Joyeux Quatorze Juillet!

Welcome to The Land of Desire, a French history podcast dedicated to exploring all the weird adventures, mysteries and surprising backstories behind French cultural icons. We’re kicking things off with a bang! Today, France celebrates itself with parades, picnics, and of course, the traditional fireworks. July 14th – “Bastille Day” to Americans –  is the anniversary of the storming of an ancient royal fortress in 1789, which effectively kicked off the French Revolution. But the storming of the Bastille might never have happened if it weren’t for another type of fireworks. For our first episode, let’s learn about the birthplace of the French revolution: Iceland.

Episode 1: Bastille Day

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Transcript

Bienvenue! Welcome to The Land of Desire, a podcast about French history and culture. I’m Diana, and I figure if nobody is making the podcast of your dreams, you have to make it yourself. I love historical podcasts, but it’s hard to find ones that strike a balance between informative and entertaining. While I might be a history nerd who happily listens to hour long lectures about French wartime agricultural outputs, most people aren’t interested in that kind of thing. But people are, generally speaking, interested in France. They’re in love with France, or at the very least fascinated by France. When the world travels, it travels to France: 83 million people each year, more than any other country on Earth. When the world wants to see art, it visits the Louvre – 1 out of every 1000 people on Earth will visit this year. When the world wants to take a selfie, it goes to the Eiffel Tower – 10,000 selfies per year and counting. We eat macarons, we wear Dior (or wish we did), we drink wine and we wear jaunty striped shirts while we watch Amelie over and over again on Netflix. We all want to know about France – the good, the bad, the funny, the weird. And I want to tell you all about France: a country that ran out of cows and figured out a tasty way to eat zebras instead, a country who smuggled its greatest artistic masterpiece away from the Nazis in the back of an ambulance, a country whose revolutionary aims included brotherhood, equality, and a special holiday for marshmallows. When your podcast’s subject is a country whose first citizens moved in 1.8 million years ago, it’s hard to decide where to start. So why not today? Today, the day I’m launching my podcast, is France’s greatest national celebration: La Fête Nationale, July 14th, “Bastille Day”. It’s a holiday which has come to symbolize the development of human rights, of independence, of democracy, and of modernity. It is a holiday which is considered a hallmark in world history. It is a holiday which only exists because one time a volcano blew up in Iceland and ruined the entire world.

On the hot summer morning of July 12, 1789, the bakers of Paris were nervous. A giant crowd surrounded them on both sides, and the bakers weren’t sure who was a bigger threat: the unfamiliar soldiers holding rifles and looking scared, or their customers, exhausted from heat and hunger. Over the last year, bad droughts and bad harvests had driven the price of bread sky-high. Bread was everything, especially when you weren’t getting enough of it. Most people in France in 1789 lived on bread, up to two pounds per day – if you were lucky. Breakfast? Bread. Lunch? Bread. Dinner? Bread. You want meat or fish? Nope, that’s reserved for wealthy nobles and merchants. If you were a farmer – and back then, you were probably a farmer – maybe you were lucky enough to afford seeds. If you plant the seeds, you pray that the local lord’s pigeons don’t eat the seeds. If the seeds sprout, you pray the local lord’s deer don’t trample them. If the sprouts grow into vegetables, you pray the local lord’s rabbits don’t eat them. If they do, you aren’t allowed to touch those rabbits, or pigeons, or deer. In 1789, this was simply the way it was and had always been. Life wasn’t great, but at least there was bread….until now.

