When it comes to murder, is the pen mightier than the sword?
The evidence from eighteenth-century France suggests that it was certainly more cruel.
Death by pen was a protracted affair resulting from a thousand painful jabs.
Fake news wasn’t uncommon in pre-Revolutionary France. In fact, it appears to have been the norm.
And Beaumarchais, who—along with a number of other hired writers, many of whom rose to prominence in Revolutionary France—lent his talents for the purpose, couldn’t have been clearer.
To take down a man, he advised through his character Bazile in the Barber of Seville:
“Spread some nasty rumor. . . then, while the scandal is going the rounds, have him slandered by experts.”
What nasty rumors were being spread in pre-Revolutionary France?
A minister’s unpopular ideas might come under fire in the popular press.
Financial and tax reforms that Louis XVI proposed through his various ministers—Turgot, Necker, Calonne—were frequently attacked in this way.
They chipped away at the privileges both of the nobles of the sword—the ancient noble families who had the right to bear arms—and those of the robe—a recently created class of professionals from the time of the Sun King who had acquired nobility as a result of the offices they purchased.
Many of the latter were magistrates and lawyers who occupied seats in the Paris Parlement, the highest court in the land. By tradition, Parlement reserved for itself the right to register any of the King’s edicts before they became law.
The King, could of course, state his will and compel Parlement to register an edict.
But Louis was rarely comfortable asserting himself in this manner. Worse still, in such cases, Parlement decried the monarchy’s despotism, calling attention to the manner in which the reforms had per force to be instituted rather than to its own intransigence when it came to implementing reforms that were intended to lower the tax burden on the peasants.
Parlement’s objections to the King’s reforms made it nearly impossible for Louis XVI and his ministers to implement many of the financial reforms he had in mind to better the condition of the people. Later its stubborn refusal to collect taxes resulted in the financial crisis that triggered the Revolution.
For example, rather than force peasants to provide free labor to repair France’s roads, Finance Minister Turgot had proposed that a tax be levied on property owners to raise the funds required for the purpose. Both the nobles of the sword and of the robe were vehemently opposed to this.
And before long a thinly veiled pamphlet began circulating in Paris. It was a story set in Persia about a minister called Togur who’s duped the Sophy (King Louis XVI) and his prime minister and mullah into issuing disastrous reforms.
The Sophy, the pamphleteer wrote, had become “the leading dummy in his kingdom.”
Who dared to call the King an idiot? His own brother, the Comte de Provence, also known as Monsieur—the man who after the Revolution became King Louis XVIII.
Monsieur fancied himself far more intelligent and articulate than his older brother. The King humbly agreed this was the case.
Monsieur also thought he’d make a better King than Louis XVI.
Circumstances had conspired to make this an impossibility while his brother still lived. But Monsieur hoped that his brother’s “impotence” and long childlessness meant the crown would one day be his.
His disappointment at the eventual birth of a child and then the birth of a Dauphin were so great, he revealed them in a bitter letter to the King of Sweden that has still survived.
Was it Monsieur who was responsible for the calumnies against the King’s lack of sexual prowess and the Queen’s apparently enormous and insatiable sexual appetite?
Here’s a verse that began doing the rounds shortly after the birth of the Dauphin:
Louis, si tu veux voir
Bâtard, cocu, putain,
Regarde ton miroir,
La Reine et le Dauphin.
I think you can guess what a “bâtard” is. A “cocu” is a cuckold. That should tell you what a “putain” might be.
If the King would like to see a portrait of these three, all he has to do is look in the mirror at himself, the Queen, and the Dauphin!
There were any number of writers who in pre-Revolutionary France could have penned such damaging verses and equally cruel prose. There were many who sought glory as writers.
But unable to gain glory for themselves through ordinary means, they rented out their talents to anyone willing to pay.
Beaumarchais, employed as a government agent, wasn’t above tossing off a few for a monetary consideration.
Brissot, leader of the Girondins during the Revolution, was another writer who hired out his pen. Mirabeau, a nobleman and a Freemason, and Choderlos de Laclos, a military man and writer of lascivious novels, were some others.
The very men concocting scandal for a fee frequently worked for the French Police as spies, providing “information” on their fellow writers.
We know this because the lists of agents employed by Lenoir, the Lieutenant of Police, have survived.
Like Beaumarchais these “spies” negotiated with the “culprits” on behalf of the King, buying them off in return for a promise to stop printing and circulating their works.
It was a lucrative profession. One got paid for writing and circulating rubbish by one party and then paid to stop disseminating said rubbish by a second party, the one affected by the rumor-mongering.
It wasn’t uncommon to retain a copy or two of the damaging works and use them in further runs off the printing press that could then be “denounced” to the government along with an offer to negotiate with and buy off the person responsible on its behalf.
Another more fatal rumor was that bread was in short supply, that the government was hoarding grain and intended to starve the population. These circulated throughout eighteenth-century France, resulting in riots—in some cases when there was no dearth at all.
Coupled with rumors about an extravagant, lustful Queen—the rumors of the Queen’s extravagance are so pervasive that even biographers largely sympathetic to Marie Antoinette, like Stefan Zweig, have repeated them—and rumors of an ineffectual, impotent King, the hired pens of France managed to unleash a Revolution whose chaotic effects are still felt in modern-day France.
During the Revolution, inflation, bread prices, unemployment and misery were so high, the people cried pitifully for “some bread and a King.”
The Revolutionaries now in charge of the government suggested in a high-minded fashion that the Revolution itself was more important than paltry considerations of one’s stomach!
“When the people rise up,” Robespierre said contemptuously in February 1793 in response to riots protesting the Revolutionary Government’s reluctance to set a ceiling on wheat prices, “should they not have an aim worthy of themselves? Should they be concerned with miserable shopping lists? The people should rise up, not to collect sugar, but to strike down the brigands.”
Was it not for the apparent dearth of bread that the Revolutionaries had overthrown the monarchy? Was it because those earlier riots had been orchestrated that Robespierre found it so hard to believe that there was a genuine need for bread now?
The Terror petered out after Robespierre’s arrest and death. But the chaos it launched remains.
In fact, as recently as a few months ago, a descendant of the Bourbons offered to step up as monarch should France need his services. Who knows, it may well be needed.
All this and more in the next Joseph Haydn Mystery. Click here to read the first five!