The Physiology of Taste (4 page)

LITERARY CONTEXT:
Burke:
Reflections on the Revolution in France
.
Hébert publishes the extreme radical newspaper
Le Père Duchesne
(to 1794).

HISTORICAL EVENTS:
The Assembly spends this year ironing out a new constitution. Religious orders suppressed (February); civil constitution of the clergy (July) meets with resistance especially when finally condemned by the Vatican in March 1791. Civic fête celebrating Bastille day (July). Mutiny at Nancy (August). Resignation of Necker (September).
Proliferation of revolutionary clubs in Paris, the left-wing Breton Club (later to become the Jacobins) being the most influential, backed by a growing network of affiliated clubs in the provinces.
Véry opens restaurant in the Palais Royal which proves vastly popular.
He soon opens a second branch on the esplanade des Tuileries, the first building ever conceived as a restaurant – but demolished during Napoleon’s civic reconstruction.
Death of Emperor Joseph II.

DATE:
1791

AUTHOR’S LIFE:
BS scores a small triumph when he ensures that the departmental seminary and the seat of the Bishop of Ain remain in Belley. On 31 May he speaks in a major debate on the death penalty (he is in favour – Robespierre, ironically, is against).
A constitutional monarchist, he strongly supports the Assembly’s decision not to act against the king after his attempted flight, telling the citizens of Belley that “the essential point [is] that we are not at the start of a new revolution, but in the process of completing the old one”. On 23 July BS speaks in support of introducing martial law and punishing the instigators of the Champs de Mars riot, once more incurring the wrath of Robespierre. In September he is one of 60 deputies who present the Constitutional Act to the king. On 30 September, the Assembly is disbanded and BS returns home, to dancing in the streets, and is made president of the civil tribunal of Belley. Becomes a judge at the civil court in Bourg (where he lives for a time) and a substitute judge on the new national appeal court (
Tribunal de cassation
). Resumes his old life of hunting, wining, dining and flirting.

LITERARY CONTEXT:
Paine:
Rights of Man
(and 1792).
Boswell:
Life of Samuel Johnson
.
Louvet:
Emilie de Varmont
.
De Sade:
Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu
.
Brissot:
Nouveau Voyage dans les États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale
.
Franklin:
Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin
.
Olympe de Gouges:
Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne
.
Mme Dacier:
Antiquitates Culinariae
.

HISTORICAL EVENTS:
Mirabeau condemns “barbaric” measures against suspected é
migrés
, fearing the beginning of a police state (February). Death of Mirabeau (April).
Escape of royal family and their recapture at Varennes (June). Assembly decrees that the king cannot be indicted, but republican support is increasing. Danton’s Cordeliers Club organizes Champ de Mars petition (17 July); National Guard fires on the crowd when it refuses to disperse.
Declaration of Pilnitz (August): Emperor Leopold and Frederick II of Prussia undertake to support Louis XVI – but only in the unlikely event of other European monarchs joining them. Nevertheless, fear of armed foreign intervention spreads among revolutionaries. France annexes Avignon and Venaissin, papal territories within her borders (September).
Assembly passes Constitutional Act, endorsed by the king (September). Dissolution of Constituent Assembly (30 September). Its members had voted to disqualify themselves from standing for re-election – a measure proposed by Robespierre which effectively eliminates many moderates from government.
New Legislative Assembly meets (October). Inflation caused by the
assignats
, revolutionary paper money. Led by Brissot, the Brissotin (or Girondist) faction successfully agitates for war against Austria, hoping to rally popular passion behind it to the benefit of the left wing.
Mêot, former
officier de bouche
of the prince de Condé, opens a restaurant which soon comes to rival that of Beauvilliers. Unrestrainedly luxurious, it also provides girls to attend to customers’ every need and – it was rumoured – a silver bath in which a gentleman might relax in champagne. It was a great favourite with revolutionaries such as Danton and Desmoulins and it is said that the Constitution of 1791 was largely drafted at Méot’s.
US Congress meets in Philadelphia.

DATE:
1792

AUTHOR’S LIFE:
Supports the war against anti-French coalition. His mother makes over to him all the family property in the town of Belley. Loses his job when Danton requires judges to stand for election (August). Elected mayor of Belley (December).

