The new ideas were none the less revolutionary of social life. The salon, that eminently French institution, soon felt their power. The charming irresponsible gaiety and frivolity of the old régime gave place to more serious preoccupation with political movements. The fusing power of Rousseau’s genius had melted all hearts; the solvent wit of Voltaire and the precise science of the Encyclopedists were a potent force even among the courtiers themselves. The centre of social life shifted from Versailles to Paris and the salons gained what the court lost. Fine ladies had the latest pamphlet of Siéyès read to them at their toilette, and maids caught up the new phrases from their mistresses’ lips. Did a young gallant enter a salon excusing himself for being late by saying, “I have just been proposing a motion at the club,” every fair eye sparkled with interest. A deputy was a social lion, and a box for the National Assembly exchanged for one at the opera at a premium of six livres. Speeches were rehearsed at the salons and action determined. Chief of the hostesses was Madame[165] Necker: at her crowded receptions might be seen Abbé Siéyès, the architect of Constitutions; Condorcet, the philosopher; Talleyrand, the patriotic bishop; Madame de Stäel, with her strong, coarse face and masculine voice and gestures. More intimate were the Tuesday suppers at which a dozen chosen guests held earnest communion. Madame de Beauharnais was noted for her excellent table, and her Tuesday and Thursday dinners: at her rooms the masters of literature and music had been wont to meet. Now came Buffon the naturalist; Bailly of Tennis Court oath fame; Clootz, the friend of humanity. The widow of Helvetius, with her many memories of Franklin, welcomed Volney, author of the Ruins of Empires, and Chamfort, the candid critic of Academicians. At the salon of Madame Pancroute, Barrère, the glib orator of the Revolution, was the chief figure.
Julie Talma was famed for her literary and artistic circle. Here Marie Joseph Chenier, the revolutionary dramatic poet of the Comédie Française, declaimed his couplets. Here came Vergniaud, the eloquent chief of the ill-fated Gironde; Greuze, the painter; Roland, the stern and minatory minister, who spoke bitter words, composed by his wife, to the king; Lavoisier, the chemist, who begged that the axe might be stayed while he completed some experiments, and was told that the Republic had no need of chemists. Madame du Deffand, whose hotel in the Rue des Quatre Fils still exists, welcomed Voltaire, D’Alembert, Montesquieu and the Encyclopedists.
In the street, the great open-air salon of the people, was a feverish going to and fro. Here were the tub-thumpers of the Revolution holding forth at every public place; the strident voices of ballad-singers at the street corners; hawkers of the latest pamphlets hot from the Quai des Augustins; the sellers of journals crying the Père Duchesne, L’Ami du Peuple, the Jean Bart, the Vieux Cordelier. Crowds gathered round Bassett’s famous shop for caricature at the corner of the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue des Mathurins. The walls of Paris were a mass of variegated placards and proclamations. The charming signs of the old régime the Pomme rouge, the Rose Blanche, the Ami du Cœur, the Gracieuse, the Trois Fleurs-de-lys couronnées gave place to the “Necker,” the “National Assembly,” the “Tiers,” the “Constitution”—these, too, soon to be effaced by more Republican appellations. For on the abolition of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Religion of Nature, the words “royal” and “saint” disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary. A new calendar is promulgated: streets and squares are renamed: rues des Droits de l’Homme, de la Revolution, des Piques de la Lois, efface the old landmarks. We must now say Rue Honoré, not St. Honoré, and Mont Marat for Montmartre. Naturalists had written of the queen bee: away with the hated word! She is now named of all good patriots the abeille pondeuse, the egg-laying bee. No more emblems on playing cards of king, queen, and knave: allegorical figures of Genius, Liberty and Equality take their places, and since Law alone is above them all, Patriotism, as it flings down its biggest card, shall cry no longer, “Ace of trumps,” but “Law of trumps,” and “Genius of trumps.” Furniture is of Spartan simplicity. The people lie down on patriotic beds and eat and drink from patriotic mugs and platters. Silver buckles are needed by the national war chest: shoes shall now be clasped by patriotic buckles of copper. The monarchial “vous” (you) shall give place to “toi” (thou); and “monsieur” and “madame” to “citoyen” and “citoyenne.” The formal subscriptions to letters, “Your humble servant,” “Your obedient servant,” shall no more recall the old days of class subjection; we write now “Your fellow citizen,” “Your friend,” “Your equal.” Every house bears an inscription, giving the names and ages of the occupants, decorated with patriotic colours of red, white and blue, with figures of the Gallic cock and the bonnet rouge. Over every public building runs the legend, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death”—it is even seen over the cages of the wild beasts at the Jardin des Plantes.
