Wednesday, 29 June 2022

The last Farmers-General


I have had a reasonably long, and very successful career, and I believe that I shall be remembered with regret, even accorded some glory. What more could I want? The events in which I find myself embroiled have probably saved me from the inconveniences of old age.  I shall die in perfect health...
It seems that the exercise of social virtue, service to the nation, a career dedicated to the progress of the arts and sciences, are not enough to save a man from condemnation and death.
Letter of Antoine Lavoisier, written from the Conciergerie shortly before the trial of the Farmers-General (Quoted Grimaux, p.915).


The end of the General Farm

By the end of the Ancien regime, the General-Farm was the most hated institution in the country. It was inconceivable that it could survive the advent of the Revolution, which was accompanied by paroxysm of popular anger and insurrection against indirect taxation. Customs houses were destroyed and greniers à sel burned down, the Farm's employees forced to seek refuge with the army.  On the night of 12th-13th July the hated Wall of the Farmers-General was subject to sustained attack. As collection ground to a halt in the provinces, the Assembly moved to liquidate the Farm.  In August 1789 the Company was ordered to close its books and to continue only on the account of the King.  The gabelles were completely abrogated on 14th March 1790,  the traites  converted in a uniform tariff in October 1790. By early March 1791, the entrées  and aides had been abolished. On 20th March 1791 the tobacco monopoly was cancelled and, on the same day, the Lease Mager of 1786 was declared null and void - the General Farm had officially ceased to exist. (Taylor, p.278-9).

Satire of 1791 The Doyen of the Farmers General, borne aloft by his clerks, makes a final journey to oblivion.   Musée Carnavalet.  Le Doyen des Fermiers Generaux [...] | Paris Musées

Whilst the legislation aroused little enthusiasm within the Assembly. popular passions in Paris continued to run high. Former employees of the Farm accused the Farmers General of having cheated them of wages and pensions.  (Grimaux, p.888).  A succession of  attacks punctuated the radical press. Hébert in the Père Duchesne wished he could be at the headquarters of the General Farm "to contemplate the fat mugs of all those financiers sitting around their green baize....What grimaces all those jackasses will make on realising that they will be forced to part with their beautiful palaces, their handsome country houses, and fine furnishings....(Le Véritable Père Duchesne,  no.33, p.5-6. Quoted Poirier, p.272). 


The Liquidation Commission

 It says something for the Revolutionaries' concern for legality and their lingering respect for the power of finance, that, even in this atmosphere of hatred,  the Farmers themselves were called upon to preside over their own demise.  On 22nd July 1791, the Assembly created a Commission of Liquidation  composed of six  former Farmers-General (Clément de Laarge de Bellefaye; Alexandre Victor de Saint-Amand; François Puissant de La Villeguérie; Guillaume Couturier; Jacques Joseph de La Perrière and Jacques Delahante).   They were instructed to establish just compensation for the former tax farmers and to settle accounts between the Company and the royal treasury by January 1793.  They were  to continue to sell remaining stocks of salt and tobacco and collect the new customs duties until the state could find replacements. It was a task which was nigh on  impossible, given the administrative chaos and the fact that almost all the accounts had been destroyed or scattered. Popular resentment frustrated attempts to sell salt or tobacco. 

As the war crisis took hold,  rumours that the Farm concealed three or four hundred million livres again circulated. The attitude of the radicals of the Convention progressively hardened. On 26th February 1793 Carra demanded a committee to investigate "those plunderers of public monies, those leeches of the people, those execrable speculators".  At end of May 1793 the Farmers formed a deputation  to the Girondin Minister of Finance Clavière, who greeted them flanked by two men, "each carrying a bare sword who never left his side" (see the account of Étienne-Marie Delahante). In June and again in September 1793, the work of the Commission was halted and papers of the Farm placed under seal.  The Convention ordered its funds transferred to public treasury:  20 million livres in assignats and 9,000 livres in cash were confiscated from the headquarters of the Farm in the rue Grenelle Saint-Honoré.   

