Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 2

The members of the Parlement returned from their exile as contumacious as ever. Against the express command of the king, they persisted in occupying themselves with religious questions and manifesting a spirit of opposition to the pretensions of the Papacy. The public excitement was so great that a wretch named Damiens attempted to assassinate the king, in 1757, but only wounded him slightly. In 1770, the Duc d'Aiguillon, Governor of Brittany, having been relieved of his post and formally accused by the parlement of that province, was brought to trial before the Parlement of Paris in his quality of peer of the realm. He was about to be condemned when the king, in a bed of justice, quashed the proceedings. To the indignant protests of the magistrates, who suspended their sittings, Louis XV replied by dismissing his minister, Choiseul, and giving his post to D'Aiguillon. On the night of the 19th and 20th of January, 1771, a hundred and sixty-nine of the members of the Parlement were each awakened by two musketeers, who required them to sign yes or no on the order to resume their official functions. Thirty-eight signed yes, but retracted this consent two days later; on the following night a huissier notified the members of their suspension from office, and the musketeers brought them lettres de cachet which banished them all in different directions. At the end of the year there were more than seven hundred magistrates in exile. The king transformed his council into a parlement, under the presidency of M. Maupeou, from whom it took its name, but it was received with a storm of popular insult and ridicule. Public opinion throughout the nation was aroused; all the princes of the blood, excepting one, and thirteen peers protested to the king "against the reversal of the laws of the State," and the name of the États Généraux was openly pronounced in the parlements of Toulouse, Besançon, Rouen, and even in Paris. "Richelieu and Louis XIV had destroyed the political importance of the nobility; Louis XV destroyed the great institution of the magistracy,—what was there remaining to prop up the ancient edifice and to cover the monarchy?"

The ribald Parisians circulated this Pater, and found amusement in it: "Our Father who art at Versailles, your name be glorified, your reign is shaken, your will is executed no more on the earth than in heaven; give us our daily bread, which you have taken from us; pardon your parlements, which have sustained your interests, as you pardon your ministers who have sold them: do not succumb any longer to the temptations of the Du Barry, but deliver us from the devil of the chancellor."

In the midst of the general decadence, which affected alike royalty, the clergy, and the nobles, in the general confusion and inequality of all laws and procedure, a formidable spirit of investigation began to stir. The nation had no written constitution, everything depended upon custom, and was maintained only by a sort of public opinion, which constantly varied. The contradictions and anomalies in all branches of the public administration were rendered even more hopeless by the general corruption and clashing of individual interests: "France has no general, positive, written law … which defines all the powers," said Lally Tollendal in the chambre de la noblesse in 1789. Both the civil and the penal law bristled with the most flagrant injustice, the accused was frequently allowed no defence; torture, mutilations, and the death-penalty were awarded with the most shocking facility and for the most inadequate crimes,—the complete innocence of the victim was but too frequently recognized after his execution. "If I were accused of having stolen the towers of Notre-Dame," said one, "I would consider it prudent to run away." The right of asylum was still maintained in Paris in the enclosure of the Temple, as in the Middle Ages; in 1768, "poor devils were sent to the galleys for having sold certain books, among them the innocent satire of Voltaire: L'homme aux quarante écus."

The details of the trial and execution of Damiens, for his attempt on the life of the king, give a better picture of the times than any general description. Immediately after his arrest, his legs were torn with red-hot pinchers, and these wounds were not allowed to heal. He was confined in the Tour de Montgommery, in a circular chamber twelve feet in diameter, almost without light and air, strapped down, without the power of movement, to a mattress, the bottom of which was alternately pushed up and let down by a jack underneath. His examination lasted fifty-seven days; he was put to the question, "ordinary and extraordinary," to discover the names of his accomplices, and finally condemned to death by torture in very nearly the same phrases as those which we have quoted in the sentence of Ravaillac. An enclosure was arranged in the Place de Grève, surrounded by a strong barricade of planks, pointed at the top, with elongations at the four corners for the four horses who were to écarteler the criminal; in the centre was a very solid wooden table, six feet long, four feet wide, and about three feet high, on which he was to be placed, fastened down with iron plates over his chest, stomach, and between his thighs, in such a manner that his body should be perfectly immovable while his limbs were at liberty. "The roofs of all the houses in the Grève," says the contemporary Journal de Barbier, "and even the chimneys, were covered with people. There was a man and a woman who fell in a certain locality, and who injured others. It was remarked that there were very many women, and even some of distinction, and that they sustained the horror of this execution better than the men, which did not do them any honor."

