Mademoiselle Charolais "en Cordelier"

After Pierre Gobert, Mademoiselle de Charolais as penitent / Franciscan monk

 

(94cm x 72cm).  

Auctioned in 2005, current whereabouts unknown. 
Wikimedia [from ArtNet]

The subject of this curious portrait is Louise-Anne de Bourbon-Condé, Mademoiselle de Charolais (1695-1758), the notoriously promiscuous granddaughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. Although portraits in fancy dress of various kinds were popular in the early 18th-century, no-one seems quite certain why she chose to have herself depicted in this singularly inappropriate costume.  (This is distinctly a masculine habit - Franciscan nuns always wore elaborate headdresses.)

The Farmer-General, his wife, her lover and ... a fireplace

Madame de  La Pouplinière by Quentin La Tour, Musée Antoine-Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin, c.1741 [Wikimedia]

 

 

 It feels high time to cheer ourselves up with some sexual scandal. One of the century's most talked about liaisons involved the notorious duc de Richelieu and Thérèse des Hayes, the wife of the Farmer-General Alexandre de La Pouplinière. The most sensational feature of this affair was the spectacular discovery by the cuckolded husband of a specially constructed fireplace in his wife's room, which allowed her lover secret ingress from the adjoining house.

Diderot, Bouret and his dog

Detail from Greuze's L'Enfant gâté (Louvre)

The story of Bouret and his dog has been made famous by Diderot in Rameau' s Nephew:

Rameau's nephew ("Lui") defends his reprehensible life as a social parasite on the grounds of moral determinism and cites Bouret 's innate natural ability in the art of flattery, a skill which has served him well:  "Only God and a few rare geniuses can have careers that keep stretching out before them as they advance".  His incident concerning the dog is one of three, ostensibly well-known,  examples of Bouret's  ingenuity, the others being the "Book of Felicity" and "torches lighting the way to Versailles". The first of these references is clearly to Bouret's famous book in the pavillon du roi,  described in the Correspondance littéraire for March 1764.  Bouret is recorded in 1759 as having stationed torchbearers at intervals along the King's progress from Versailles to La Croix-Fontaine.

According to Rameau's nephew, the  Keeper of the Seals took a fancy to Bouret's little pet dog and Bouret decided to make him a present of it.  He was obliged to go extraordinary lengths  since he had to persuade the animal to accept the minister as his new master. The creature, who was extremely attached to Bouret, was frightened by the minister's bizarre clothing.  Moreover Bouret was under time pressure, for he has only a week to achieve the feat. He had a mask made to disguise himself as the Keeper of the Seals, borrowed the man's wig and voluminous robe, then petted the dog and enticed it with titbits to eat;  reverting to his own identity, he then gave  the animal a beating.  By repeating the exercise from morning to night, the dog was soon persuaded to prefer the minister. Rameau's nephew professes  admiration for this remorseless attention to detail - "Having a mask made to look like him! It's the mask I find so staggering". Genius of this sort is born, not made:  "Who ever gave Bouret any lessons?  No-one. It's nature that forms these rare men.  Do you think the dog and the mask is written down anywhere?" (2014 English edition, p.52-55) 

A Pavilion fit for a King

This portrait, by Louis-Michel Van Loo, is from the collection of the late couturier Hubert de Givency which is to be auctioned by Christie's in Paris at the end of the month. If you have €60,000-€ 80,000 to spare, this glossy, this splendid, rather self-satisfied eighteenth-century gentleman could soon adorn your walls....

Louis-Michel Van Loo (1707-1771) and workshop, Portrait of Étienne-Michel Bouret (1710-1777) in front of the  Pavillon Bouret

Oil on canvas 141 cm x 109 cm. 

https://www.christies.com/lot/louis-michel-van-loo-1707-1771-et-atelier-portrait-6376123

[The painting was previously auctioned in December 1994. See the reproductions on Artnet and Wikimedia.]

As it happens, the subject fits in neatly with my current theme of financiers and tax farmers.  He is Étienne-Michel Bouret - perhaps the most absurdly rich and profligate of them all. 

According to Lenotre, Bouret was "le prototype des parvenus".  The most famous of three brothers, he rose from modest origins -  legend he had it he arrived in Paris with only 20 écus - and amassed fortune through transport of salt for the gabelle and later through speculation in the grain trade.   He accumulated even greater wealth through a series of lucrative Royal offices -  General Treasurer to the Royal Household in 1738 and Postmaster General in 1752 - and in 1741 joined the exalted ranks of the Farmer-Generals. 

