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Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment
By Ira O. Wade PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06052-1
CHAPTER 1
THE CHANGING PICTURE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
At the outset, let us formulate a preliminary opinion concerning the conditions in France during the Enlightenment. In many respects the views now held have completely changed since the beginning of the twentieth century.
The one essential fact which all students of the Enlightenment have had to face was that it ended in France in a Revolution. Consequently we have always thought that explanation had to be found in the century itself which would justify the explosion at the end. The two nineteenth-century historians who were most responsible for stressing this fact were de Tocqueville and Taine. They were, however, only summarizing the opinion of a long line of nineteenth-century historians that the upheaval which occurred at the end of the Enlightenment must have been conditioned by particularly critical circumstances in the eighteenth century.
De Tocqueville, for instance, once he had decided to center his attention not upon the "ancien régime" but upon the French Revolution, was literally harassed by two questions: Why did this Revolution, everywhere prepared and everywhere threatening to burst, nonetheless take place in France? Why, once having exploded, did it assume certain characteristics which have never appeared elsewhere in the same way? These two questions, so common to that French way of thinking which consists in always assuming that whatever is European is first of all French and what is French is fundamentally European, drove de Tocqueville to study France's institutions, her methods, habits, and spirit. His research was thus directed to ascertaining the conditions of society at the time and the public's state of mind. Ignoring the primary importance of literature and memoirs in an investigation of this sort, his inquiry was pursued in the more plebeian writings of the time where he thought a wider public opinion could be discerned. De Tocqueville gave a very neat explanation of his method (L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution):
Comme mon objet est bien plus de peindre le mouvement des sentiments et des idées qui ont successivement produit les événements de la Révolution que de raconter ces événements eux-mêmes, c'est bien moins de documents historiques que j'ai besoin, que des écrits dans lesquels l'esprit public se manifeste à chaque période, journaux, brochures, lettres particulières, correspondances administratives.
Taine, likewise, set out to depict the movement of thought and feeling which produced the Revolution. Instead of basing his study upon the sources of public opinion, however, he centered it around the important writers of the age and the writers of memoirs. In the former he sought the spirit of the time; in the latter, evidence of the conditions which prevailed. Taine, as well as de Tocqueville, saw in the movement aspects which, though ill-directed, held for him a certain fascination. While criticizing bitterly the shortcomings of the epoch, he could not avoid a feeling of admiration at the utopian illusions which all those shortcomings prepared. Fundamentally what he criticized in his ancestors was a lack of a sense of reality. One of his very fine passages will give the tone which pervades the whole of the Ancien Régime:
Au fond, quand on voulait se représenter la fondation d'une société humaine, on imaginait vaguement une scène demi-bucolique, demithéâtrale, à peu près semblable à celle qu'on voyait sur la frontispice des livres illustrés de morale et de politique. Des hommes demi-nus ou vêtus de peaux de bêtes sont assemblés sous un grand chêne; au milieu d'eux, un vieillard vénérable se lève, et leur parle "le langage de la nature et de la raison:" il leur propose de s'unir et leur explique à quoi ils s'obligent par cet engagement mutuel; il leur montre l'accord de l'intérêt public et de l'intérêt privé et finit en leur faisant sentir les beautés de la vertu. Tous aussitôt poussent des cris d'allégresse, s'embrassent, s'empressent autour de lui et le choisissent pour magistrat; de toutes parts on danse sous les ormeaux, et la félicité désormais est établie sur la terre.
Nonetheless, despite these pastoral scenes, Taine felt that the misery of the peasant, the exasperation of the bourgeois, the cynicism of the nobleman, in short, the wretchedness of a regime in the final stages of decay, could not be concealed.
Hence, all during the first part of the twentieth century, those interested in the subject understood that in the Enlightenment times were hard, misery was widespread, the country was bankrupt, trade was at a standstill, the country was becoming depopulated, and there was a bitter class conflict. Only the Court and a small élite, mostly nobles of great wealth, escaped this common misery. In general, this historical view of the state of society in the Enlightenment was confirmed to a large extent by Young's Travels, written shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution. To be sure, Talleyrand's well-known remark about the "douceur de vivre," in referring to the period, in a way contradicted Young, but it was assumed that the wily diplomat was talking only of the élite. It had to be this way, for the disaster of Law's financial schemes in the Regency was known to have depleted the fiscal state of France to such a degree that the Ancien Régime could never recover from it, and the Cahiers de doléances bear eloquent testimony at the end of the century that conditions were very bad. It would have taken, fifty years ago, a bold historian to dare paint a picture of prosperity for the Enlightenment.
