An instructive historical anecdote

Just briefly, because I'm busy with something else.

At the end of the 18th century, France was getting very weird. They had been pretty glorious under the Louis kings, I - XIV, but the whole house of cards was beginning to collapse. Monumental corruption for one thing. They were already going broke when Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson talked them into funding the American Revolution.

And what was really going on was the growth of the bourgeois -- the middle class. Previously, there had been the monarchy and nobility and the rest of the population were peasants or maybe soliders. At any rate, they had all been largely dependent upon the monarchy and the nobility and lived to serve them.

The middle class were merchants and skilled tradesmen; in every case, they were people who were managing to get a living and even get wealthy in other ways than simply bowing and scraping to the nobility. This period saw the beginning of real science and its natural child, technology.

These upstarts -- these bourgeois -- began to complain about the king's policies if and when they interfered with the interests of the independent bourgeois. Like, France was almost continuously at war with England and Spain. This really slowed down trade between the nations. Most European nations, and especially the "empire builders," who were going around the world setting up colonies, had adopted a mercantilist economic system. This system often messed up trade and commerce. It certainly made it more expensive.

For example, Boston (Massachusetts) was a British colony at the time. And most sugar was grown on plantations in the Caribbean -- both British and French colonial plantations. (By this time, Spain had taken itself out of the running and was pretty much sitting and staring its own navel and burning people at the stake in the Inquisition.)

Now in Boston, distilling sugar into rum was a pretty big business. But the distillers couldn't just buy sugar directly from the planters in the Caribbean. Under the mercantilist system, the sugar had to be shipped to England first (or to France, from a French plantation) in order to be weighed and taxed.

Only then would the sugar go to Boston for distilling. And it would cost more, carrying the extra burden of taxation, and probably also the cost of shipping it halfway around the world and back. The Boston rum smugglers were people who bought sugar off-the-books in the Caribbean and carried it directly to the distilleries in Boston, untaxed. I do believe they could have been hanged for that.

The same process applied to all the mining done in South America, silk from Asia, mahogany from Africa, etc etc . Mercantilism was extremely inefficient as an economic system, but it did make the kings and the nobility rich.

So, anyway, there's the background. The bourgeois would be the distillers, even the ship-owners, shop owners and merchants, and the dock workers.

And in France, the bourgeois started taking note of the excesses of the court of Louis XV and his son, Louis XVI. The younger Louis was supposed to be kind of an idiot, or at least very weak and kept under the thumbs of the nobility and court advisors. I'm quite sure he'd only ever had limited exposure to the real world. I mean, "the court," any royal court in any country, was a pretty exclusive club that rigidly enforced their own interests, as a class.

At any rate, things started slipping in France. The nobility didn't believe they were rich enough, and began taxing all kinds of things. Like, they would tax your doors and windows (I've heard that this is still done in Europe), tax your harvest, tax your cattle, tax your shoes, make you pay for toll roads, etc. They probably had a VAT even then. You got taxed for everything. This made it more and more impossible to make a living -- for peasants and for the growing bourgeois.

Unrest was growing. For one thing, the public media, known as "the Fourth Estate," was growing up alongside the bourgeois. The press had the nerve to insult Queen Marie Antoinette once for wearing an 8-foot wig adorned with pearls and little replicas of sailing ships. They didn't think it was fair that they worked so hard and had so little, while all Queen Marie did was sit on her butt and eat bonbons. Or maybe cake.

To appease the masses, the French monarchy would invite people into the palace at Versailles to watch the Queen eat breakfast. She constructed Le Petit Trianon on the grounds at Versailles. It's a little idyllic farm, so she could look out the window of the palace and see a pastoral panorama. A real-live family of peasants lived there and worked the place. She so loved the common people. It's rumored she used to meet lovers there, too.

For some reason, all of these kinds of public relations moves only pissed people off even more. The nobility couldn't figure it out. Here they were setting themselves up as models of perfection night and day, and the common herd just didn't appreciate it.

So Louis XVI, in perhaps the only useful thing he ever did, called upon a Swiss economist named Colbert to try to figure out exactly what he was doing wrong. He asked Colbert, "What can we do to help the bourgeois and ensure their happiness and prosperity? And keep them from murdering us in our beds?"

Colbert told him: "Laissez faire." That is, "Leave them alone."

Well, Louis didn't listen and I guess Colbert just went back to Switzerland. At least I hope so. And the rest is history. Louis and Marie couldn't leave the bourgeois alone. Louis and Marie needed more and more taxes to support the lifestyle at their court.

So the bourgeois locked them up and eventually beheaded them -- and their little dogs, too. The French Revolution was one of the bloodiest on record. It went on for years. The revolutionary government was, by all accounts, a little nuts. They didn't really have much of plan beyond murdering the nobility. Eventually, they began murdering each other. One leader, Marat, was assassinated in his bath tub.

And some of the nobility actually weren't too bad. They did fund the American Revolution. Among them were some of the leading voices of The Enlightenment, and among these were some of the loudest critics of the monarchy.

And then, or course, as the French Revolution wound down -- no one left to kill -- Napolean Bonaparte took over. By all accounts he wasn't such a terrible emperor. He didn't really care about micro-managing the country so much as expanding its borders. He left people largely alone, as long as they funded his wars and in other ways paid the consequences for them. However, due to his appetite for conquest, he didn't end happily, either.

Interesting note: I've heard that when Napolean died, a doctor took a lock of his hair. This was analyzed some time later and found to be saturated with enough arsenic to kill an elephant. Apparently Napolean had developed some kind immunity to poisoning.

I was stuck on a bus once at Place de la Concorde in Paris, where La Guillotine once ruled. It's a large plaza now with a big obelisk, kinda like the Washington Monument, where La Guillotine once stood. It was rush hour, the dog-poo covered pavingstone streets were jammed with gridlocked traffic, the air blue with auto exhaust fumes. And all the lights came on all at once. Paris is called "The City of Lights." It was very pretty, but not really my taste. Being a Lit major, I kept thinking about Madame LaFarge hunched in some dark corner knitting.

The French Revolution did clear away a lot of the Old World deadwood and paved the road for a better -- though not necessarily more peaceful -- world. Quite a price to pay, though.

People like Franklin and Jefferson looked at places like France and they invented the USA instead.

Has the human race learned nothing?