In an age of ostentatious luxury, Bouret stood out for his extravagance. Biographers estimate that his fortune at its peak could have been reached as much 42 million livres.   Voltaire later maintained that he spent up to 200 livres a day to have fresh seafood relayed by road from Dieppe.(Requête à tous les magistrats du royaume, 1769).  It was above all the scale of his building projects which drew scandalised attention.   He maintained a splendid hôtel in the rue de la Grange-Batelière (later sold to Laborde), and constructed an magnificent "pavilion" at Gonesse  ("What folly!", wrote d'Argenson, who disliked him: "What an insult all this is to the people.").  

The Encyclopédie on tobacco

 The account of tobacco manufacture in the Encyclopédie, is based on practice at the tobacco works in Paris, which was adjacent to  the Hôtel de Longueville.  The article was published under the name of the Chevalier de Jaucourt, but was no doubt based on copy supplied an official of the Ferme de tabac.

Jaucourt's informant notes that the manufacture of tobacco products demanded neither complicated machinery nor highly skilled workers; however simple operations require care and attention throughout the process, from the choice of materials to the finished product.

The magasins or warehouses for storage of raw tobacco were designed to offer protection from sunlight and humidity.  They were very large, since newer leaves had to be constantly moved and piled up to avoid uncontrolled fermentation.   

Tobacco was processed into a number of different finished products, each with a particular name and usage. The two most common in Paris were rolls for the pipe and  tabacs "en carotte", that is compressed tobacco for grating.   The article illustrates the steps in manufacture:

1. L' Époulardage 

Two workers sort imported tobacco leaves

The tobacco is transported to the manufacture in wooden barrels called "bocaux".  It arrives as bundles  ("manoques"), ie. handfuls of leaves bound together and tied using a corded leaf at the top.  These have to be separated out and the leaves rubbed clean and graded.  "Époulardage" is jargon de l'atelier for shaking off the dust -  the bundles resembled chickens with flapping wings (see the clip below, from Morlaix in 1986).

Tobacco Manufactories

This post is based on a lecture given in 2011 by Paul Smith, a specialist in industrial archaeology with the Direction générale des patrimoines (see references blow).

Paul Smith explains how the organisation of the tobacco trade into a royal monopoly dictated the structure of the tobacco processing industry and its associated buildings:  

Unusually for this period, the workforce employed by the Tobacco Farm was concentrated in large-scale factories, an organisational preference dictated both by operational convenience and by the need for tight security. The state tobacco monopoly of the 19th century was also to be characterised by large factories, whereas small scale operations were the rule for the period of deregulation during the Revolution.

The manufactures, which were built and maintained directly by the Crown, functioned as symbols of royal authority.  Situated in major ports or urban centres, they represented prestigious architectural projects. Their innovative design anticipated the model factories of Eugène Rolland in the nineteenth century.

Manufacture de tabac Architectes: Jacques Martinet et Jacques V. Gabriel, Le Havre 1728.

Paul Smith begins his discussion  with this view of the interior of one of the earliest of the factories, the manufacture du tabac in Le Havre.  The illustration is is a small vignette from an engraving of 1728 in the Bibliothèque Nationale.  At the tables to the right tobacco leaves are being "spun" or twisted into ropes or "rôlles" -  the basic form in which tobacco was sold in the Ancien Régime.

Already, at this early date, the enduring characteristics of the tobacco industry are apparent - firstly, the large scale concentration of workers and, secondly, the use of child labour: children can be seen under the tables passing up the leaves of tobacco to the ouvriers fileurs.  

The Tobacco Farm

The Ferme du tabac and the organisation of the Tobacco industry

By the  mid century tobacco duties were worth more than 30 million livres a year to the French Crown - some 7% of fixed income -  second in value only to the hated gabelle.  Like the trade in salt, the tobacco trade was administered as a royal monopoly. In 1730, after a period of control by the Compagnie des Indes, Ferme du tabac was incorporated into the "General-Farm".   It was a huge undertaking. To maintain the tobacco monopoly effectively, every aspect of the importation, processing and sale of tobacco had to be overseen.  

This map, which was prepared by Lavoisier in the 1780s,  shows the Tobacco Farm's complex and highly regulated pattern of import and distribution. This level of control was made possible by the centralised organisation of the General-Farm with its specialised committees, directors and inspectors. From 1749 onwards the  Comité du tabac occupied the magnificent 17th-century Hôtel de Longueville, situated in the centre of  Paris between the Louvre and the Tuileries.  From here the authority of the Farm extended directly through much of the Kingdom, with "sous-fermes" in the Lyonnais, Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, Roussillon and Lorraine. 