It was impossible to tell whether the bakers were sweating from the heat or their own nerves. Over the past few weeks, it seemed like all of France had descended into chaos. Violence all around the country seemed to be marching into town, and it seemed like everyone was going mad. These bakers just wanted to sell their bread and hurry home to lock their doors and wait for the craziness to blow over. But the crowd around them was enormous, and hungry, and hot, and ready for anything. That morning, the bakers and their customers agreed on one thing: conditions were terrible. In fact, if anyone had been paying close attention – and nobody was paying close attention, they were all too hungry – they might have realized that things had been terrible for almost exactly 6 years. 6 years ago an extraordinary thing had happened. It happened 1,300 miles away, in a place most Parisians had never visited, had never heard of, probably never would hear of. 6 years ago, in an unknown corner of the world, a mysterious disaster unfolded, a disaster which would bring the marketplaces of 1789 to the brink of a riot and kick off one of the greatest political upheavals in human history.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, in the little known corner of a little known village in a little known country called Iceland, the ground trembled. On the morning of June 8, 1783 a dark cloud settled over the sky, so thick that locals couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. The weather was calm. Suddenly, at 9 o clock in the morning, the ground opened up like a enormous zipper! The local priest, Reverend Jon Steingrimsson saw it all: “Flames and fire erupted. Great blocks of rocks and pieces of grass were thrown high into the air and in indescribable heights, from time to time strong thunders, flashes, fountains of sand, lightning and dense smoke occurred…Earth trembled incessantly…how terrible it was to see such signs of an angry god..now it was time to confess to the lord.” 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride filled the air, wiping out Iceland’s sheep, cows, horses, crops and people. Birds fell dead out of the sky. All the iron on the island rusted. If the poison air didn’t kill you, the lack of food did. One fourth of Iceland died. But the volcano wasn’t done yet! The poisonous smoke rose up and up and up, all the way into the jet stream, covering the world in a haze. Fog settled over China and floated out to sea, where it disrupted the monsoon cycle and caused famine throughout India and Egypt. The Inuits of Alaska wrote of a “summer that did not come.” By the 9th day after the eruption, the cloud reached Norway, scattering ashes on the ground. By the tenth day, Germany watched the sun turn the color of blood. By the eleventh day, the cloud reached France. Boats sat still in the water, as clouds of poison rolled in. Those unlucky enough to breathe the gas choked to death. Benjamin Franklin, living in Paris at the time, attended lectures on the “constant fog” and was one of only a handful of educated men able to figure out where it was coming from. For everybody else, it was a summer of inexplicable death and suffering. In at least one village, the local priest got dragged out of bed to perform an exorcism on the murderous air. And the only thing better than a summer of Deathclouds is a summer that never ends. The clouds lasted until October. Winters grew colder, harvests failed, and freak storms rolled through the French countryside. Five years later, things were really spiraling out of control.

The first thing to go was the barley crops, then the oats, then the rye. Next went the meat, rotting in the sun. That summer, a thunderstorm passed through Paris, showering down 16 inch hailstones which killed men in the streets and tore the crops in the fields into shreds. I can just imagine some poor French peasant, very hungry, getting hit in the head with hailstones. “Right. Of course. Same merde, different day.” If you can believe it, things only got worse from there. The winter of 1788 was really cold. No, really cold. Frozen rivers trapped boats filled with grain. Onlookers could only watch from the shore as the their only chance at dinner spoiled and rotted away. Thomas Jefferson, the new American minister to France, wrote of “a winter of such severe cold as without example…the mercury was at times 50 degrees below freezing…Great fires were kept at all the cross roads around which the people gathered in crowds to avoid perishing with cold.” Relief at the arrival of spring in 1789 quickly turned to dread as the air grew hotter and drier. Turns out when all that ice melts, you get floods! Without any good harvests, French peasants spent the spring eating the last of last year’s grain, with the fall harvest still months away. Now bread was getting harder and harder to find, and just like that toxic volcanic smoke, bread prices in Paris were going up, up, up.

In March, the rumors began trickling into the streets of Paris: bread riots in Flanders. No, bread riots in Artois. Just kidding, riots in both! For the first time, most poor people in Paris couldn’t even get their daily bread. More rumors arrived: there was bread, but the fat little monks were hoarding it, locking it away in their monasteries. Now, the rumors turned dangerous: no, not the monks, the king himself was hoarding the bread. As these rumors began filtering into Paris, so, too, did a new type of person: soldiers. Every day, it seemed, more and more soldiers assembled on corners, next to flour mills and market stalls, next to bakeries. At first, the Parisians thought it must have been their imagination, or the heat. But no: the gathering armies were real. Every day, more soldiers poured in. Worse, these soldiers weren’t even French! The real French soldiers were all deserting, since they weren’t getting paid and their families back home were starving to death. The king was importing these new arrivals from Switzerland and Germany. Rumors began turning into speeches: these foreign invaders were standing in between loyal French people and their bread.

Riots in Picardy.

Riots in Normandy.

Then, three weeks before our morning in the marketplace, just a few days ride away from Paris, there were riots in Lyon.

Now it was Sunday, back to July 12th 1789, and the people of Paris were the hungriest and the poorest they had ever been. Thursday had been the quarterly ferme, when all of their dwindling money had been used to settle debts and pay rent. Today was the first market day since they’d emptied their pockets, and everyone watched nervously as the bakers set out their bread. I can only imagine everyone sucking in their breath at the same time as the bakers wrote their prices on the board – 14 sous for bread! To put that into a little context, the average American worker earns about 170 dollars per day. Imagine going to the store and finding out that a loaf of plain, regular bread costs 154 dollars. By law, whatever the bakers didn’t sell at the end of the day had to be given away – so the rowdy crowds waited for the sun to set. While they waited in the July sun, stomachs rumbling, a rumor swept through the crowd. King Louis XVI had fired the finance minister! A year earlier, during the summer of freak thunderstorms, the finance minister had used his own fortune to buy grain overseas and have it shipped to Paris. For most Parisians, the finance minister was the only person left in power who seemed to care that the Parisians were starving to death. To the relief of the bakers, the rumor was so explosive that the angry mob forgot all about their hunger and left the marketplace – to gather in the streets and march towards the palace.