This was all the more hazardous since there had been, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a set of studies upon poverty in the Enlightenment. L. Lallemand, La Révolution et les pauvres (1898), especially Chapter I: "Quinze ans de réformes hospitalières"; C. Paultre, De la répression de la mendicité ...sous l'ancien régime (1906); and C. Bloch, L'Assistance et l'État en France à la veille de la Révolution (1908). These works gave such a startling picture of the government grappling with the problem of poverty that it was difficult to avoid the impression that it had become the one overpowering preoccupation of the time. Since these studies were packed with edicts, royal instructions, and the reports of commissions spread throughout the century, it was easy to see in this situation the problem of the century, all the more so since it was known that, in 1789, the peasantry took a leading role in La Grande Peur. To be sure, this instability is not what the demonstrations of Bloch and Paultre indicated. They brought out that all these investigations, edicts, instructions, showed an increasing interest which the government took in poverty and the way in which it more and more assumed responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. They depict the movement as growing not out of the prosperity of the time but out of an ideological humanitarianism. The notion that times were prosperous nowhere occurs in these works, though, in the early years of the twentieth century, two historians, Mathiez and J. Jaurès, questioned Taine's presentation.
It is, however, only in recent decades that this notion of prosperity has been put forward with some force after some quiet development during the past twenty-five years or so. If one reads the eighteenth-century section of the excellent little Histoire de la civilisation française (1958) of G. Duby and R. Mandrou, he will obtain a view of the situation which is anything but pessimistic. Basing his treatment upon the analyses of C. E. Labrousse in Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (1936), and La Crise de l'économie française (1944), the author presents the Enlightenment as a "révolution économique et démographique." The period of the Philosophes was a time of prosperity, similar to the Renaissance when the riches of the nation reinvigorated all of French life and stimulated its desire for luxuries. If anything, this Enlightenment prosperity was superior to that of the Renaissance, since it permeated the whole of French society and created a new form of humanism which stressed not only knowledge but action.
The population, from fifteen million at the death of Louis XIV, had become between twenty-four and twenty-six million before the Revolution. The material existence of this augmented population was entirely renewed. The cities became wealthy, but the striking change seems to have taken place in the rural population. Duby and Mandrou have noted (II, 72): "C'est la vie rurale elle-même qui devient plus facile, plus supportable, préservant la masse de la population de ces ponctions effroyables des temps plus anciens, les famines." Finally, there was a noticeable increase both in waterways and roads. This prosperity, which extended to 1775, was European in its scope. Only with the beginning of Louis XVI's reign did a depression set in which increased with the passing years and reached its culmination in the famine of 1788.
The peasant benefited from the break-up of large farms, the dividing of communal land and the gradual disappearance of serfdom, but more still from the prosperity of the surrounding towns, and most of all from the changes in the methods of agriculture. It has been noted that many agricultural societies flourished throughout the century, the most significant being those which grew out of the Physiocratic movement. All of this is still not sufficiently clarified, but it is indisputable that (p. 77) "à quelques exceptions près, la vie rurale [s'est] tirée partout de cette médiocrité chronique qui était la règle aux siècles passés." It was indeed a real revolution, characterized by fairs and markets, "signe de cet accroissement massif des transactions." At the beginning of the Revolution, for instance, there were more than five thousand fairs. This presentation of Duby and Mandrou, which contrasts so vigorously with our former view has been summed up most apdy in two short phrases (p. 79): "Ainsi, prudemment, lentement, la paysannerie française entre dans les circuits commerciaux: vaste mouvement dans les pays de vignobles réputés ...
That the peasant's life was still uncomfortable can be confirmed in the reports of the Turgot Committee on poverty. But this fact in no way diminishes the evidence of his relative prosperity. The melioration of his condition actually contributed to the prosperity of the towns, through the sale of agricultural products in the towns and the purchase of luxuries:
La grande voie, par laquelle les rentiers du sol irriguent l'économie française, c'est celle des biens de consommation. Tous ces enrichis ont surtout pensé à acheter des meubles, des tapis, des tissus: ils ont amélioré leurs menus quotidiens, enrichi leurs caves, fait construire surtout.