On 24th September the Farmers successfully petitioned the Finance Committee of the Convention to recommence their work.  However, the final verification of accounts was now to be audited by a special Commission of Surveillance appointed by the Convention was composed exclusively of former employees of the Farm, one of whom, Gaudot, had been imprisoned for peculation.  At its head was André Dupin de Beaumont, deputy for Aisne, once a supernumerary controller in the General Farm.  A man with a well-deserved reputation as a cynical bon-viveur, Dupin aimed from the onset to prove the culpability of the Farmers.



Imprisonment in Port-Libre

Duplessis-Bertaux,  Etching of 1798 showing the arrest of Lavoisier.  Wellcome Institute
The scene is imaginary - Lavoisier surrendered himself and was never "arrested".

On 4 Frimaire Year II (24th November 1793) Bourdon de l'Oise moved the arrest of the Farmers-General, "those public bloodsuckers", and demanded that they be brought to trial if the accounts were not presented within a month.  Nineteen former Farmers-General were immediately arrested and taken to the  Port-Libre-prison - the former convent of Port-Royal - where they were to be held pending production of the accounts. The associate Farmer Étienne-Marie Delahante was of the opinion that they would inevitably be convicted of corrupt practices and were doomed.  (In the event, Delahante was one of the few to escape execution).  Lavoisier and his father-in-law Paulz turned themselves in voluntarily on 28th November. In all, among the two hundred prisoners, there were 27 Farmers General, and another 27 tax officials from the Ministry of Finance.

There is always a certain fascination in accounts of the rich and privileged reduced to living in the straited conditions of the Revolution's prisons and maisons d'arrêt.  The Farmers' experience is recounted in some detail in Delahante's memoirs and the  anonymous account in the Tableau des prisons, published in 1795.  Port-Libre was not a harsh place of confinement.  The Farmers were held in the main building.  On each of the three storeys were 32 cells with a wide corridor running down the middle, in which stood a large stove.  At the end of the hallway was a salon, where tables were set up for communal meals.  Delahante describes the detailed financial arrangements; the prisoners were even made to pay for a guard dog.  Evenings were convivial, with the women, who were held in another part of the prison,  allowed to join the men in the communal salon: "There was good society and excellent conversation. We might have been simply an extended family having come together for a visit in a vast chateau". The Farmers avoided drawing attention to themselves by ordering in elaborate dinners, and restricted their expenditure to 40 sous per person. In a letter to his wife  Lavoisier reports that he and his father-in-law had moved to a heated room - "first floor hall, number 23, room at the end" - and requests her to send "a shovel, a pair of tongs, matches and a common bellows." (quoted Poirier, p.356)


Return to the Hôtel des Fermes

On Christmas Day the Farmers' request  was conceded to return to their former headquarters in order to to continue their work. "They said goodbye to everybody, generously tipped the concierge for his services, and left behind 4,000 livres to purchase mattresses for the infirmary and aid indigent citizens.  They were greatly missed." (Tableau des prisons, p.91)  A cortege of fourteen carriages transported  them to the rue Grenelle Saint-Honoré.  The former offices had been transformed into a prison by the addition of heavy doors, partitions and barred windows.  Here they were less well provided for.  There was little in the way of comfort: the once fabulously rich financiers were obliged to sleep on mattresses on the floor.  Delahante and his colleagues organised the task before them with business-like efficiency.  After a daily communal progress meeting the men worked in teams according to their particular area of expertise. By the end of  January 1794 they were ready to submit their accounts.

Étienne_Marie_Delahante_(1743-1829)
(wikimedia.org)

 It was "in these small groups of eight or nine", reports Delahante, that they first learned the charges the auditors were going to bring against them, which "bore the stamp of either the most complete ignorance or dishonesty"(Memoirs, p.273).   The main accusation was that that the Farmers had unlawfully taken  excessive interest -  it was evident that Dupin was willfully confusing advances made to the Treasury with the working capital of the Farm.

Lavoisier was commissioned to write a detailed refutal, a difficult task given that the charges were not officially known . The printed version ran to 42 pages: Oeuvres de Lavoisier. Tome 6 / [éd. par J.-B. Dumas, E. Grimaux et F.-A. Fouqué] | Gallica (bnf.fr)

His work was never considered by the Convention.  