Salt-smuggling - more snapshots from the Breton border

The division of the gabelle into different regions, with extreme and arbitrary price differentials, inevitably made the smuggling of salt an intractable problem.  Smugglers were most active where the pays francs or pays rédimés shared a frontier with the grandes gabelles, above all along  boundary with Brittany.  Salt which sold for two or three livres-per-minot in Brittany retailed for fifty-six or more livres-per-minot  over the border in Maine or Anjou.

According to Daniel Roche, everywhere in France the majority of those convicted of salt tax violations were men; two-thirds were adults under the age of forty.  Smuggling was normally a supplement to other work:  even the few full-time smugglers would be supported by their communities and often did ordinary chores around the villages. They were not the true marginals of society, but poor country folk - day labourers, smallholders, village artisans, petty traders. Ultimately  they inhabited the same world in which the taxed salt and tobacco were consumed.

As long as individuals operated alone and on foot, the money to be made was  modest - around 50% profit might be expected, but the quantities of salt involved were  small - an "artisanal" level of fraud. In the towns and larger settlement, particularly along the Loire, the involvement of  artisans, innkeepers and petty tradesmen  encouraged some larger scale enterprise.  In the 18th century professionals or semi-professional smugglers worked mainly as individuals or  small groups - but occasionally there were armed troops of several dozen men, quasi -military in operation.  The most dangerous operated by night, under cover of darkness. On the Breton border the landscape - with the woods and hedges of the bocages - acted in their favour, making it easy to evade pursuers and to hide the contraband. The territory round the Loire offered sizable urban outlets;  Angers was only 20 km from the frontier of the gabelle.  

See: Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer  (Harvard U.P.1998) ,  p.348-53.

Figures published by Necker (1784)

According to Necker, during the first three years of the Lease Salzard (1780) an annual average of 2,342 men, 896 women and 201 children were convicted of salt smuggling in the vicinity of Laval and Angers on the Brittany border.  Many more women and children were arrested (or rearrested) but not prosecuted.  Over a thousand horses, and fifty waggons were also seized, and 4,000 domestic raids carried out. The value of illegal salt seized and horses and wagons confiscated amounted to 280,000 livres  [Quoted G.T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms (New York, 1958) p.109]. 

The grenier à sel at Laval

In 1974  Yves Durand and his students carried out a statistical analysis of 4,788 smugglers  tried between 1759 and 1788 by the grenier à sel  in Laval, a centre of the clandestine trade.  These were overwhelmingly petty smugglers.

Smugglers and their dogs

One particularly inventive ruse of 18th-century smugglers was the use of specially trained dogs to carry contraband salt and tobacco.  On 6th June 1734,  Royal Letters patent  prohibited the inhabitants of the  pays des grandes gabelles on the frontier with Brittany from keeping mastiffs ("chiens mâtins" ), on pain of a penalty of 500 livres.  According to the preamble, these dogs were bred in great numbers.  They would be leashed together like  packs of hounds and taken into Brittany, where collaborators would keep them shut up in barns or stables for a few days until they became hungry.  Twelve to fifteen livres of salt would then be attached to the dogs' necks, wrapped up and rolled into collars of waxed cloth.  When the dogs were released at night they invariably made their way back to their masters by the route they had come.  The routes would be varied so that they were difficult to trace.  Sometimes the dog's food  would be deliberately  impregnated with salt so that the animal became maddened with thirst.

Lettres patentes portant défenses aux habitans des provinces limitrophes de Bretagne d'avoir chez eux des chiens-mâtins, à peine de 500 livres d'amende... Registrées en Parlement [à Rennes] le 12 juillet 1734

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96075628/f348.item

The dog referred to as a "chien mâtin" was the Belgian mastiff, a breed which is now defunct but was once widely employed as a working dog, particularly to pull carts. Such dogs were large and powerful beasts.

The smugglers' dogs were much vaunted for their intelligence and their ability to evade the guardsmen.  In Laval the tale was told of Marjolet, a dog belonging to a weaver in the rue Saint-Jean, who would regularly pick up salt in La Gravelle across the Breton border.  On one of his return trips the dog was pursued by three gabelous.  Rather than betray his master, Marjolet diverted into the rue Sainte-Catherine, where he managed to hide under a woman's skirts.  She  was more than happy to send the guards off in the wrong direction,so as to allow the dog to return  to its master at leisure. (Briais, Contrabandiers de sel, p.73) 

As the century progressed, the fight against the canine smugglers continued to escalate. On 8th April 1763 the Farm offered a reward to employees who killed dogs carrying salt or tobacco.  Each animal was worth 30 sols,  plus the value of the merchandise recovered. The dog's paw was to be presented as evidence of its destruction.