From the memoirs of H. Sanson, one of the public executioners, the following details are quoted by M. de Genouillac. "The tortionnaire, who had charge of the pinchers, and who, by a singular mockery of circumstances, bore the name of a great seigneur of the time, Soubise, had assured his chief that he had procured all the implements indicated in the sentence. When he arrived at the scaffold, Gabriel Sanson immediately perceived that the miserable Soubise was drunk, and quite incapable of fulfilling his appointed task. Filled with violent apprehension, he demanded to be shown the lead, the sulphur, the wax, and the rosin which Soubise was to have purchased; everything was lacking, and it was recognized at the same moment that the 'patient' might arrive immediately, that the pile which was to consume his body was composed of damp and ill-chosen wood that would be very difficult to light.

"In contemplating the consequences of the drunkenness of the tortionnaire, Gabriel Sanson lost his head. For some moments the scaffold presented a spectacle of inexpressible confusion; the valets ran about distracted, everybody cried out at once, and the unhappy executioner of the prévôté de l'hôtel tore his hair while deploring the terrible responsibility which he had brought down upon his head. The arrival of the lieutenant of the short robe, who had finished disposing his men in the enclosure, the presence of the procureur général, who had been sent for, put an end to this disorder.

"The magistrate severely reprimanded Gabriel Sanson.... During this interval, the valets went into the shops of the grocers of the neighborhood to provide themselves with what was necessary; but when they issued from the enclosure, the crowd followed them,—in all the shops which they entered their purpose was made known and the merchants refused to sell them, or pretended not to have what they desired; it was necessary for the lieutenant to send with them an officer to demand, in the king's name, the objects of which they had need."

"This scene was prolonged for such a length of time," says M. de Genouillac, continuing the narration, "that everything was not yet ready when the patient arrived on the Place de Grève, and they were obliged to seat him on one of the steps of the scaffold whilst they proceeded, under his very eyes, with the final preparations for his death. Damiens had remained three hours in the chapel; he had prayed continually, with a fervor and a contrition that had touched the hearts of all those present. When four o'clock struck from the clock of the Palais, Gabriel Sanson approached MM. Gueret and De Marsilly, and said to them that the hour to set out had arrived.

"Although he had spoken in a low voice, Damiens had heard him, for he murmured, in a feverish voice: 'Yes, it will soon be night;' and after a pause he added: 'Alas! to-morrow it will be day for them!'

"They raised him up to take him away; he made the motion of a kiss toward the crucifix; he was put into the tumbril, which took its way toward Notre-Dame. Before the porch of the church they endeavored to force him to kneel, but his legs were so broken that he uttered a piercing cry in endeavoring to stoop; he was obliged to pronounce while standing the words which the greffier dictated to him.

"He was replaced in the cart and all returned to the Place de Grève, which was literally full of people belonging to all classes of society. Arrived at the foot of the scaffold, Damiens asked to speak to the commissioners; he was carried to the Hôtel de Ville, there he retracted again the accusation he had made against Gautier, which had been wrung from him by torture, recommended his wife and his children to M. Pasquier, and at five o'clock he was set down again on the Place and they lifted him on the scaffold.

"The braziers in which was burning the sulphur mingled with burning coals were ready; his arm was attached to a bar in such a manner that the wrist extended beyond the outside plank of the platform. The executioner brought up the brazier. Damiens uttered a frightful cry and writhed; then, that movement over, he lifted his head and watched his hand burning without manifesting his pain in any other manner than by the chattering of his teeth. It was one of Sanson's valets, André Legris, who, for the sum of a hundred livres, undertook the tearing with pinchers. He carried his instrument over the arms, over the chest, and over the thighs of the patient, and brought away shreds of flesh; then he poured into the gaping wounds boiling oil, flaming rosin, sulphur fused, or melted lead, with which the other valets supplied him.