Everyone in the streets headed down to the Tuileries gardens, about five or six thousand people in total. There was a lot of shouting and fist-waving. By the time the crowd reached the area which we now call the place de la Concorde, the masses found themselves facing a wall of nervous foreign soldiers. No longer standing on the sidewalks or guarding bakeries, German soldiers now pointed their weapons at the French people – just as the radicals had warned would happen! Eyewitness accounts differ as to what, exactly, happened, but perhaps the more important story is what Parisians thought happened. According to the stories in the streets, the German calvarymen charged their horses and their guns at the Parisians, injuring some, killing others, and sending Parisians scattering into the streets. Whether this is an accurate tale is irrelevant: what matters is that that night, Parisians told themselves that the showdown between the elites and the common people was finally here. It was time to prepare for battle, and that meant finding guns. At this point, the buzzing mob had woken up the local French soldiers and the policemen. Surely they wouldn’t fight alongside these German mercenaries? Surely they wouldn’t take the side of the king against their own starving families and friends? French soldiers, underpaid and underfed, began crossing over to the other side, forming a new kind of citizen-soldier, pledged to defend his countrymen against the foreign soldiers the king had imported. These soldiers could help train the French masses to defend themselves – if only there were enough weapons. When a group of angry citizens and French soldiers pushed their way into the military hospital in search of cannons and muskets, they were too late – everything had just been moved. If the mob wanted to get their hands on any weapons, they were going to need to attack the ancient fortress downtown: the Bastille.

Despite our modern day myths and legends about the Bastille, the fortress was not exactly the towering hellmouth we imagine. Originally built alongside the river to keep out the English, it now served to keep in the French – conspirators, Protestants, dangerous writers, scandalous writers and the oh-so-scary juvenile delinquents, whose families begged the King to lock them up for their own good. I can only imagine how often Parisian dads scared their children into good behavior by threatening to lock them up in the Bastille if they didn’t eat their bread. The Bastille’s reputation is mostly due to the fact that it held a lot of writers who saw a good opportunity: as one prisoner put it, “I saw literary glory illuminate the walls of my prison. Once persecuted I would be better known…and those six months of the Bastille would be an excellent recommendation and infallibly make my fortune.” Those same writers usually received a daily allowance much higher than that of the average French peasant, with cells that contained curtains, tables, chairs, chimneys, even their own dogs and cats from home. The Bastille’s most famous prisoner is probably that weirdo, the Marquis de Sade, who was only able to survive the nightmarish fever dream of prison thanks to his silk stockings, four family portraits, perfumes, 133 books, and a bunch of squashy mattresses. A few weeks earlier, the Marquis had leaned out his cell window to tell the crowds below that the guards were killing everybody, but please remember that the Marquis de Sade was the most notorious troll of 18th century France. But the crowd was ready to believe anything of its dastardly king by this point – a king who had dismissed the man of the people, a king who was clearly starving the people on purpose, a king who was getting ready to unleash a horde of Germans to murder innocent Parisians, why not a king who would lock everyone up in a prison and then murder them where no one could see?

