidery.
Worse, in Roland’s eyes, were the restrictions on the way in which an article was to be manufactured. These were so numerous that industrial genius and initiative were practically prevented, that the manufacturer could not respond to the demands of fashion and of taste, and that competition with foreign trade was largely cut off. He could make only certain stuffs. The dimensions were fixed; the dyeing and stamping must follow a certain formula; they must bear a certain mark. If by any accident, intentional or not, a stuff was turned out which did not conform exactly to the rules, the severest penalty was fixed. A system of inspection, most irritating and frequently unjust, was made of every piece of goods; even houses with long reputation for honest manufacturing were subjected to this examination, which was sometimes little more than a kind of spying exercised by young and incapable men who had no commercial training. A grave injustice was according the title of manufacture royale as a favor, or often, to new institutions, for a sum.
Roland clashed constantly with these regulations throughout his term in Amiens.
Mademoiselle Phlipon had likewise, in the days before her marriage, been influenced by public affairs. She was in a centre where the populace throbbed continually. A stone’s throw from her house the Parlement sat, and its every act was a sign for popular joy or discontent. There could be no demonstration without its passing largely under her windows. From the first days of her life, then, her political education commenced. A child of less intellectual curiosity and of less sensibility would not have responded to these popular outbursts. They would have made but fleeting impressions. It was different with her; she watched it all, felt the rage or joy of the people, and brooded over its meaning. There is, indeed, no more fascinating study in her life than the influence which the panorama of the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine had upon her.
When she was eight years old she saw the smoke of burning volumes, as she looked from her window towards the Place de la Grève. It was Rousseau’s Émile going up in smoke. Every year after she saw the same suggestive sight. Now it was remonstrances against interferences by the King with the rights of the Parlement which were burned; now the seditious utterances of the independent parlements of Bretagne, of Rouen, of Dauphiné; now a too liberal general history of the present condition of Europe, translated from the English; now too bold reflections on feudal rights; now Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique; now Holbach; now Raynal; now Helvétius. In 1775 she heard La Harpe admonished “to be more circumspect in the future,” because of a daring article he had published. These condemned authors she was beginning to read.
She began to hear from her earliest days the word révolution. It had been pronounced frequently for a long time in private, but it began to be said aloud. When she was nine years old, a Paris priest declared: “We approach a state of crisis and an age of revolutions. I believe it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe endure long.” The priest was condemned at the Châtelet across the river from her window, but his discourse was printed and scattered right and left. She heard gossip of how the Parlement had told the King that Frenchmen are free men and not slaves; and a little later it is quite possible that she saw the King on his way to the Palais de Justice, where, under the very eyes of the Parlement, he erased their rebellious decree, and declared: “It is in my person alone that the sovereign power exists; it is from me alone that my courts have their existence and their authority; it is to me alone that independent and indivisible legislative power belongs; public order emanates entirely from me.”
In 1770 she saw bread riots and seditious pamphlets posted in Paris. In January, 1771, came the dissolution and exile of the Parlement because of its refusal to record Louis XV.’s humiliating decree abrogating its power and condemning its conduct. Little Manon saw a surging crowd of Parisians filling the palace and its neighborhood—a crowd in which, wrote one who watched it, “there was sometimes a dull silence, as in times of great calamities; sometimes a noise and a murmur like that which precedes great revolutions.”
She saw the new and detested body—organ of the King’s despotism—sitting in a veritable camp, and the walls of the palace covered with abusive inscriptions. She read, too, many of the hardy pamphlets which flooded the country after this despotic coup d’état. In them the doctrine of power residing in one individual was roundly attacked; the divine authority of kings was denied flatly, and the Constitution of England, with the example of 1688, was held up to the country. We know she followed the exciting seven months of the trial of Beaumarchais and Goëzmann. When Louis XVI. came to the throne, she shared the general joy at his promises, and doubtless felt that it was a true prophet who printed resurrexit on the statue of Henry IV., in front of her door.
When in the next year the bread riots began and across the river the people pillaged the markets, she saw much of the disorder,—people dancing with joy over a loaf they had secured; guards about the bakeries to give the bakers an opportunity properly to bake the bread: hungry men waiting with their eight sous, taking the loaves from the very oven; shops closed in terror, as the rioters moved from quarter to quarter.
Married, the Rolands saw together all the abuses of the realm and aided in the struggles against them. The first year of their married life Roland labored in vain at Paris with the committee which the King had summoned from the manufacturing centres of France, to obtain greater freedom in the industries, and was forced to go back to Amiens with a list of vexatious restrictions still encumbering all varieties of manufacturing.