The Discovery of France (13 page)

A sensitive economic barometer might register these activities as contributions to the gross national product, but it would give a false impression of the producers’ mentality. In parts of the Auvergne, women got together in the evening, sometimes until after midnight, to sew and knit clothes that they sold to travelling merchants for a pittance. In a technical sense, this was a form of industrial enterprise, but the main reason for the sewing was not to create a surplus. The idea was simply to make enough money to pay for the lamp oil that allowed them to get together in the first place.

Boredom was as powerful a force as economic need. It helps to explain so many aspects of daily life, at all times of the year, that it could form the basis of an academic discipline: cottage industries and hibernation, bizarre beliefs and legends, sexual experiment, local politics, migration and even social aspiration. In small, suspicious communities where neighbour competed with neighbour, boredom was one of the main elements of social cohesion. It brought people together and counteracted the effects of poverty and class rivalry. Even in the insanely energetic universe of Balzac’s novels, boredom is one of the great guiding principles of French society, from the gilded tedium of Paris apartments to the cloistral silence of provincial towns:

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T
WO MONTHS BEFORE
the fall of the Bastille, in the quiet towns of Balzac’s Touraine and in the black basalt hovels where the women of the Auvergne sewed to keep the lamps alight, there was, for once, a new topic of conversation. A rare conjunction of historical time and daily life had occurred. On 5 May 1789, at a meeting of the States-General,
¹³
the towns and parishes of France were invited to list their grievances. The very idea that it might be possible to alter the conditions of life was a revolution in itself. For the first time, suffering seemed to have an audience and literacy had a point.

The sixty thousand or so ‘Cahiers de Doléances’ were, of course, written by literate or semi-literate people, often by the local lawyer. Crudely drafted lists of grievances were passed to larger committees who prepared more politely abstract reports for the States-General. But enough of the humbler Cahiers have survived to construct a detailed panorama of daily life in France.

Most of the Cahiers list the same grievances: taxation, the
corvée
(road-repairing duty), impassable roads and broken bridges, hospitals that no one could reach though they paid for them in taxes, the billeting of troops and their hungry horses, lack of representation and arbitrary or unaffordable justice, ineffective policing, the proliferation of con men, uncertified surgeons and beggars – either local people who were starving to death or aggressive intruders – and, of course, ecclesiastical and seigneurial privilege. Hunting rights were the sorest point: to see a furry feast scampering across a field and to know that catching it might mean death by hanging was more than a hungry peasant could bear. If the local lord spent all his time in a city or was not very keen on hunting, the area might be overrun by deer, boars, hares, rabbits and pigeons. To many foreign travellers, the characteristic sound of the French Revolution was the constant crepitation of
muskets in the countryside exterminating the animals that had once enjoyed aristocratic immunity.

In the Cahiers that were drafted by small parish committees, one complaint dominates all the others: the pain and botheration of living in the natural world. The desire of most people was not to have their human rights enshrined in a glorious constitution. They wanted freedom from poor soil and bad weather, from gales, hailstorms, fire and flood, from wolves, cold and famine. Many towns and villages described their predicament as though they were island states cut off from the outside world.

The man who wrote directly to the King from Catus in the Quercy (‘a town of whose very existence, Sire, you are no doubt unaware’) suggested, with some justification, that ‘to know our little town is to know the province of Quercy and all of France’. In misery, the kingdom was united:

Eight miles from the King’s palace at Versailles, in a region where more than half the population owned no land, the parish of Saint-Forget was the twin in misery of Catus. The people were often reduced to ‘the most extreme poverty’ by a momentary lack of work, a fall of snow, a spell of rain or a few days of illness. They could not afford a schoolteacher and the land lay fallow because farmers were ‘discouraged’. In bad years, they starved; in good years, they went hungry because their produce was taxed but could not be transported and sold.