LITERARY CONTEXT:
Chénier:
Sur les Suisses révoltés du régiment de Châteauvieux
.
Marat launches newspaper
Journal de la république française
.
Wollstonecraft:
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
.
Young:
Travels in France
.

HISTORICAL EVENTS:
Girondists form ministry (March); war declared on Austria (April) and Prussia (July). Her army ill-prepared, France faces military disaster. Fall of
assignat
provokes food crisis, grain riots and demands for price controls.
Counter-revolutionary activity in the provinces – notably in Marseilles and Provence – crushed by local Jacobins. Denouncing court and aristocratic plots, the Girondists summon provincial National Guard (
fédérés)
to defend the Revolution in Paris. Louis XVI dismisses Girondist minister, Roland (June). Popular demonstrations in Paris (20 June) in which royal apartments again entered. Parisian municipal government by now permeated by revolutionaries, particularly the 48 Sections, local consituency divisions of the Commune, declared permanent on 25 July. Legislative Assembly takes on emergency powers – “La patrie en danger”. Duke of Brunswick, Allied general, threatens Parisians with violent reprisals if French royal family are harmed. Robespierre defines aim of calling an election for a new National Convention based on universal suffrage (speech at Jacobin Club, 29 July).
Radical Section leaders form break-away revolutionary Commune (9 August).
Fédérés
lead attack on the Tuileries (10 August) which turns into a massacre. Louis XVI deposed and imprisoned with his family in the Temple (13 August). Girondists obliged to summon a democratic National Convention and to allow Danton into the Ministry of Justice. Lafayette flees abroad (19 August). Verdun surrenders to Prussian army; panic in Paris leads mob to storm prisons and massacre inmates (2–10 September).
Dumouriez wins unexpected victory against the Duke of Brunswick at Valmy (20 September). French occupation of Nice and Savoy (the latter is annexed in October). Custine crosses the Rhine (October); Dumouriez invades Austrian Netherlands, taking Brussels (November). Decree of Convention promising help to all peoples desirous of recovering their liberty (19 November).
First meeting of National Convention (only 7.5 per cent of those now eligible to vote in the elections had done so) which proceeds to abolish the monarchy (22 September). Girondists, strongly supported in the provinces, retain considerable influence. The Jacobin deputation from Paris (known as the
Montagne)
with Robespierre as their chief spokesman, press for an indictment of the king. Discovery of a secret
armoire de fer
containing royal correspondence with Austria makes the king’s trial inevitable; it takes place on 10 and 11 December.
Divorce legalized. Slave rebellion in West Indies causes sugar shortage in France.

DATE:
1793

AUTHOR’S LIFE:
By this time BS has allied himself with the Girondists, presiding over the
Société des amis de la Liberté et de l’Egalité
in Belley. (BS’s mayoral speeches stress the importance of liberty but refute the idea that equality applies to equality of wealth.) They are split over the question of the king’s indictment (BS’s views are unknown) but all support a limited federalism as a counterbalance to the power of the Paris mob (which supports the more radical Jacobins). He chairs several meetings in which speeches are made in support of the reaction in Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux to the fall of the Gironde, one by his own cousin. However, ordered by the Convention to raise men to suppress revolt of the federalists in Lyons, BS prudently complies. Personally leads another group of volunteers to the assistance of neighbouring Chambéry, threatened by Sardinian troops (August). Unimpressed by this show of patriotishm, local Jacobins led by café-owner Antoine Bonnet campaign successfully for his removal (13 October). BS fights back, gaining time, a useful passport, and a temporary reinstatement as mayor. But learning that a representative of the Convention has been dispatched to Belley to investigate his case, he quickly leaves the town (10/11 December). In his absence he is denounced as a federalist and traitor. His goods and papers are sequestered.

LITERARY CONTEXT:
Paine:
The Age of Reason
(and 1794).
Kant:
Religion within the Boundaries of Reason
.
Desmoulins (ed.):
Le Vieux Cordelier
(to 1794).
Mirabeau (younger):
Les Lettres à Sophie
.

