the Parlements grew awkward. They drafted protests about the state of the nation – but only when they felt their interests threatened, or when they saw that their interests could be served. M. de Viefville belonged to that section of the middle classes that did not want to destroy the nobility, but rather hoped to merge with it. Offices, positions, monopolies – all have their price, and many carry a title with them.
The Parlementarians worried a great deal when the Crown began to assert itself, to issue decrees where it had never issued them before, to produce bright new ideas about how the country should be run. Occasionally they got on the wrong side of the monarch; since any resistance to authority was novel and risky, the Parlementarians managed the difficult feat of being both arch-conservatives and popular heroes.
In January 1776, the minister Turgot proposed the abolition of the feudal right called corvée – a system of forced labour on roads and bridges. He thought that the roads would be better if they were built and maintained by private contractors, rather than by peasants dragged from their fields. But that would cost, wouldn’t it? So perhaps there could be a property tax? And every man of means would pay it – not just commoners, but the nobility too?
Parlement turned this scheme down flat. After another bitter argument, the King forced them to register the abolition of the corvée. Turgot was making enemies everywhere. The Queen and her circle stepped up their campaign against him. The King disliked asserting himself, and was vulnerable to the pressures of the moment. In May, he dismissed Turgot; forced labour was reinstated.
In this way, one minister was brought down; the trick bore repetition. Said the Comte d’Artois, to the back of the retreating economist: ‘Now at last we shall have some money to spend.’
When the King was not hunting, he liked to shut himself up in his workshop, doing metalwork and tinkering with locks. He hoped that by refusing to make decisions he could avoid making mistakes; he thought that, if he did not interfere, things would go on as they always had done.
After Turgot was sacked, Malesherbes offered his own resignation. ‘You’re lucky,’ Louis said mournfully. ‘I wish I could resign.’
1776: A DECLARATION of the Parlement of Paris:
The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.
WHEN M. DE VIEFVILLE arrived home, he would make his way through the narrow huddle of small-town streets, and through the narrow huddle of provincial hearts; and he would bring himself to call on Jean-Nicolas, in his tall white book-filled house on the Place des Armes. Maître Desmoulins had an obsession nowadays, and de Viefville dreaded meeting him, meeting his baffled eyes and being asked once again the question that no one could answer: what had happened to the good and beautiful child he had sent to Cateau-Cambrésis nine years earlier?
On Camille’s sixteenth birthday, his father was stamping about the house. ‘I sometimes think,’ he said, ‘that I have got on my hands a depraved little monster with no feelings and no sense.’ He has written to the priests in Paris, to ask what they teach his son; to ask why he looks so untidy, and why during his last visit home he has seduced the daughter of a town councillor, ‘a man,’ he says, ‘whom I see every day of my working life’.
Jean-Nicolas did not really expect answers to these questions. His real objections to his son were rather different. Why, he really wanted to know, was his son so emotional? Where did he get this capacity to infect others with emotion: to agitate them, discomfit them, shake them out of their ease? Ordinary conversations, in Camille’s presence, went off at peculiar tangents, or turned into blazing rows. Safe social conventions took on an air of danger. You couldn’t, Desmoulins thought, leave him alone with anybody.
It was no longer said that his son was a little Godard. Neither did the de Viefvilles rush to claim him. His brothers were thriving, his sisters blooming, but when Camille slipped in at the front door of the Old House, he looked as if he had come on a message from the Foundling Hospital.
Perhaps, when he is grown up, he will be one of those boys who you pay to stay away from home.
THERE ARE SOME noblemen in France who have discovered that their best friends are their lawyers. Now that revenue from land is falling steadily, and prices are rising, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting poorer too. It has become necessary to assert certain privileges that have been allowed to lapse over the years. Often, dues to which one is entitled have not been paid for a generation; that lax and charitable lordship must now cease. Again, one’s ancestors have allowed part of their estates to become known as ‘common land’ – an expression for which there is usually no legal foundation.
These were the golden days of Jean-Nicolas; if, privately, he had worries, at least professionally he was prospering. Maître Desmoulins was no bootlicker – he had a lively sense of his own dignity, and was moreover a liberal-minded man, an advocate of reform in most spheres of national life. He read Diderot after dinner, and subscribed to the Geneva reprint of the Encyclopédie, which he took in instalments. Nevertheless, he found himself much occupied with registers of rights and tracing of titles. A couple of old strongboxes were brought around and trundled up to his study, and when they were opened a faint musty smell crept out. Camille said, ‘So that is what tyranny smells like.’ His father swept his own work aside and delved into the boxes; very tenderly he held the old yellow papers up to the light. Clément, the youngest, thought he was looking for buried treasure.
The Prince de Condé, the district’s premier nobleman, called personally on Maître Desmoulins in the tall, white, book-filled, very very humble house on the Place des Armes. Normally he would have sent his land agent, but he was piqued by curiosity to know the man who was doing such good work for him. Besides, if honoured by a visit, the fellow would never dare to send in a bill.
It was late afternoon, autumn. Warming in his hand a glass of deep red wine, and mellow, aware of his condescension, the Prince lounged in a wash of candlelight; evening crept up around them, and painted shadows in the corners of the room.
‘What do you people want?’ he asked.
‘Well …’ Maître Desmoulins considered this large question. ‘People like me, men of the professional classes, we would like a little more say, I suppose – or let me put it this way, we would welcome the opportunity to serve.’ It is a fair point, he thinks; under the old King, noblemen were never ministers, but, increasingly, all the ministers are noblemen. ‘Civil equality,’ he said. ‘Fiscal equality.’
Condé raised his eyebrows. ‘You want the nobility to pay your taxes for you?’
‘No, Monseigneur, we want you to pay your own.’
‘I do pay tax,’ Condé said. ‘I pay my poll tax, don’t I? All this property-tax business is nonsense. And so, what else?’
Desmoulins made a gesture, which he hoped was eloquent. ‘An equal chance. That’s all. An equal chance at promotion in the army or the church …’ I’m explaining it as simply as I can, he thought: an ABC of aspiration.
‘An equal chance? It seems against nature.’
‘Other nations conduct themselves differently. Look at England. You can’t say it’s a human trait, to be oppressed.’
‘Oppressed? Is that what you think you are?’
‘I