"Damiens, mad with pain, his eyes immeasurably out of their orbits, the hair standing on his head, cried, in a voice that made every one tremble: 'More! more!'

"But he was taken down from the platform, the traces of the horses were attached to each one of his limbs. Each horse was held by the bridle by an aid; another was placed behind with a whip in his hand; the executioner, standing on the platform, gave the signal.

"The four horses sprang violently forward, one of them fell, but the body of the unfortunate wretch was not dismembered.

"Three times the horses recommenced their efforts, and three times the resistance of the body made them fall back. Only the arms and legs of the patient, who was still living, were immeasurably elongated.

"The curé had fainted; the executioners no longer knew what to do. The spectators, at first dumb with stupor and fright, now uttered exclamations of horror.

"It was then that the surgeon, Boyer, ascended to the Hôtel de Ville to ask of the commissioners permission to cut the joints; this was at first refused, on the pretext that the longer the execution lasted the more would the criminal suffer, and that this was what was necessary; but the surgeon having affirmed that the tearing asunder could not be effected without aid, it was resolved to permit the necessary amputation.

"But there was no instrument.

"André Legris performed the operation with blows of a hatchet, he cut the arm-pits and the joints of the thighs. The two thighs were first dismembered, then a shoulder, and it was not till after this that the wretched Damiens expired.

"A sigh of relief escaped from all breasts.

"But it was not finished: the four members and the trunk were gathered up and all placed upon the pile of fagots, and the flames arose. The execution of Damiens had lasted an hour and a quarter....

"It was observed, when they picked up the body of Damiens to throw it on the pyre, that his hair, which was brown when he arrived on the Place de Grève, had become white as snow."

The judgment rendered by the Parlement in the famous case of the diamond necklace, in the following reign, was received with very different emotions by the court and the people. It may be remembered that the Bishop of Strasbourg, Cardinal de Rohan, a member of one of the most arrogant families of the nobility, anxious to regain the favor of the Queen Marie Antoinette, had fallen into the snares of a clever adventuress, Jeanne de Saint-Remy de Valois, Comtesse de la Motte. The latter was aware that the crown-jewelers, MM. Bœhmer and Bassenge, had offered the queen a necklace of diamonds for the price of one million six hundred thousand livres, but that she had declined it, saying that the money would be better applied in the purchase of a vessel of war. Madame de la Motte proceeded to open fictitious negotiations with the jewelers in the name of the queen, pretending that the latter had changed her mind but did not wish the affair to become public, that the purchase would be made by instalments and through the hands of a great seigneur of the court. This was the Cardinal Rohan, upon whom she imposed, by means of forged letters from the queen, skilfully prepared by her secretary, one Sieur Rétaux de Villette. She even arranged a brief nocturnal interview in the gardens of Versailles for him, as related in the last chapter, with a demoiselle from the Palais-Royal disguised as Marie-Antoinette. A few days later, the cardinal remitted to the comtesse the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand livres on a pretended letter; but when she proposed to him, later, to purchase the necklace himself on the strength of the queen's promise to indemnify him, he had so many doubts that he went to consult the adventurer Cagliostro, then in great favor in Paris. The magician pronounced favorably upon the enterprise; in January, 1785, the cardinal received the jewels from the merchants in return for a paper signed and sealed by him but bearing on the margin the words: "Approuvé, Marie-Antoinette de France" in which it was agreed that they were to be paid for in four instalments of four hundred thousand livres each, the first payment to be made on the 1st of August following. The queens of France were never in the habit of adding anything to the signature of their Christian names. On the first of February the cardinal delivered the necklace in a casket, in the apartments of Madame de la Motte at Versailles, to an assumed valet in the royal livery, whom he thought he recognized, but who was no other than the crafty Rétaux de Villette. The stones were immediately separated, the comtesse kept the small ones for herself and sold the larger ones in England. Naturally, the affair came to light a few months later, and on the 15th of August the cardinal was lodged in the Bastille.

