PARIS, 18TH CENTURY: REVOLUTION & SOCIAL CHANGES

A drawing of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

When you start to read a book, the first important thing is to know something about the author. Once you have enough information about him, it's important to situate the book in time and space.

Charles Dickens' A tale of two cities has two main localizations. The first of them is Paris, the capital of France. The story happens in 1775 when the French city is near to live a great social revolution that will change not only France but the world history.

Paris in the 18th century was the second-largest city in Europe, after London, with a population of about 600,000 persons. The century saw the construction of Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the church of Les Invalides, and the Panthéon, and the founding of the Louvre Museum. Paris witnessed the end of the reign of Louis XIV, was the center stage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, saw the first manned flight, and was the birthplace of high fashion and the modern restaurant.

Louis XIV distrusted the Parisians; when he was young he had been forced to flee the city twice, and he did not forget it. He moved his residence from the Tuileries Palace to the Palace of Versailles in 1671, and moved his entire court to Versailles in 1682. But while he disliked the Parisians, he wanted Paris to be a monument to his glory; he declared in 1666 that he wished to do for Paris what Augustus had done for Rome.

A typical day in 18th century in Paris

Immediately following the death of Louis XIV, his nephew, Philippe d’Orléans, manoeuvered the Parlement into breaking the King's will and naming him the Regent for the five-year-old king Louis XV. On 12 September, the Regent had the child King brought to the Palais de Justice to ratify his Regency, and then to the Château de Vincennes. On 30 December, the young King was installed in the Tuileries Palace, while the Regent took up residence in his family's palace, the Palais Royal, the former Palais-Cardinal of Cardinal Richelieu.

Until the 1789 Revolution, Paris had a strict social hierarchy, whose customs and rules were established by long tradition. It was described by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in the Le Tableau de Paris, written in 1783: There are in Paris eight distinct classes; the princes and great nobles, these are the least numerous; the Nobles of the Robe; the financiers; the traders and merchants; the artists; the craftsmen; the manual workers; the servants; and the bas peuple, the lower class.

More information: BBC

The bourgeois, or members of the middle class of Paris, financiers, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and those in the liberal professions like doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers or government officials were a growing social class. They were specifically defined by law as persons who had lived in the city at least a year in their own residence, and earned enough money to pay taxes.

A drawing of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

Most Parisians belonged to the working class or the poor. There were some forty thousand domestic servants, mostly working for middle-class families. Most came from the provinces; only five percent were born in Paris. 

They lived with the families they served, and their living and working conditions depended entirely on character of their employers. They received very low wages, worked long hours, and if they lost their job, or if a woman became pregnant, they had little hope of getting another position.

In the domain of finance and banking, Paris was far behind other European capitals, and even other French cities. The first venture of Paris into modern finance was launched by the Scottish economist John Law, who, encouraged by the Regent, in 1716 started a private bank and issued paper money. Law invested heavily in the Mississippi Company, causing wild speculation, with shares rising to sixty times their original value. The bubble burst in 1720, and Law closed the bank and fled the country, ruining many Parisian investors.

More information: History Lists

Parisians were suspicious of banks and bankers. The Bourse, or Paris stock market, didn't open until 24 September 1724 on rue Vivienne, in the former hôtel de Nevers, after stock markets had existed in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse and other cities. The Banque de France wasn't founded until 1800, after the Bank of Amsterdam (1609), and the Bank of England (1694).

Notre Dame de Paris in the 18th century

During most of the 18th century, the Parisian economy was based on thousands of small workshops, where skilled artisans produced products. 

The workshops were clustered in particular neighborhoods; furniture makers in the faubourg Saint-Antoine; cutlery and small metal-work in neighborhood called the Quinze Vingts near the Bastille. At the beginning of the 18th century, security was provided by two different corps of police; the Garde de Paris and the Guet Royal, or royal watchmen. Both organizations were under the command of the Lieutenant General of Police. The Parisians considered the police both corrupt and inefficient, and relations between the people and the police were increasingly strained.

For most of the 18th century, the hospitals were religious institutions, run by the church, which provided more spiritual than actual medical care. The largest and oldest was the Hôtel-Dieu, located on the parvis of Notre-Dame Cathedral on the opposite side of the square from its present location. It was founded in 651 by Saint Landry of Paris.

More information: Eye Witness to History

Paris possessed an extraordinary number and variety of prisons, used for different classes of persons and types of crimes.

The guillotine during the French Revolution

In October 1789 Doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, in the interest of finding a more humane method, successfully had the means of execution changed to decapitation by a machine he perfected, the guillotine, built with the help of a Paris manufacturer of pianos and harps named Tobias Schmidt and the surgeon Antoine Louis.

The University of Paris had fallen gradually in quality and influence since the 17th century. It was primarily a school of theology, not well adapted to the modern world, and played no important role in the scientific revolution or the Enlightenment.

The great majority of Parisians were at least nominally Roman Catholic, and the church played an enormous role in the life of the city; though its influence declined toward the end of the century, partly because of the Enlightenment, and partly from conflicts within the church establishment. The church, along with the nobility, suffered more than any other institutions from the French Revolution.

More information: ThoughtCo

The Protestant Church had been strictly controlled and limited by the royal government for most of the 18th century. 

A drawing of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

The Jewish community in Paris was also very small; an estimated five hundred persons in 1789. About fifty were Sephardic Jews who had originally come from Spain and Portugal, then lived in Bayonne before coming to Paris. They lived mostly in the neighborhood of Saint-German-des-Prés, and worked largely in the silk and chocolate-making businesses. There was another Sephardic community of about one hundred persons in the same neighborhood, who were originally from Avignon, from the oldest Jewish community in France, which had lived protected in the Papal state. They mostly worked in commerce. The third and largest community, about three hundred fifty persons, were Ashkenaze Jews from Alsace, Lorraine, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. They spoke Yiddish, and lived largely in the neighborhood of the Church of Saint-Merri.

The Freemasons were not a religious community, but functioned like one and had a powerful impact on events in Paris in the 18th century. The first lodge in France, the Grand Loge de France, was founded on 24 June 1738 on the rue des Boucheries, and was led by the Duke of Antin. By 1743 there were sixteen lodges in Paris, and their grand master was the Count of Clermont, close to the royal family. The lodges contained aristocrats, the wealthy, church leaders and scientists. Their doctrines promoted liberty and tolerance, and they were strong supporters of the Enlightenment. 

More information: Students for Liberty

 Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. 

When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation. 

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