Liberty, the inspiration and the collapse...the double face of freedom...The fall of the Bastille and the week that followed...Chateaubriand...below, a contemporary engraving shows the attack

Chère amie, cher ami,

« Fermez les portes ! fermez les portes ! » shouted the porter, hurrying to help the footman slide the thick wooden bar through iron brackets. 
 
It was the evening of July 22, 1789. Oppressive heat hung over Paris like a stifling curtain. The tocsin – alarm bells -- had been ringing in churches and from the Hôtel de Ville since the night of July 13. René de Chateaubriand, 21 years old, and his two older sisters sat at the windows of a rented hôtel particulier on the rue de Richelieu in Paris. 
 
The Bastille had fallen eight days earlier, on July 14. 
 
From a distance, they could see a band of men advancing from one end of the street. Like a Roman legion that had lost its way in time, they appeared to be holding aloft a pair of standards. But these poles held no Roman eagles.
 
“As they came closer, we distinguished two disheveled and disfigured heads. It was Foullon and Bertier, on the end of pikes. Everyone else recoiled from the windows; I stayed."
 
“The assassins stopped in front of me, flourishing the two pikes, singing, leaping in the air, jumping up to lift the pale effigies to the level of my face, howling like wild beasts. The eye of one head had fallen out of its socket and hung down; the pike came through the open mouth; the teeth of the corpse closed on the iron blade.”
 
“Brigands!” shouted the young man, almost in tears. “Is this how you understand liberty?”
 
“If I’d had a rifle, I would have shot them like wolves,” he later wrote.
 
The men pounded on the door to force entry “that they might add my head to those of their other two victims.”
 
“My sisters were sick with fear; the servants bitterly reproached me for risking all our lives,” he continued. Les massacreurs, pursued by soldiers, gave up and fled.
 
Chateaubriand’s perspective on life was sharply reoriented. 
 
“I have lived,” he wrote toward the end of his life, “between two centuries, as at the junction of two great rivers.” 
 
Out of the turbulent 18th-century, with its untested faith in man’s rational power and loss of faith in the divine order, a harsh and unknowable world had come into being. Like so many enthusiastic young nobles, Chateaubriand had anticipated a transformation of the Ancien Régime, not its collapse.

A week before on July 14, the cause had seemed so pure and inspiring!

It was time for the aristocrats of France to reassert themselves, after almost two centuries of being crushed down by the overweening power of the king. La Fronde had been the last noble uprising against the king and his counselors; the rebellion had been successfully put down by Louis XIV in 1653.
 
Meanwhile, the Etats Généraux had been dismissed by Louis XIII in 1615 and never since recalled. The Etats was the reunion of nobles, the Church, and the “Tiers Etat” or the Third Estate that encompassed non-noble and non-clerical subjects. It was a structure that formalized the participation of all the king’s subjects in the government of their own provinces and within the royal realm. The Etats advised on state policy, religious reform, taxes, royal marriages and any other matter it deemed vital to the interests of the various “estates” of France.
 
Now, at last, the Etats Généraux had been summoned again. Louis XVI’s government, desperate to stave off financial ruin, needed its approval to reform the fiscal system. And the long-awaited reunion was being used to push back against the king’s “absolute” prerogatives. 
 
What better symbol of coercive royal power than the Bastille! 
 
This 14th-century fortress had become the prison of the elite. Here, bishops and cardinals, dukes and vicomtes, chief ministers and foreign officers were jailed at royal expense. Here, the Marquis de Sade, whose libertin opinions and lifestyle were an embarrassment to his family, an affront to public virtue, and a danger to housemaids and prostitutes, was removed from the scene. Voltaire, Beaumarchais and other famous or influential commoners also went to the Bastille.
 
Mere common crimes couldn’t get you into the Bastille, but neither did the usual legal system. A “lettre de cachet,” signed by the king and countersigned by one of his ministers, ordered the civil authorities to imprison the subject. There was no trial and no recourse from this royal command. A prisoner was freed at the king’s pleasure.
 
But although the “lettre de cachet” was arbitrary, it was not despotic. The authority and power of the Letter hung on an ancient function of the king -- he was “le font de justice,” the fountain or source of justice itself. In his person, the king represented the abstract ideal of justice. Until the late 18th century, criticism of the king was usually that he exercised his role unjustly, not that his power itself was unjust.

 As a practical matter, the king and his administration appointed magistrates and enforced the law. Royal power recognized the rights of provincial and local courts and their legal codes. It respected the complex web of canon law exercised by the Church, and the judicial rights and courts of Parlement. Still, the legal theory of French kingship held that there was an inherent judicial power that belonged to the king. This was his “justice retenue.” This “retained justice” allowed him to circumvent the usual channels in certain circumstances…hence the imperious “lettre de cachet.”
 
“Cachet” means hidden. The “lettre” was sealed and its contents known only by those who executed the order. It could be used to intimidate, threaten and silence – or as one might say, “cancel” -- enemies of the king or his circle, inconvenient members of the aristocracy, or those who were influential without being deferential to authority. 
 
Sentences tended to be short. The miscreant had time to repent, and everyone was spared the expense and embarrassment of a public trial.
 
The writer La Rochefoucauld spent a week in the Bastille in 1635 for plotting with the charming and rebellious Madame de Chevreuse against Louis XIII’s chief minister Richelieu. In 1718, François-Marie Arouet spent 11 days there for penning a satirical pamphlet that accused the king’s uncle of incest. Upon release, Arouet changed his name to Voltaire and took up writing history plays – for a time. 

On the other hand, the Marquis de Sade spent five years in the Bastille. Although he complained bitterly of being a captive, prison conditions were pleasant. There was a library and the governor gave concerts and dinners in his chambers. The Marquis had his own suite of rooms hung with tapestries. He ordered in wine from his own estate. Madame de Sade brought her husband paper upon which he wrote “Les Cents Journées de Sodome.”
 