Great was the excitement; the Papacy even interfered to prevent the trial of so eminent a churchman by the Parlement, before whom the king brought the procès in the following month, but the latter maintained its rights, and on the 31st of May, 1786, pronounced judgment. M. de la Motte (who had escaped to England) was condemned to the galleys for life; his wife, to be publicly flogged, branded on both shoulders with the letter "V," a rope around her neck, and imprisoned for life; Rétaux de Villette banished for life, without branding or flogging; the demoiselle D'Olivia discharged; Cagliostro and the cardinal discharged from all accusation. The acquittal of the prelate was hailed with applause by the people, and viewed with great displeasure by the court and the nobility; the blow to the royal prestige was felt to be very serious, the publicity given to the fact that a cardinal, Grand Almoner to the Court, had mistaken a courtesan for the Queen of France was recognized as most unfortunate. Louis XVI banished him to his abbey of the Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne, ordered him to resign his post of Grand Aumônier de France, and to return his order of the Saint-Esprit.

Madame de la Motte, who had appeared on her trial coquettishly arrayed, and bearing herself with the greatest assurance, had become so violent on hearing her sentence that the exécuteur des hautes-œuvres was summoned to the Palais by the magistrates, and strongly recommended to avoid any public scandal in carrying out the sentence of branding her. It was proposed to gag her, but it was feared that this would excite the people, and it was resolved to perform the operation at six o'clock in the morning, in the court of the Conciergerie. When it came to reading the sentence to her, four men were required to transport her before the Commission Parlementaire charged with this duty, and even then she escaped from their hands and threw herself upon the floor, rolling "in such convulsions and uttering such cries of a wild beast" that the reading had to be abandoned.

"When she was stretched on the platform," as the Mémoires des Sanson relate, "the fustigation commenced, and as long as it lasted, her cries became all the more furious. Her imprecations were especially addressed to the Cardinal de Rohan; … she received a dozen blows with the rods; … she remained during some moments mute, motionless, and as though fainting. Charles-Henri Sanson thought to take advantage of this to carry out the final directions of the sentence. Her dress had been torn in the struggles she had undergone, and her shoulder was uncovered. He took an iron from the brazier, and, approaching her, he pressed it upon the skin. Madame de la Motte uttered the cry of a wounded hyena, and, throwing herself upon one of the assistants who held her, she bit his hand with so much fury that she took out a portion of the flesh. Then, and although tightly bound, she began again to defend herself. Taking advantage of the care which the executioners exercised in this struggle against a woman, she succeeded for a long time in paralyzing all their attempts, and it was only very imperfectly that the iron was applied a second time, to the other shoulder."

The red-hot iron slipped, and the brand was made on her breast instead. "This time she uttered a cry more heart-rending and more terrible than all the others, and fainted. They took advantage of this to put her in a carriage and convey her to the Salpêtrière."

Such was the administration of justice in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the most civilized capital in Christendom!

It is to be regretted that Destiny, with her usual disregard of sound ethics, should have passed over the heads of the vainglorious Louis XIV and the corrupt Louis XV to wreak the final vengeance due the Bourbons on that of their well-intentioned but incapable successor. In the eyes of Clio, weakness is the Unforgivable Sin. The grandson of Louis XV, when he ascended the throne in 1774, at the age of twenty, was "a prince of pure habits, of very limited intelligence, of an extreme timidity both in character and speech, loving the good, desirous of it, but, unfortunately, too feeble to be able to impose his will on those around him. While he was still dauphin, being one day reproached by the courtiers with his sober humor in the midst of the totally unregulated court of his grandfather, he replied: 'I wish to be called Louis the Severe.'" One day his minister, Turgot, entering his cabinet, found him seriously occupied. "You see," the monarch said to him, "I am working also." He was drawing up a memoir for the destruction of rabbits in the neighborhood of cultivated estates!

The reforms instituted by this minister evoked such violent opposition, even from the Parlement in defence of the odious abuse of the corvée (forced labor on the highways), that the timid king dismissed him, in 1776. He was succeeded by the Genoese banker, Necker, who in his turn was obliged to resign, five years later, his intelligent efforts to redeem the hopeless confusion into which the finances had fallen serving only to increase the number of his enemies, amongst whom the Parlement was again to be found. The treaty of alliance with the revolted American colonies, signed February 6, 1778, was made the occasion of solemn warnings addressed to the king as to the dangerous encouragement he was thus giving the spirit of unrest and independence. The queen began to interest herself in the affairs of the government; at her advice, the direction of the finances was given to Calonne, in 1783, who in three years increased the debt by the sum of five hundred millions of borrowed money, and brought things to such a pass that he had no other resource to offer the distracted monarch but the discarded measures of his predecessor, Necker.