So here we were, on the morning of July 14th, 1789, only 48 hours after the bakers set out their bread. The governor of the Bastille woke up nervous. He knew that he had been abandoned by his fellow authorities. The German soldiers were withdrawing from the streets, the other military leaders in Paris had sent him their gunpowder and weapons but no soldiers with which to guard it all, and waiting outside the gates were 900 angry Parisians. Because nothing in Paris happens like you’d expect, the storming of the Bastille began with…a very civilized breakfast. When two of the crowd demanded to go inside the Bastille, the governor welcomed them inside for breakfast, gave them a tour of the place, and said that while he wouldn’t be able to let the militia move in and take away his guns, he would put all of the fortress’s weapons away. This very polite negotiation went on for hours, but at least two Parisians got some bread out of this ordeal. Eventually, as the restless crowd of Parisians pressed closer together in front of the gates, someone managed to shimmy up the outer wall and cut the ropes to the drawbridge, accidentally squishing at least one unsuspecting member of the crowd. As the mob poured into the inner courtyard, the Bastille guards opened fire…aaaaaand we’re off. Now that the battle had begun in earnest, all those French soldiers who had joined the other side began showing up with their own weapons. The governor of the Bastille was in no mood for a long, drawn-out fight – at most, they had enough food to last a seige of, oh, 48 hours. His best bet was to negotiate an honorable, peaceful surrender. These terms of surrender were flatly rejected, and the mob surged its way into the prison. They liberated all the Bastille’s prisoners – all seven of them. Four of them were some run-of-the-mill forgers, one was a Count imprisoned by his own family for bad behavior and the other two were just mentally ill at a bad time in history to be mentally ill. This task accomplished, the mob turned their energies towards the guards and staff. This wasn’t really a good idea, because the citizens managed to lose 98 of their guys, while the governor lost only one. That simply wouldn’t do. All of a sudden, after a huge surge into a crowd of Bastille guards, the crowd managed to seize the governor of the Bastille, beat the crap out of him, and dragged his bruised body down the streets towards the Hotel de Ville. For those of you who have been to Paris, that’s a long way to be dragged. Naturally, the crowd spent the entire trip debating which hideous, grisly, medieval form of torture they would use to kill the governor, with everyone debating back and forth which hideous suffering would be best. Keep in mind that this is the governor of a prison which treated its poorest prisoners better than the richest prisoners at any other prison in Paris. This is a governor who has little control over who he guards. This is a man who was guarding 7 prisoners. I don’t want to say he was Mr. Rogers, but he wasn’t exactly Josef Mengele. A pastry chef standing nearby suggested bringing the governor inside, where God-Knows-What torture would be performed. This was the last straw for the governor. He knew he was doomed, and he wasn’t going to put off the inevitable any longer. At this point, the governor closed his eyes, gathered up the last of his feeble strength, shouted “Let me die!” and kicked the pastry chef right in the family jewels. Well, when you ask a mob of French revolutionaries to kill you, you don’t have to ask them twice. The governor died, which was probably a relief to everybody at that point, including the governor. Then it was back off to the Bastille to begin tearing down the hated old Fortress by hand, stone by stone.

That night, King Louis received word of the destruction at the Bastille from his longtime friend at court, the Duc de Liancourt. After weeks of skirmishes around the country, perhaps the news that mob violence had reached the heart of the capitol took a moment to sink in, because Louis heard about the storming of the Bastille ..and then made ready to go to bed early. Before turning in for the night, Louis is said to have turned to his friend the Duke and asked, “Is it a revolt?” Quick to grasp their new reality, the Duke replied, “No, sire, it is not a revolt. It is a revolution.”

[BIRD SOUNDS]

Paris never forgot the bread riots. The bread riots which had surged through the countryside, through every city, through Paris itself, kicked off a revolution that wouldn’t end until Napoleon stepped in. Throughout all the chaos of the two hundred years following the summer of 1789, France seemed to learn its lesson: never take the bread away. Anyone who’s ever visited France in the summer – or simply tried to email anyone in France in the summer – knows that the whole country takes a vacation in August. There was one big exception to this practice: bakers. Throughout the 20th century, bakeries in each neighborhood were divided into one of two groups, and either got permission to take their vacation in July or in August. This ensured that, come what may, the streets of Paris would never go without bread on a hot summer’s day. Well, all good things come to an end. In 2015, the mayor of Paris decided to scrap the old rule, and let Parisian bakers take their vacations whenever they pleased. For the first time in 200 years, Parisians could walk through their neighborhood without finding a single bakery open selling bread. Things seem to be going well, but for how long? Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Alaska, Guatemala, Oregon, reports come in of rumblings and grumblings from the earth, of volcanos getting ready to come to life once more.

Further Reading:

A Very Present Help in Trouble: The Autobiography of the Fire-Priest (Jón Steingrímsson)

“June 8, 1789: How the ‘Laki-Eruptions’ Changed History” (David Bressan, Scientific American)

“The summer of acid rain” (The Economist)

“Local and Global Impacts of the 1783-84 Laki Eruption in Iceland” (Eric Klemetti, Wired)

“When Food Changed History: The French Revolution” (Lisa Bramen, Smithsonian)

“Laki: The Forgotten Volcano” (Alexandra Witze) and her guide to visiting Laki

 

Sources:

“The eruption that changed Iceland forever” (Tom de Castella, BBC)

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Simon Schama)

A Companion to the French Revolution (Peter McPhee)

About

The Land of Desire is a French history podcast written, recorded and produced by Diana Stegall. For more information regarding this episode’s production, please contact me and thanks for listening!

Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples, circa 1776. Oil on canvas, 122cmx1764cm.

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