According to Nicolas François Mollien (later Count Mollien) who was arrested as a former employee of the Farm, the Farmers were confident that they had vindicated themselves and could await the verdict with serenity:  "After four years of revolution these worthy men were still in this state of ignorance and delusion as to the "trials" of that time and the violence of political passions." 

 Delahante similarly observes that several still hoped to be freed, though Delahante himself and the majority of his younger colleagues expected a catastrophe.


Arrest 

On 5th May 1794 Dupin submitted the report of the Committee of Surveillance to the Convention. The Company of Farmers-General was formally declared to be in the debt of the state to the sum of 130,345,262 livres, 12 sols, 1 dernier.  The Farmers were accused of bribery and malversation, of having taken illegal interest on advances to the Treasury, of having retarded remittance of lease prices...... and of fraudulently "moistening" tobacco for snuff.

At 4:30 on the same day (5th May) the Farmers were distrained to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal. 

Lavoisier, who chanced to be the the first to be informed of the decree, had the courage to announce it to his colleagues;  they immediately understood that their fate was sealed.  Mollien and his companion Boullongne, who had obtained opium for a collective suicide, offered it to Lavoisier, who refused it as setting a cowardly example.  

At seven in the evening several members of the Commune, draped in tricolour scarves, arrived with four large covered waggons to conduct the prisoners to the Conciergerie.  Thirty-two prisoners were loaded;  Mollien, who relates the events,  was saved by the quick thinking of the concierge who pushed him back inside. It was a slow progression.  Only at eleven were the men finally admitted to the Consciergerie  After formalities, they were locked in cells, where they slept on trestle beds without mattresses, or bedded down on the floor.

The next morning, 17 Floréal (6th May), they were assembled in the hall of the Conciergerie, where they spent the whole day waiting.  Slightly bizarrely, in the course of the morning  a delegation of scholars from the Lycée des Arts, was allowed inside to present Lavoisier with a metal crown decorated with small gilded stars as a token of esteem (See Poirier, p.373, note 10) That night Delahante managed to obtain three rooms: Lavoisier, Paulze and Nicolas Deville de Noailly took the smallest.

The next day they were were taken up to the clerk's office next to the Revolutionary Tribunal where they were subject one-by-one to a perfunctory interrogation, then returned to their cells.  They were surprised when the  concierge's wife served them a fine meal, courtesy of an anonymous donor (possibly Madame Lavoisier?).  They learned that they were to appear before the Tribunal the following day.

Last letter of Charles de Parseval de Frileuse, to his wife, dated 16th Floréal (5th May 1794), a precious keepsake which has recently been rediscovered in the family's possession.  A deeply religious man, Parseval commends himself to God and reminds his wife of her duty as sole support of their children. At 35 he was the youngest of those executed. 
 https://www.parseval.fr/pages/Charles.html


Trial

On 19 Floréal (8th May)  the prisoners were called just after daybreak, led to the court clerk of the Conciergerie and stripped of their remaining personal possessions. Taken to a room adjoining the Tribunal,  they found four citizens dressed in black,  their officially appointed defence lawyers, one of whom was the famous Claude François Chauveau-Lagarde.  They were  given only fifteen minutes to prepare before the Tribunal opened its session.  For an hour-and-a-half the presiding judge Coffinhal quizzed the defendants in turn as to their conduct since beginning of the Revolution.  The court recessed at 11:30 and resumed at noon.  The Clerk read the indictment, which was followed a brief and confusing session of questioning.

 The Bulletin of the Revolutionary Tribunal reported the conclusion as follows:

Claude Royer, the Public Prosecutor,  summed up this case in a few words. Going over the different forms of exactions and misappropriations of funds of which the so called former Farmers General are accused, he proved their guilt succinctly and convincingly.  He concluded that the immorality of these men was engraved in public opinion, and that they had been the perpetual authors of all the evils from which France had been suffering for a long time. (quoted Pourrier, p. 379, note 24).