The quarrels with the Parlement increased in frequency and bitterness; the king was guilty of irregularity in forcing the enregistering of certain edicts,—"it is legal because I wish it so," he said; Calonne was succeeded by Brienne for a year, and the latter by Necker again for the same length of time, but it was too late; the demands for the États Généraux, or even for an Assemblée Nationale, became more and more peremptory. Brienne was burned in effigy in the streets of Paris, as Calonne had been, and it was even intended to insult the queen in the same manner. She was called Madame Déficit, and, at the request of the lieutenant of police, the king promised to prevent her appearing in the capital. Finally, a decree of the Conseil du Roi, December 27, 1788, convoked the États Généraux to meet at Versailles on the 1st of the following May, and the beginning of the end had come.

One of the very first of the questions to be settled was that of the number of representatives of the tiers état. Many things had changed since 1614, when they had been so humiliated, and it was recognized that an increased representation should be given them, though the nobles bitterly opposed this reform. A royal decree of the 1st of January, 1789, fixed the total number of members at, at least, a thousand, and that of the third order at that of the other two combined. This decision was received with many demonstrations of satisfaction by the Parisians, and the six corps of the merchants of the capital addressed a congratulatory letter to the king. The amicable fusion of the three orders, which took place in the latter part of June, was prefaced by acrimonious dissensions, in which the king interfered, and was worsted. The custom, at first, was to permit the deputies of the clergy and nobility to enter the hall to take their places of honor, and to let those of the communes wait outside, frequently in the rain, as on the 23d of June,—the scene represented in M. Mélingue's painting, reproduced on page 35.

The first defections from the ranks of the aristocracy were made on the 13th of June, when three curés of Poitou took their seats with the third estate. On the 17th, on the motion of the Abbé Sieyès, the communes declared themselves the National Assembly, and on the 9th of July, the more clearly to indicate their mission, they added the word "Constituante." This bold step filled the court with rage, the king was advised to dissolve the Assembly, but had courage only to close the doors of the Salle des Menus, called the Salle des Trois Ordres, in which the sittings had been held. The president of the tiers état, Bailly, convoked the members in a tennis-court, where, on the 20th of June, they took a solemn oath not to separate until they had given a constitution to France. This was the famous Serment du Jeu de Paume. A week later, the king, at the instigation of Necker, invited the two higher orders to reunite themselves with the third. They obeyed and were courteously received, "We missed our brothers," said Bailly, "the family is now complete."

The Assemblée divided itself into thirty bureaux to facilitate the great work of creating the constitution, and the deputies of the tiers chose their presidents from among the nobles and ecclesiastics.

So far, everything had gone well, but the day of violence was at hand. More than thirty thousand troops had been concentrated around Paris and Versailles by order of the court; the Parisians, uneasy at their presence, demanded their withdrawal, the king dismissed Necker instead. The next day, the disturbances broke out, the Gardes-Françaises fired on a detachment of one of the foreign regiments, the Royal-Allemand, the people rose, clamoring for arms, fabricated pikes, plundered the arsenal of the Hôtel des Invalides, and moved on the Bastille as by a common impulse. The governor, the Marquis de Launey, had made the best preparations for defence that he could, but he had only one hundred and fifteen men under his command, and these but little disposed to make a good stand; at the end of a combat of several hours, they forced him to capitulate, on the solemn promise of the besiegers that their lives should be spared,—a promise which was not kept. It is rather as the destruction of a hated instrument of tyranny than as a feat of arms that the French celebrate this event,—which inaugurated the long series of acts of bloodshed of the Revolution.