The provincial towns were veritable centers of culture during the eighteenth century, particularly the provincial capitals which in a way aped Paris. But all moderately-sized cities also had salons, academies, public libraries, and agricultural societies. Moreover, cities of Italy and Germany imitated the urban life of France. In a rather extensive geographical sense of the expression Europe was French in the Age of the Enlightenment, but it was only so in a restricted society.
This optimistic picture presented by Duby and Mandrou supplemented the studies already made in the late twenties and thirties by H. Sée, where French trade during the eighteenth century is presented in anything but a depleted condition. Thanks to the creation of the École des ponts et chaussées (1747) and the Corps des ingénieurs des ponts et chaussées (1750-54), the network of roads was remarkably developed during the second half of the century. On the other hand, there was but little new construction of canals — only 1000 kms. during the entire century — and the secondary road system, involving the cross-country roads, was in a deplorable condition. Thus traveling was often difficult, uncomfortable, and expensive; cross-country shipping was prohibitive because of the duties and tolls; coastwise traffic, on the contrary, was flourishing.
Internal trade, the basis of which was agriculture and, along the seashore, fishing, was hampered by all sorts of provincial regulations. External trade was freer and more lucrative. As a consequence. European nations increased their foreign trade sixfold during the century. France was third (to England and Holland) in foreign trade among the European countries, increasing from 215 million francs in 1716 to 1,061 million in 1783. The overseas colonies were encouraged, but only the Antilles gave fully satisfactory results. The maritime cities (Saint-Malo, Bordeaux, Nantes, etc.) became very prosperous because of this colonial and maritime trade.
The fiscal techniques were largely a continuation of seventeenth-century policies, and for the most part were rather conservative. Law's failure having discouraged new and venturesome methods. Nevertheless, private banks, especially the "caisses d'escompte," gradually took over from a depleted treasury. The government stopped changing arbitrarily the value of money which had been a source of much unnecessary misery. A stock exchange was established in 1724 following the Law fiasco, but most financial business remained in the hands of brokers.
The guild system became more and more obsolete until in 1776 it was temporarily abolished by Turgot, and then, because of protests, reinstated. Merchants preferred, however, to furnish raw materials to workers. This was particularly true where manufactured goods were concerned, and where merchants supplied what was needed to the peasants who turned it into finished products during the winter months. Thus the peasant became the backbone not only of agriculture but also of manufactures. The break-up of the land continued throughout the century, accompanied by a tendency toward a break-up in manufactures, which to some extent worked against high industrialization. This fragmentation also produced economic crises when the conditions of the peasantry became critical, as frequently happened in famines. As a consequence, these situations built up antagonisms between the peasantry and the well-to-do merchant class of provincial cities. It should not be forgotten, however, that the economic system of the eighteenth century was so organized that a depressed peasantry inevitably led to local urban depressions, so there were obvious limits to class conflicts. Moreover, in a regime where the priority was given to agriculture over manufactures, industry was only slowly developed: between 1700 and 1730, it seems hardly to have changed at all; between 1730 and 1750, some progress was made, especially in silks and cottons; after 1750, there was greater expansion in France, but not at all comparable to what was taking place in England.
Two conditions particularly limited its growth. Of the twenty-four or twenty-six million population, only about ten percent were urban. In the cities, consequently, the industries were rather small; indeed, it was this situation which led to the farming-out of work to the countryside. In this way rural labor, chiefly because it was cheap, had a tendency to upset the balance of urban industry, especially in regions where agriculture was unsuccessful. The second handicap was the government management of firms. Some factories (Gobelins, Sèvres) it ran directly; while others (Van Robáis, St.-Gobain, Anzin) were run privately with the consent of the government. This condition made government responsible for industrial planning and especially for the modernization of equipment. Since it displayed no great efficiency nor alacrity in assuming this responsibility, manufacturing was slowed. Moreover, there was a great deal of discussion between those who favored state regulation of industry (Melon) and those who proposed the doctrine of free industry (Vincent de Gournay), and this state of affairs was further complicated by the agricultural doctrines of the Physiocrats.
Sée concludes (Hist, éc., p. 362) that "tout compte fait, on peut affirmer qu'un progrès très sensible s'est manifesté dans l'industrie française vers la fin de l'ancien régime." Sée's conclusion, modest though it is in comparison with that of Duby and Mandrou, was nonetheless contradicted by M. Kovalewsky who stressed that at that time France's industry had declined miserably. Perhaps some balance can be struck if the reign of Louis XV is dissociated from that of Louis XVI, where there was an admitted depression, culminating in real famine in 1788.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment by Ira O. Wade. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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