Sade’s view of “liberté” was “personnel,” as we say in French, or unique to himself. He was in prison not just for brutality and rape, but for locking his victims in the bedroom. Sade the libertin did not arouse much sympathy. But indeed, the Bastille was used to restrict more than the behavior of unruly aristocrats and malicious pamphleteers. 
 
The Bastille had a tradition of enforcing royal decrees that prohibited the free expression of conscience and thought.
 
During the reign of Louis XIV, the Bastille held noble Protestants who refused conversion to Roman Catholicism; during the reign of Louis XV, rebellious Catholics who practiced a form of mysticism banned by the Church. Increasingly throughout the 18th century, writers, printers, and sellers of books that attacked all forms of religion…or that espoused such seditious propositions as constitutional versus absolute monarchy.
 
The fall of the Bastille on July 14 was a step towards progress, towards that great ideal, the emancipation of the human mind from the prison of superstition, censorship and arbitrary state power. It seemed to be part of a general movement toward the light, like other improvements that had already been made during the 18th century:  a highway and canal system to better distribute food and thus prevent famine, mutual relief societies for the poor, measures to prevent rabies and smallpox, gas street lights…

“Everyone rushed to the autopsy of the Bastille,” writes Chateaubriand. “Cafés popped up under tents; we hurried as if to a fair or horse race; innumerable carriages filed past the towers from which stones were flung down in a whirlwind of dust. Elegant ladies, fashionable young men…mixed with the bare-chested workmen who were tearing down the walls to the cheers of the crowd. At this final rendez-vous mingled the greatest orators, the most famous men of letters, the most celebrated painters, popular actors and favorite dancers, illustrious foreigners, the nobles of the Court and the ambassadors of Europe: Old France came to witness its end, the new world gathered to begin.”
 
The Bastille was so notorious an image of autocratic repression that there was dancing in the streets as far away as Saint Petersburg when news reached Russia of its fall. Trees of Liberty were planted in Germany. Everyone was willing to overlook the gory murders of Marquis de Launay, governor of the Bastille, and the Swiss guardsmen, hacked to pieces by the mob.

“How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!” enthused the English politician Fox. 
 
The pair of heads dancing on the end of pikes a week later suggested a different tenor of celebration. Like Chateaubriand’s two rivers converging into one, violence and idealism shot toward the final catharsis -- the collapse of the Old Regime…and the collapse of the Revolution itself.
 
By the time Chateaubriand drew up his chair to the fire in the library at Chateau de Courtomer in the winter of 1804, the Revolution had undergone its last spasm. Citoyen Bonaparte had crowned himself the emperor Napoleon. Pardoned by the Emperor, Chateaubriand had returned to France from exile. His novel “Atala” had gone into five printings; it attacked the notion of the “noble savage,” or the inherent goodness of man in a state of nature. And he had published his widely influential defense of Christianity, “Génie de christianisme.”
 
Chateaubriand spent the winter of 1804 immersed in one of his great and typically fleeting love affairs. Delphine de Custine, his mistress, was mother-in-law to Angélique de Saint-Simon de Courtomer, heiress of the Courtomer estate. On the advice of her lover, Delphine herself had purchased the neighboring Château de Fervaques. Here, Chateaubriand admiringly wrote, was “le paix et le bonheur.”

The green solitude of an aristocratic castle in Normandy was a peaceful haven from which to reflect on the converging streams of his own life and of French history. His books and his memoirs reflect a continuing struggle to understand what had taken place, what it meant for the past and its traditions, and what promise it held for the future.
 
In the end, he believed the striving for liberty by the French aristocracy was both the means of its own destruction and its greatest legacy for France.

“Les plus grands coups portés à l’antique constitution de l’État le furent par des gentilhommes. Les patriciens commencèrent la Révolution, les plébéiens l’achevèrent : comme la vieille France avait dû sa gloire à la noblesse française, la jeune France lui doit sa liberté, si liberté il y a pour la France.

“The greatest blows against the ancient constitution of the French State were struck by the gentilhommesIT. The patricians started the Revolution, the plebians, the commoners, finished it: as the old France owed its glory to the French nobility, to them the young France owes its liberty…if liberty there is to be for France.”
 
Chateaubriand died shortly after he wrote those words, on July 4, 1848. France had recently entered its second, short-lived revolution, the violent and bloody Révolution française de 1848. The king’s cousin, Philippe of Orleans, rose to the throne.
 
On these hot July days almost 250 years later, we too reflect on the passage of time, on revolution and its aftermath. We lean back on transatsIT at the edge of the great lawn, contemplating the graceful façade of the 18th-century Chateau, half-listening to the gentle hum of bees amid the rose border…and the insistent mechanical thrum of the harvester as it reaps, threshes and binds the golden grain and tawny straw of our surrounding fields. The tall trees of the park, legacy of that long-gone France, cover us with welcome shade. 

"Je me suis retrouvé entre deux siècles comme au confluent de deux fleuves; j'ai plongé dans leurs eaux troublées, m'éloignant à regret du vieux rivage où je suis né, nageant avec espérance vers une rive inconnue."

“I find myself between two centuries as at the confluence of two great rivers; I have plunged into their troubled waters, leaving with longing sadness the old coast on which I was born, swimming with hope toward an unknown shore.”
 
And at the window of the library, perhaps we only imagine the sight of a pale face…looking out at our own century with mingled regret and faith. 
 

           A bientôt au Chateau,

Elisabeth
                    
     
As always, Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your holiday or special gathering at the Farmhouse or the Chateau. We still have a few openings for this year and are taking bookings through 2024. Please feel free to call or write us.