Since the Revolutionary Tribunal had no jurisdiction over financial offences, the Farmers were formally convicted of "a plot intended to favour by all means the success of the enemies of France".

The magistrate Dobsent managed to secure the release at the eleventh hour of  his relative Delahante, and the two other Associate Farmers Dellage de Bellfray and Sanlot.  A report on behalf of Lavoisier by Hallé in the name of the Advisory Board for Arts and Trades was not admitted.


Execution

Illustration by Camille Gilbert from Tissandier Les martyrs de la science (1882)

The condemned were taken back to the Conciergerie.  The clerk, Nappier, informed the concierge Richard of the judgment and delivered to him twenty-eight hastily drawn-up discharge forms.  The charettes set off for the the place de la Révolution.  The condemned men, who were mostly in their fifties and sixties, remained silent.  Only Papillon d'Anteroche, seeing the crowd and thinking of his confiscated property, was moved to comment, "What grieves me most, is to have such unpleasant heirs" (quoted Grimaux, p.921).  They were executed in the order they appeared on the act of accusation: Lavoisier mounted the scaffold fourth, immediately after his father-in-law Paulze.  The men behaved with dignity and the crowd seems to have been subdued.  The execution took place at five o'clock; it took only 35 minutes to execute the twenty-eight men.  Their remains were interred without ceremony in the communal grave of the Errancis cemetery, which a few days later was also to swallow up the body of Madame Élizabeth.  Within a few weeks six more of their colleagues had joined them. 

In 1806 a new audit Commission finally vindicated the Farm's financial probity; instead of being in debt to the Treasury for 130 million livres, the Treasury had overdraw its account with the Farmers by 8 million (Matthews, p.283).


References

George Tennyson Matthews, The Royal General Farms in eighteenth-century France (New York, 1958), Chpt 9: "The end of the Company of General Farmers", p.272-
https://archive.org/details/royalgeneralfarm0000matt/page/272/mode/2up

Édouard Grimaux, "La mort de Lavoisier", .Revue des Deux Mondes (1887), 79(4): p. 884-930.
 http://www.jstor.org/stable/44756254.

Jean Pierre Poirier, Lavoisier: chemist, biologist, economist (Engl. trans. 1998), p.346-82.  Available on Internet Archive

The relevant French Wikipedia article includes a full list of those executed.  

Memoirs etc:

Francois-Nicolas Mollien, Mémoires d'un ministre du Trésor public, 1780-1815, p.167

Philippe-Edme Coittant ed., Tableau des prisons de Paris, sous le regne de Robespierre, vol. 2 (1795) 

Adrien Delahante, Une famille de finance au xviiie siècle; vol. 2 (1880) - Memoirs of Étienne_Marie_Delahante (1743-1829) [Google Books]

On  11th November 1792, Étienne-Marie's uncle, the venerable Jacques Delahante,  had the good fortune to expire peacefully in his own bed, at the age of seventy-seven.  A few months later, he would have died on the scaffold.


Reading from Mollien

François Nicolas Mollien was arrested in Evreux in February 1794 and taken in the middle of the night to the Hôtel des Fermes, where  the thirty-two Fermiers-Généraux were imprisoned.

Innocence itself sleeps ill in prisons, and though the night was far spent, most of the Fermiers Généraux were still awake. They were employed, with the incorrigible but ingenuous confidence of honest men in opposing their own exact calculations to the extravagant suppositions of their adversaries. My arrival astonished them. Their first care was to offer me a share in the wretched furniture of the prison - a mattress on the floor and a screen - in which condition I remained till daylight. Nothing could be more painful than the scene around me, and I confess that I could ill sustain it; but the resignation, the patience, and the hopefulness of my companions gave me fresh courage.......

They boasted that they had a complete answer to every charge that could be made against them, and they could await their trial with safety.  After four years of revolution these worth men were still in this state of ignorance and delusion as to the "trials" of that time and the violence of political passions.  I sought not to shake their confidence, but I could not share it......

[Some of the Fermiers Généraux had proposed to sacrifice their fortunes, thinking - with truth - that they were chiefly obnoxious by their wealth; but the proposal was rejected - because its acceptance might have looked like an acknowledgment of injustice in the charges that had been pressed upon them. This, however, led to inquiry as to the amount of property they could have collected. It turned out that these 32 Fermiers Géneraux, descending from opulent financial families, and who were accused of having robbed the State of two or three hundred millions, could scarcely have raised twenty-two millions amongst them, including their entire property of every sort, if their lives could have been saved at that price. It barely amounted to a capital of 27,0001. sterling a piece. Some of them were so reduced as to be obliged to borrow a pittance for their prison meal. Their courage continued unshaken, even when their danger became more palpable; and they defended themselves from every aspersion on their honour with so much ability, that the Convention was at last compelled to decree (6th of May, 1794), that they had put the Republic in peril, because some of their agents had been suspected, in 1789, of selling damp tobacco. The decree wound up by sending to the Revolutionary Tribunal the members of this conspiracy.]

The illustrious Lavoisier was first informed of the edict--and he had the courage to announce it to the rest.  All were by this time so detached from life and human affairs that they gave the same answer: "We had foreseen it - we are prepared. I never doubted that I should share the fate of the Fermiers Generaux, as I had shared their arrest, and I was not appalled by the aspect of death.  But I confess I was not equally firm when I thought of the moments which would precede it. From two to four o'clock every day we heard the shouts of the mob insulting the victims as they passed to execution. Full of the horror of such an end, dying on the scaffold amidst the execrations of the populace, I will even confess that in conjunction with another captive I had procured opium. We confided our secret to Lavoisier, and offered him a share of our poison. With a moral dignity, equal to his great attainments, this eminent man rejected the proposal. Nous donner la mort," said he, ce serait absoudre les forcénés qui nous y envoient. Pensons à ceux qui nous ont precédés; ne laissons pas un moins bon exemple à ceux qui nous suivent."

A few minutes later, the Municipality of Paris, escorted by gendarmes, and accompanied by covered vehicles arrived to consign the prisoners to the tribunal. They were all drawn out before the wicket, and taken by four at a time to each carriage. The turnkeys were all in tears. In about an hour twenty-four of our unfortunate companions had left the prison, the gaoler watching with obvious compassion each departure, whilst the municipal officers were drinking and shouting in his room. I was standing with the eight Fermiers Généraux who remained, for my turn came after them, being the thirty-third on the list, when the gaoler said to me in a low voice "Go in you are not wanted here." I had only time to cast a glance at those I was leaving, and to see them smile at the hope of my deliverance. The door was shut upon me, and I was in solitude. What a solitude was that of a prison in which I was to survive thirty-two innocent men! I remained in a state of stupor. It was midnight when the gaoler again approached me. He was just returned from the Committee of Public Safety, where he had given his account of the clearance of the prison, but without naming me. He omitted me there, as he had done in the yard of the prison, because the decree only designated the Fermiers Généraux. Some good action, he said, was necessary to console him for so many others. I hardly thanked him, or understood what he said. The next day there was still danger; an inquiry had been made about me. All the following night I heard but one carriage pass, for carriages were rare at that time in Paris. I thought it was coming to the prison, and half unconsciously groped to the door which separated me from the sleeping room of the gaolers. One of them said, "That is Fouquier Tinville, going to prepare tomorrow's work with Robespierre. He seldom passes so late." The very name and object of those men increased the gloom of my thoughts. The next morning I knew that my unfortunate comrades were before the tribunal which would pronounce their fate. At two o'clock on the 8th of May, I hear a voice on the stairs, and the step of gendarmes. Four of them enter the prison, and behind them three other men, whom I scarcely recognized, but who fell fainting into my arms. They were the sole survivors, who had been saved by some lucky accident; but they had left their fathers and brothers at the foot of the scaffold, and their own agony lasted many hours after they were restored to me.
Mollien François Nicolas Mollien, Mémoires d'un ministre du Trésor public, 1780-1815, p.158-173.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k39650z/f181.double
This English translation and summary is published in the London Quarterly Review for 1852.

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