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| 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 |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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 |
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
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| 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.
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
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:
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."
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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