The wealth of evidence in the Cahiers de Doléances is not completely reliable. Some places hoped to avoid tax by depicting their land as an arid desert, a festering flood-plain or a fruitless confusion of rocks and torrents ravaged by weeds and wild animals. If they could prove that the land could not be farmed, it would not be liable to tax. The village of Sexey-les-Bois (Meurthe-et-Moselle) claimed that two-thirds of its inhabitants were widows and that all the able-bodied people, who were taxed at 20 per cent, had ‘sold their meagre furniture and gone to live in the woods’. Some villages tried to shift the tax burden onto supposedly more fortunate neighbours. The Cahiers from the Quercy province make it sound as though all the soil of the region around Cahors had long since been washed away. The village of Escamps described its predicament in terms almost identical to those of many other Cahiers:

A slightly callous view of past suffering has emphasized the suspiciously repetitive nature of these Cahiers. Set phrases were suggested by central committees and copied down by local committees. One village found an adequate expression of its suffering and others repeated the impressive details: children eating grass, tears moistening bread, farmers feeling envious of their animals, and so on. But those
grass-eating children were clearly not a figure of speech: the harvest of 1788 had been worse than usual, and the Cahiers were drawn up in the dangerously hollow months when last year’s supplies were running low and next year’s corn had yet to ripen. The relatively prosperous town of Espère obviously had nothing to gain when it applied the phrase to its neighbours:

If some of these accounts sound unconvincing, it is partly because they represent hours of intellectual labour. Their writers were struggling to find the right words, dressing up their misery in stiff, incongruous clothes for a trip to the city. Exaggeration was not a miserly ruse, it was a means of survival. Tax inspectors came to villages with armed dragoons on the lookout for signs of recent income: poultry feathers on a doorstep, a new suit of clothes, fresh repairs to rotting barns and crumbling walls. The collectors themselves were recruited locally and often barely numerate. They could be sent to prison if they failed to collect the prescribed amount.

Even for prosperous peasants, disaster always loomed. Few lives were free from sudden setbacks. Every year, several villages and urban districts went up in smoke. An English traveller, crossing the Jura from Salins to Pontarlier in 1738, was told that ‘there is scarce a Village in all this Tract that does not perish by Flames once at least in 10 Years’. Salins itself was almost totally destroyed in 1825 by a fire that burned for three days. The city of Rennes disappeared in 1720 and much of Limoges in 1864. Thatch was cheap (gleaned from harvested fields in October), but it harboured huge populations of insects and caught fire easily unless it was completely covered by a layer of clay, quicklime, horse manure and sand. (In some parts, thatch was outlawed in new buildings in the mid-nineteenth century and replaced by the red corrugated iron that was thought to add a pleasant touch of colour to the landscape.) Many people burned to death in their homes or were killed when their house suddenly fell
on them. The spontaneous combustion of dung heaps and haystacks was a surprisingly common cause of destitution and was often blamed on jealous neighbours and pyromaniac witches.

Frosts, floods and livestock disease were the most frequent calamities after fire, but the greatest natural disasters were caused by hail. A ten-minute hailstorm could wipe out the work of a generation, demolishing roofs, stripping trees, flattening crops and covering the ground with a carpet of twigs, leaves and small dead birds. In 1789, the town of Pompey near Nancy was still recovering from the effects of a hailstorm that had decimated its harvest twelve years before. In 1900, forty years after a hailstorm swept through a valley in the Bourbonnais, some houses still had roofs that were half tile and half slate, because the local supply of tiles had been exhausted. Failure to prevent hailstorms was, understandably, one of the commonest causes of disenchantment with the local priest (see p. 127). More progressive towns and villages relied on the dubious effects of ‘anti-hail’ cannon, which were fired at the sky when dark battalions of storm clouds massed above the fields.

These disasters affected all but a tiny minority of people. In a land of small, vulnerable
pays
, the section of the population comfortably referred to as ‘the poor’ could suddenly swell to enormous proportions. At the time of the Revolution, almost half the population of France could be described as poor or indigent. Depending on the region, between half and nine-tenths of families were unable to support themselves with the land they owned and were forced to sell their labour or fall into the stairless pit of debt. Hippolyte Taine’s image of the common people in his
Origins of Contemporary France
(1879) might seem melodramatic when compared to the steady march of economic progress, but it matches the simple evidence of daily life in every part of France:

Taine’s alarming picture of a population sinking into destitution referred to the late eighteenth century but it could just as well have referred to much later periods.

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E
VEN IF THEY WERE
enterprising and intelligent and managed to acquire an education, and even if they were born in the more buoyant nineteenth century, life for most people was a game of snakes-and-ladders with very short ladders and very long snakes. The Breton peasant Jean-Marie Déguignet (1834–1905) wrote his memoirs because he had never read about anyone like himself, except in novels. In the Quimper public library, he saw a tiny part of French life brilliantly illuminated by a handful of egos while the mass of humanity was left in the dark. The bare facts of his own life are refreshingly unremarkable: