Daily Life During the French Revolution (19 page)

David stage-managed some enormous public occasions,
including the celebration of the unity of the republic, on August 10, 1793, and
the Festival of the Supreme Being. After the fall of Robespierre, David
survived and flourished under Napoleon. His major historical painting,
Intervention
of the Sabine Women,
was a symbol of reconciliation and peace for France at
the end of the Directory.

In architecture, the Paris
Bourse
(stock exchange)
was designed by Théodore Brongniart, who also designed several hotels in the
prevalent classical taste. The homes of the wealthy were decorated with Doric
columns and nymphs, muses, olive leaves, lyres, and heavy gilded furniture. To
show it had public interest in mind, the government promoted projects such as
public baths, fountains, museums, and theaters. Furthermore, the
revolutionaries wished to impress their ideals on the public by decorating
buildings and statues with inscriptions proclaiming liberty and equality. While
classicism dominated and much new construction was planned during the
revolution, little was actually built. Money was not available for ambitious
projects, and little was produced that was innovative, dynamic, or exciting.
The environment inhibited creative innovation both during the revolution and
under Napoleon, who preferred the artwork of the past.

THE PALAIS ROYAL

Situated in the prosperous Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the
Palais Royal, the Paris residence of the king’s cousin, the duke of Orléans,
was once a large park open to strollers and a favorite promenade for
respectable people. In the 1780s, the duke enclosed the rectangular site with
shops and galleries. Offering everything from freak shows to marionettes, magic
lanterns, acrobats, shops, jewelers, watchmakers, restaurants, billiard rooms,
ballad singers, magicians, and even a natural history display, the Palais Royal
gardens soon became a favorite haunt for those seeking pleasure and amusement.
Most important of all were the cafes, which attracted large numbers of people
including politicians and prostitutes.

People of all classes enjoyed the atmosphere, and orators
always found a ready audience in the cafes, which were to become centers of
political agitation in 1788 and 1789. Since the Palais Royal was royal property,
police were not permitted to enter without permission, and Orléans did nothing
to suppress the excitement and disputes that arose when speakers expressed
their views and seditious pamphlets were read out to the worked-up crowds. On
July 13, 1789, the call to arms that began the insurrection in Paris was given
from the Palais Royal. Here, Camille Desmoulins called on the people to march
against the Bastille.

OTHER AMUSEMENTS AND SPORTS

For working people, a walk through the city gates and past
the custom houses into the country villages to drink wine in the local taverns
was an agreeable pastime, especially since the country air was much fresher and
everything in Paris was more heavily taxed. New and in demand among Parisians
in the late eighteenth century were segregated public baths on boats on the
river Seine. The puppeteer and the street musician were always popular and,
prior to 1789, nonpolitical. When the revolution came, the puppeteer’s job was
to represent allegories of the Third Estate, politicizing the old folk
traditions.

The so-called sport of hunting occupied a lot of the time
of the aristocracy before the revolution, while the common people were denied
this activity. To assuage their gambling inclinations, the upper classes also
attended horse races. They enjoyed fronton or pelota, too, a sport popular in
the southwest; of Basque origin, the game required competitors to hurl a ball
from a basket-like racket against a wall from a substantial distance.

Historically, kings and nobles played tennis (which seems
to have originated in twelfth-century France as a game in which the ball was
hit with the bare hand). The racket, first in the form of a glove, evolved over
time. The first known indoor court was built in the fourteenth century, and the
name “tennis” derived from the French word tenez (hold), a signal that the ball
was coming. Gambling on tennis was widespread and sometimes fixed. In 1600, the
Venetian ambassador reported that there were 1,800 courts in Paris. The
revolution killed the sport for a time when the government banned the game as a
symbol of the aristocracy, although, ironically, the revolution began on a
tennis court.

Ascending in a hot-air balloon was a French innovation that
began in 1782 and became very popular for a few. The following year, at
Versailles, witnessed by the king, a balloon was sent up equipped with a
gondola occupied by some farm animals. The animals landed safely after an
eight-minute flight. Next came a two-man flight; the balloonists were a
physicist, Pilâtre de Rosier, and a companion. Burning straw supplied the hot
air to maintain the balloon aloft. The flight, on November 21, 1783, lasted 28
minutes, and the balloon rose to 1,000 meters. The hot-air balloon was replaced
by one using hydrogen; this one went higher, and the race was on to produce the
best. When the first man to go up was also the first to be killed in a
ballooning accident, the incident more or less finished the sport for decades
to come.

