Imagine these small stockholders, ruined already by the official robbery of 1797, the Tiers consolide, threatened by a fresh tax more severe even than the earlier ones, the Forced Loan. How could they stand up to it, receiving their income as they now did, only in the form of dividend bonds, that is to say in worthless paper? Shopkeepers were suffering in the same way; many of them, having no goods to sell, were shooting the moon, and so were most industrialists, who had been forced to disband their workers. In 1791 Paris still had seven thousand factory hands, in 1799 there remained only seventeen hundred. For a city of that size such a figure is astounding.
Even the civil servant class and the state pensioners were not spared this disaster, for in the last few months the Exchequer had suffered strange blanks of memory.
Even in the highest official circles people were beginning to feel worried on the subject, especially at the Institute, whose president, Creuze-Latouche, had just drawn up a report informing the Government of the cruel difficulties in which several of his colleagues, deprived of their 'salary' — or as we should say today, 'attendance tokens' — were going to find themselves involved. And the perturbation of the Immortals was shared by far humbler mortals: government quill-drivers wondering when they would get their pay, civil service assistants waiting in vain for their monthly wages, all sorts of humble workers necessary to the life of others, but with a right to earn their own- registry-office hacks, Customs personnel, lamplighters, firemen, policemen... „ Yes, even the pay of the police was being held over! Was this not a sure sign of the times? When a government neglects to feed the flower of its personnel, it can be reproached with want of heart; but when it no longer pays its police it can be said to be ruined.
Poverty of the State, poverty of the individual-such was the double bankruptcy marking this turning-point of history. The first was a godsend to the gang of army contractors and high financiers, the second to the rabble of usurers lending money at every street corner, at two and a half or three per cent per month. Everybody needed them, but everybody hated them, and their origin had not a little to do with this. No matter whether they came from Frankfort or Lombardy, they were always found to have an air of resemblance to a certain Shylock of unblessed memory.... For the first time a wave of anti-semitism, worthy of note, swept through the French press.
'Ever since the Revolution/ wrote a journalist of the year VIII, 'the Frenchman has been daily obliged to deal with a Jew for his business or his domestic affairs, without a chance of discovering that he is dealing, not with a man but an enemy, whose sense of honour is invariably circumscribed within the circle of his religious community/
A rather mediocre pun, the author of which had at least the excuse of having made it involuntarily.
After a revolution, the wounds suffered by the towns are always somewhat slow to heal, far more so than those of the country, where Nature at once sets to work to repair the follies of man. At the end of the Directory one has only to turn to one or other of our large provincial centres to see the consequences of the late troubles: life asleep everywhere, or at best re-awakening in hesitant fashion.
Export trade having come to an end, Brittany was no longer manufacturing linen, nor the Languedoc its textiles, nor Thiers its cutlery, nor Valenciennes its lace. Of the 15,000 workshops formerly busy in Lyons, 13,000 had closed down. Business was so bad in Havre that tradesmen no longer bothered to open their shops. With no oil for its street lamps, Bordeaux spent the night in darkness. There were no more carriages in Marseilles, where the streets had turned to quagmires for want of repair. As for its glorious harbour, the less said the better: it was now a mere cemetery of ships.
Rural France presented a less depressing picture. There, except for the regions directly affected by the war, prosperity seemed on the point of recovery. Not everybody was of that opinion, it is true; certain writers of the time even exaggerated the desolation of the countryside, but their evidence is suspect. When Chateaubriand, returning from emigration early in 1800, tells us that all along the road from Calais to Paris he saw nothing but felled woodlands, demolished villages, and women with "faces tanned and hardened, barefoot, heads bare or wrapped in a handkerchief, tilling the fields', when he keeps pointing out 'mud and dust, dung and ruins', he is speaking as an exile who for the last seven years had been piling pessimism on pessimism. And when the first English tourists crossed the Channel a little later, and John Dean Paul or Redhead Yorke, driving along our roads, tells us that all he could see was sparsely populated land and poor harvests 1 ; when they declare that 'nothing can exceed the wretched condition of the farming implements except that of the livestock and of the labourers in charge of it' 2 we are not bound to believe them. These so-called witnesses must have looked at France with English eyes, as Chateaubriand did with the eyes of an emigre.
Far more reliable is the information furnished by some of the great landed proprietors in direct contact with the countryside. Even if they had suffered personally from the Revolution, they could not help recognizing that the condition of the peasants had been improved by it. 'They are richer', wrote La Fayette of the people of the Limagne, 'the fields are better cultivated, the women better dressed. Estates fetch a third more in the market, and sometimes twice as much as before the Revolution/
Life was easier, too, for the communities around Blois, according to Dufort de Cheverny, whose veracity is not to be doubted. 'Day-labourers get wine for three sols, bread for two, and their daily wage amounts to thirty or forty, the inevitable result being that the taverns are much frequented, and the people themselves dictate the conditions of their work/
1 Sir John Dean Paul, Diary of a Journey to Paris in 1802.
2 Henry Redhead Yorke, Paris and France under the Consulate.
But another inevitable result was that they produced a great many children, for 'conscription having spared married people, all the young men got married from the age of sixteen upwards, and the number of births, in all the communes, is double or treble what it used to be/
The great changes just brought about should really have completely ensured the independence and welfare of the peasants. They had been freed from most of the burdens that had weighed them down for centuries, and the liquidation of feudal domains and property in mortmain allowed them to acquire, under excellent conditions, lands they had so far cultivated for the benefit of others. But there was another side to the medal. Hardly had the countryside had time to feel emancipated when it underwent a strange crisis, a sort of disease manifesting itself in innumerable ways; a reawakening of old hatreds between proscribers and proscribed, executioners and victims of yesterday, robbers and robbed of today, quarrels between house and house, persistence of religious struggles, danger in travelling the roads, in inhabiting an isolated farm, in possessing the goods of an emigre, and still more those of the Church, lack of security for everybody. So many signs of the heavy mortgage encumbering the heritage of the Revolution.
The average Frenchman was beginning to be aware of it. In his efforts to repair the old clock of the Monarchy, which was grievously slow, but had contrived for centuries to show more or less the right time, he had broken its mainspring, so that now nothing functioned any more, neither the Government, nor justice, nor finance. There was a sort of masked anarchy paralysing work, poisoning social relations, sowing fear and discouragement. People still talked of liberty, and many honest souls were still proud of having attained to it, complete with Phrygian cap and symbolic attributes — but they were sorry to have lost it in a more modest form, when it meant simply liberty to live in peace.