Nowhere did the revolutionary ploughshare cut deeper than among the clergy and the religious orders. Nearly forty monasteries and convents were suppressed in Paris, and strange scenes were those when the troops of monks and friars issued forth to secular life, some crying, “Vive Jesus le Roi et la Revolution,” for the new ideas had penetrated even the cloister. The barbers’ shops were invaded, and strange figures were seen smoking their pipes along the Boulevards. Some went to the wars; others, especially the Benedictines, appealed for teaching appointments; many, faithful to their vows, went forth to poverty, misery and death.
The nuns and sisters gave more trouble, and the scenes that attended their expulsion and that of the non-juring clergy burned deep into the memories of the pious. “What do they take from me?” cried the curé of St. Marguerite in his farewell sermon. “My cure? All that I have is yours, and it is you they despoil. My life? I am eighty-four years of age, and what of life remains to me is not worth the sacrifice of my principles.” Descending the pulpit the venerable priest passed through a sobbing congregation to a garret in one of the Faubourgs. There were but few, however, who imitated the dignified protest of the curé of St. Marguerite. Many a pulpit rang with fiery denunciations, which recalled the savage fanaticism of the league. Some of the younger clergy and a few of the bishops were on the side of the early Revolutionists. The Abbé Fouchet was the Peter the Hermit of the crusade for Liberty, and so popular were his sermons in Notre Dame that a seat there fetched twenty-four sous. But the corruption and apostasy of the hierarchy as a whole, and their betrayal of the people, had borne its acrid fruit of popular contempt and hostility, resulting in the monstrous profanation of Notre Dame and other churches of Paris by the fanatics of the worship of Nature and the puerile Deistic theatricalities of Robespierre’s Feasts of the Supreme Being. Compromise became impossible and the Revolutionists found arrayed against them the most universal and the deepest of human sentiments, the strongest cementing force in civil life. Less than eight years after Robespierre’s solemn comedy of the Etre Suprème all the hierarchy of the old religion returned—sixty archbishops and bishops, and an army of priests. A gorgeous Easter Mass in Notre Dame celebrated the re-establishment of the Catholic faith by Napoleon, the heir of the Revolution.
It is not within the scope of the present work to deal with the later annals of France. Superficial students of her modern history have freely charged her with political irresponsibility and fickleness; no charge could be less warranted by facts. For a thousand years her people were loyal and faithful subjects of a monarchy, and endured for a century and a half an infliction of misgovernment, oppression and grinding taxation such as probably no other European people would have tolerated. With touching fidelity and indomitable steadfastness the French people have cherished the principles of the Great Revolution, in whose name they swept the shams and wrongs of the ancien régime away. There is a profounder truth than perhaps Alphonse Karr imagined in his famous epigram, Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Every political upheaval of the nineteenth century in Paris has been at bottom an effort to realise the revolutionary ideals of political freedom and social equality in the face of external violence or internal corruption and treachery. Twice the hated Bourbons were re-imposed on the people of Paris by the bayonets of the foreigner; twice they rose and chased them away. A compromise followed—that of a citizen king, Louis Philippe of Orleans, once a Jacobin doorkeeper and a soldier of the Revolution, who had fought valiantly at Valmy and Jemappes. But he too identified himself with reactionary ministers, and became a fugitive to England, the bourne of deposed kings. The Second Republic which followed grew distrustful of the people and disfranchised at one stroke 3,000,000 citizens: one of the causes of the success of the coup d’état of Napoleon III. was an astute edict which restored universal suffrage.
During the negation of political rectitude and decency which characterised the period of the Second Empire a little band of Republicans refused to bow the knee to the new pinchbeck Cæsar, and, inspired by Victor Hugo, their fiery poet and seer, whose Châtiments have the passionate intensity of an Isaiah, braved exile, poverty, calumny and flattery. They “stooped into a dark, tremendous sea of doubt, pressed God’s lamp to their breasts and emerged” to witness a sad and bitter day of reckoning, when the corruption and vice of the Second Empire were swallowed up in shame and disaster at Sedan. The Third Republic, with admirable energy and patriotism, rose to save the self-respect of France. The first and Imperial war, up to Sedan, was over in a month; the second national and popular war endured for five months.