Fencing, usually an upper-class activity, was popular, and
the French style of fencing became prominent in Europe. Its rules govern most
modern competition, and the vocabulary of traditional fencing is composed
largely of French words. The sport was imitated by children, even among the
poor, with sticks or wooden swords.

CHILDREN’S GAMES

Swimming, highly esteemed in ancient Greece and Rome,
especially as a form of training for warriors, was mostly a sport of French
schoolchildren, who were encouraged by revolutionaries to build strong young
bodies, and competitions were sometimes held. The revolutionary government was
also attentive to the young mind and believed that it could mold a new
generation of ideal patriots if children could be taught the advantages of the
glorious new age. By exposure to republican schooling accompanied by a deluge
of images such as didactic plays, civic festivals, and revolutionary music,
slogans, and printed matter, a new person would be created for the new society.
There were, of course, numerous country children who would never see a play and
seldom see a newspaper, even if they could read, and these needed to be
instructed in other ways. One way was through the use of signs and symbols of
cultural significance in place of words. As the cross symbolizes Christianity,
a picture of the storming of the Bastille stood for liberty, and the red hat
and cockade were symbols of revolutionary support, liberty, and equality.
Rituals, too, such as civic events or dancing around the liberty tree, were
important. The figure of the king, a symbol of absolute power in the old
regime, had to be eradicated.

To attract children and the masses of illiterate adults to
the new symbols and their meanings, few things could have been more important than
games, as Rousseau had once pointed out. Besides balls, dolls, spinning tops,
and other amusements, children had board games designed to communicate to them
the meaning of the struggle. The ancient
jeu de l’oie
(goose game) was
changed to meet revolutionary criteria. Players rolled dice to see how far they
could advance toward the goal by moving along squares placed in a circle around
the board. Previously the object had been to move from squares showing Roman
emperors through a series of squares with depictions of early French kings and
finally to the prize square, which portrayed Louis XV. Updated versions
appeared early in the revolution in which players progressed by squares from
the siege of the Bastille through major revolutionary events or achievements to
the National Assembly (or, in other versions, to the new constitution), thus
providing a history of significant episodes in the struggle. Players hoped not
to be unlucky enough to land on squares depicting two geese in magisterial
robes, since these were symbolic of the old, discredited parlements, which had
been bastions of reactionaries. Some variations presented an extended view of
history beginning before civilized societies and displaying a progression of
abuses up to the Enlightenment and ending with the revolution. Republicans saw
everything as having a moral purpose, even games.

Playing cards were altered to represent republicanism.
Cards that portrayed the king, queen, and jack, which implied despotism and
inequality, were no longer acceptable. Publishers of playing cards replaced
these images with images of human figures representing genius, liberty, rights,
or some other republican attribute. Some produced cards with images of
philosophers, republican soldiers, and sans-culottes.

Children’s games: spinning a top in a Paris suburb.

A board game used during the
revolution in which participants moved pieces from square to square around the
board.

The pastimes of Père Gérard.
Revolutionary Board Game.

BOOKS AND THE PRESS

Only books authorized by the royal government could be sold
or read, and penalties could be imposed on those who disregarded the law. The
regulation, lacking the support of the people was, however, unenforceable. Some
famous writers who defied the law spent brief terms in the prison at Vincennes
or in the Bastille but emerged more popular than ever. The more books were
burned by public authorities, the more they were secretly printed, sold, and
read. If a writer could be sentenced to imprisonment and his books condemned to
the flames, he might regard his literary career as secure.

The writers of the age of Enlightenment laid the groundwork
for change well before the revolution. Their theories and views, along with the
momentous events in the North American colonies, were discussed, dissected, and
judged in French salons and pamphlets. Voltaire had long been at the height of
his fame, Rousseau had written his
Social Contract,
Holbach’s
System
of Nature
had appeared, and Diderot’s
Encyclopedia
was finally
finished and published. The popularity of these men and their works was
unabated.

Novels written just before and during the revolutionary
period were few in number, and most were insipid and mediocre, with the
preferred themes being escapism from the realities of everyday life. With few
exceptions, the literary market was filled with sentimental, anemic, and vapid
romantic novels written for the most part by titled upper-class women.
Historical novels, short on facts, were also in vogue.