This news was received with such consternation at Versailles that the king commenced his half-hearted attempts to accept the situation and secure the friendship of his people. The next day, a royal courier announced to the inhabitants of Paris that, "relying upon the love and fidelity of his subjects," he had ordered the troops to leave the vicinity of the capital and of Versailles. The Assemblée sent a deputation of eighty members to Paris to confirm the news, there was universal rejoicing, a Te Deum at Notre-Dame, illuminations in the evening, Lafayette was appointed general of the Parisian militia and Bailly mayor of the city. On the 17th of July, the king made his famous visit to the Hôtel de Ville, was received by the new mayor and all the officers of the corporation, assumed the new tricolored cockade—with sufficient unwillingness,—and in response to the tumultuous acclamations of the crowd, swearing to defend his "legitimate authority," made them a little speech: "My people can always rely upon my love." "Louis might, on this day, have regained all hearts; but he was in nowise the man required for such times. The Revolution continued in his presence." On his return to Versailles, he consented to dismiss his cabinet of ministers and to recall Necker.

But misery and hunger were prevalent in Paris, and throughout the provinces the peasants had begun to burn convents and châteaux; the murder of former officers of the crown and the parading of their heads, and even of their hearts, through the streets had begun in the capital. In the celebrated sitting of the night of the 4th of August, the delegates of the nobility and the clergy voluntarily consented to the abolishment of all their privileges and feudal rights, of jurisdiction, of levying tithes by the clergy, privileges of persons, provinces, and cities. The right of redemption of all these privileges, excepting those which affected personal liberty, was stipulated, but this session was considered as memorable in establishing the dawn of equality, and the members of the Assemblée were saluted as "fathers of the country." Following the example of the American Congress, it was desired to draw up a declaration of the rights of the man and the citizen; those who wished to divide the legislative power into two branches, as in England, and give to the king the right of unlimited veto, were outvoted, some of the moderate members retired from the committee on the constitution,—on both sides the advocates of extreme measures came to the front. The regiment of Flanders was recalled to Versailles; the king refused the proposition which was made to him to take refuge in Metz, with the army of Bouillé, which would have brought on the civil war, but the final catastrophe was hastened, nevertheless, by an imprudent banquet given to the officers of the various regiments, even the foreign ones and those of the national guard, on the night of the 1st of October, in which foreign airs were played, healths drunk to the royal family, white cockades distributed by the ladies, and the tricolored ones, it was said, trampled under foot.

The starvation in Paris had become so general, that the people, in their ignorance, murmured: "Ah! if the king only knew of our miseries; he is good, but he is deceived by the courtiers; if he were only here, and not at Versailles!" The news of this banquet, and of another given the following day in the salle du manége, set fire to the powder, an army of women assembled, crying: "Bread! bread!" and, accompanied by a great multitude, set out for Versailles, notwithstanding all the efforts of Bailly and Lafayette. Some of the gardes du corps were killed, and their heads paraded through the streets on pikes; the royal family were brought back to Paris, virtually prisoners, and the Assemblée committed "the unpardonable fault" of following them, and thus placing itself also within the reach of the mob that had finally learned all its power. The great nobles had already begun to "emigrate," leaving the king defenceless in the hands of his enemies, and rendering his situation still more desperate by their intrigues with foreign powers, which brought about the first of the coalitions against France.

On the 5th of November, it was decreed, and promptly approved by the king, that the sittings of the Parlement of Paris should be suspended until further orders, their powers to be exercised by the Chambres des Vacations; on the 24th of March, 1790, this ancient body was formally abolished, on the grounds that the nation had not concurred in its election. The consideration of the innumerable reforms, civil and political, voted by the Assemblée in its complete reconstruction of the government belongs rather to the history of the nation than to that of the city,—the absolute monarchy was deprived of the power of making laws, establishing imposts, deciding on peace or war, and reduced to the condition of the first of the administrative branches of the government, with a civil list of twenty-five millions. Complete liberty of action was given to the press, to industry and commerce. The rights of primogeniture, of rendering estates inalienable, were abolished, and of confiscation, on the principle that the expiation should be strictly personal, like the fault. Protestants and Jews were admitted to all civic and civil rights, and the former recovered their property which had been incorporated in the domains of the State. All titles were abolished, the nobles were reduced to the condition of citizens, and the priests to those of public functionaries; the application of the death-penalty was greatly restricted; all Frenchmen, without regard to their birth or religion, were eligible to all public offices and all military grades; the ancient provincial departments of the nation were replaced by departments. "The territory of France is free throughout its length and breadth, like the persons who inhabit it."