 When the Breton peasants complained, the Farm admitted that "although 2,500 dogs were killed each year, the contrabandiers still found ways to acquire more" .  In 1781, according to the director Châteaubrun, , 4, 449 dogs were killed in jurisdiction of the grenier at Laval alone (See Briais, p.74). 

The use of dogs was mainly associated with the Breton Border, but it was not entirely confined to the West. A particularly vivid report  survives from the direction  of St. Quentin in Picardy in the mid-century.  In the  parishes of Montbrehain, Etaves, Grandfresnoy and Seboncourt in the Aisne, longstanding centres of smuggling, the Farm's officials had been surprised to discover over a hundred dogs, each capable of carrying between 30 and 50 livres of salt. In response to the "disorder" the Farm had acquired dogs of its own to hunt down the smugglers;  six employees had been sent from Amiens each with a trained dog and with a remit to train more.   In 1786  an official of the Farm in St. Quentin confirmed to his colleague in Valenciennes, that 600-700 dogs were killed there each year.

See:

"Chiens de douaniers, chiens de contrebandiers", Association pour l’Histoire de l’Administration des Douanes, post of 01.01.2021. Documents from the Municipal Archives of Valenciennes

https://histoire-de-la-douane.org/chiens-de-douaniers-chiens-de-contrebandiers/

It would seem that the measures were of little avail.  On 7th May 1782 another set of  Letters-Patent was issued for the Breton frontier.

This time the preamble reads:

"We are informed that notwithstanding our Letters-Patent registered by our Parlement of Brittany, intended to prevent salt smuggling using dogs trained for the purpose; these animals have multiplied to a point so excessive, that they are traded publicly in the markets of Towns subject to the gabelle and  tabac; We have therefore deemed it necessary to renew and extend the provisions of the aforesaid Letters-Patent...."

A fine of 200 livres was imposed for keeping or selling chiens- mâtins in the provinces subject to the gabelle, or anywhere within four leagues of the border, with the sole exception of farm guard dogs. The agents of the Farm were given  the right to search and prosecute market traders and to shoot any dog they found loose.

Lettres patentes portant défenses aux habitans des provinces limitrophes de Bretagne d'avoir chez eux des chiens-mâtins, à peine de 500 livres d'amende... Registrées en Parlement [à Rennes] le 12 juillet 1734

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96075628/f348.item

The consensus, especially among later commentators, was that the dogs of the Farm were far more vicious than those of the smugglers.  In a letter of 1665   Colbert's brother wrote to the minister from Vitré denouncing the violence of the archers of the gabelle: "I am obliged to inform you that they have dogs trained to track smugglers;  to accustom the dogs, they have them tear at the legs of these wretches, so that they develop gangrene in prison from the bites."

Correspondance administrative sous le règne de Louis XIV,  vol. 1, p.490-1.

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k204027t/f535

  As noted the Farm at St Quentin acquired several tracker dogs.  In May 1762 brigades in Maine  spotted some porte-cols hiding sacks of salt in the landes de Châtenay  close to the Breton border and, with the aid of their dogs, tracked them to a cabaret in Juvigné (Briais, Contrabandiers de sel, p. 129)  [I am sure there must be more records from the 18th century - I will any more that I come across.] 

Salt smugglers [cont.] - Policing the gabelle

 [...continuing my notes from Bernard Briais's book, Contrabandiers de sel (1984)]

THE GABELOUS

Gardes des brigades des Fermes du roi, 1788, 
Association pour l'histoire de l'administration des douanes

The  Farm was faced with 1200 lieus (c.4800 kilometres) of internal frontiers to police.  Guardposts were ranged along these borders, where possible following the line of the rivers: the Meuse to the east, the Mayenne to the west, the Vienne and the Creuse between Poitou and Touraine. A second or even a third line of guard posts would  provide reinforcement.  The guards could be stationed at crossing points or act as patrols; on the water itself, flat-bottomed pataches were manned at the entrances to the rivers.   Most brigades comprised two to six men, but a few were larger:  in the Bourbonnais, the brigade of La Roche-Bransat, had a captain, a lieutenant and ten cavalrymen; the brigade La Jolivette at Chemilly also had ten men.  The distance between guardposts varied according to the terrain and the level of smuggling activity.   No less than nine brigades were stationed along the Vienne over the nineteen kilometres between l'Ile-Bouchard and Candes, including one on a patache at the confluence with the Loire.