HISTORICAL EVENTS:
Louis XVI having been found guilty of treason, a vote on the death penalty is taken in the Convention, and agreed by a small majority. Sentence carried out on 21 January.
France declares war on Great Britain and Holland (February) and Spain (March). Inflation leads to food riots in Paris led by
enragés
Roux and Varlet (Febrary–March). Revolt of the Vendée. Revolutionary Tribunal set up to institutionalize revolutionary justice; decree condemning to summary execution all criminals taken in the act (the latter claiming even more victims than the former). Watch committes set up in every commune (March). Defeat of Girondist General Dumouriez in the Netherlands and his defection to the Austrians. Committe of Public Safety established where middle-men Danton and Barère try to mediate between warring factions in the Convention (April).
Huge mob, probably stirred up by the
Montagne
, surrounds the Convention (2 June); leading Girondists arrested. Many moderate members leave Paris, leaving Jacobins in control. Constitution of 1793 voted but never implemented as country in state of war. New Committe of Public Safety re-elected, including Robespierre (July).
Marat murdered (13 July). Revolts in Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux and other southern towns (May).
Girondist army formed in Marseilles, but city falls to troops of the Republic (August).
Leveé en masse
declared by Convention; general conscription of bachelors aged 18 to 25. Royalist rebels in Toulon hand the city to the British (August). Sardinian forces enter France in support of rebels but are driven back (September). Responding to pressure from Sections, Convention declares that “La terreur à l’ordre du jour”; revolutionary armies established, Law of Suspects passed and wage and price controls (the
maximum)
put in place (September). Revolutionary calendar renames months, introduces ten-day week and dates the Year 1 from 22 September 1792.
Adoption of metric system. Lyons falls to republicans and revolt ruthlessly suppressed (October). Execution of Marie Antoinette. Execution of Brissot and 30 Girondists (October); others, including Roland, Condorcet, and Pétion, commit suicide. Women’s political societies banned. Government led by Committe of Public Safety, Robespierre, Collot d’Herbois, Barère and Saint-Just among the most prominent members. Dechristianization campaign by Paris extremists including Jacques Hébert. By the end of the year, Vendéan revolt crushed, though the region remains in a state of civil war until 1796. Toulon retaken for the Republic by the young Bonaparte (December). Law on local government of 14 frimaire (4 December): Committe of Public Safety moves to control provinces by assuming direct rule; national agents placed in each district, to report every ten days to the government. David’s
Death of Marat
.

DATE:
1794

AUTHOR’S LIFE:
BS had ridden across the border to Switzerland, making his way to Lausanne where he had arranged to meet an
émigré
friend, Jean-Antoine de Rostaing. Spends time with his maternal grandparents in Moudon. Deciding to go the United States, the two men travel up through Germany to Holland, setting sail from Rotterdam on 12 July. They arrive in New York on 30 September. BS earns a living by teaching French – styling himself
Professeur
, a title by which he humorously refers to himself for the rest of his life – and by playing principal violin at the city’s only theatre, a ramshackle building in John Street.

LITERARY CONTEXT:
Mme Merigot:
La Cuisinière Républicaine
.
Restif de la Bretonne:
Monsieur Nicolas
(to 1797).
Mrs Radcliffe:
The Mysteries of Udolpho
.
Coleridge and Southey:
The Fall of Robespierre
.
Execution of Chénier and Lavoisier.

HISTORICAL EVENTS:
Robespierre eliminates enemies to both left and right, sending Hébert and his followers to the guillotine in March and Danton, Desmoulins and friends, who had been campaigning for a relaxation of the Terror, in April. Grandiose pageants organized to promote new regime, e.g. Fête of the Supreme Being (June) and the anniversary of revolution of 10 August.
Unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Collot d’Herbois and suspected attempt on life of Robespierre prompt law of 22 prairial (10 June) reorganizing Revolutionary Tribunal. Intensification of the Terror, which is no longer justified by military situation after French victory at Fleurus (26 June) and reoccupation of Belgium. Robespierre denounces his enemies at the Convention and is in turn denounced and arrested (9 thermidor: 27 July); Paris Commune fails to rally to him and he and his associates are guillotined (28 July). 71 of his supporters in the Commune are executed the following day.
“Thermidorean Reaction”: White Terror begins in Paris where so-called
jeunesse dorée
carry out revenge attacks on Jacobins. Jacobin Club closed (November). Terror spreads to provinces, particularly Lyons and the south where massacres carried out by the
Compagnies de jéhu
continue until mid-1795. Price controls abandoned (December).