“IN his own entertaining way, Mr. Andrew Lang has recently been taking the scientific historian to task, and giving him a very admirable lesson on “history as she ought to be wrote.” But though the two professors to whom he mainly addresses himself are Frenchmen, it would be doing an injustice to France to infer that she is the alma mater of the modern dryasdust. The exact contrary is the case : France is rich in historical writers like the Comte d’Haussonville, M. de Maulde la Clavière, M. Gaston Boissier, to name only a few, who know how to be accurate without being dull.
M. Funck-Bretano, whom I have the honour of introducing here to the English public, belongs to the same class. Of literary parentage and connections — his uncle is Professor Lujo Brentano, whose work on the English trade gilds is a standard — he entered in his twentieth year the École des Chartes, the famous institution which trains men in the methods of historical research. At the end of his three years’ course, he was appointed to succeed François Ravaisson in the work of classifying the archives of the Bastille in the Arsenal Library, — a work which occupied him for more than ten years. One fruit of it is to be seen in the huge catalogue of more than one thousand pages, printed vi under official auspices and awarded the Prix le Dissez de Penanrum by the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Another is the present work, which has been crowned by the French Academy. Meanwhile M. Funck-Bretano had been pursuing his studies at the Sorbonne and at Nancy, and his French thesis for the doctorate in letters was a volume on the origins of the Hundred Years’ War, which obtained for him the highest possible distinction for a work of erudition in France, the Grand Prix Gobert. This volume he intends to follow up with two others, completing a social rather than a military history of the war, and this no doubt he regards as his magnum opus. He is known also as a lecturer in Belgium and Alsace as well as in Paris, and being general secretary of the Société des Etudes historiques and deputy professor of history at the College of France as well as sub-librarian of the Arsenal Library, he leads a busy life.
Trained in the rigorous methods of the École des Chartes and inspired by the examples of Fustel de Coulanges and M. Paul Meyer, M. Funck-Bretano has developed a most interesting and conscientious method of his own. He depends on original sources, and subjects these to the most searching critical tests; but this is a matter of course : his individuality appears in regard to the publication of the results of his researches. When he has discoveries of importance to communicate, he gives them to the world first in the form of articles or studies in reviews of standing, thus preparing public opinion, and at the same time affording opportunities for the search-light of criticism to play on his work. Some of the chapters of this book thus appeared in the various revues, and have subsequently gone through a severe process of pruning and amending. It is now eleven years vii since the first appearance, in the pages of the Revue des deux Mondes, of the study of Latude which, in a much altered shape, now forms one of the most interesting portions of this book. The coming autumn will see the publication in France of a stirring work by M. Funck-Brentano on the amazing poison-dramas at Louis XIV.’s court, and of this book also the several sections have been appearing at intervals for several years past.
The present work, as I have already said, is the fruit of many years of research. Its startling revelations, so well summarized in M. Victorien Sardou’s Introduction, have revolutionized public opinion in France, and in particular the solution of the old problem of the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask has been accepted as final by all competent critics. The Athenæum, in reviewing the book in its French form the other day, said that it must be taken cautiously as an ingenious bit of special pleading, and that the Bastille appears in M. Funck-Brentano’s pages in altogether too roseate hues, suggesting further that no such results could be obtained without prejudice from the same archives as those on which Charpentier founded his La Bastille dévoilée, in 1789. This criticism seems to me to ignore several important points. Charpentier’s book, written in the heat of the revolutionary struggle, is not a history, but a political pamphlet, which, in the nature of the case, was bound to represent the Bastille as a horror. Moreover, Charpentier could only have depended superficially on the archives, which, as M. Funck-Brentano shows, were thrown into utter disorder on the day of the capture of the Bastille. The later writer, on the other hand, approached the subject when the revolutionary ardours had quite burnt out, and with the independent and dispassionate mind of a trained official. He spent thirteen years in setting viii rediscovered archives in order, after his predecessor Ravaisson had already spent a considerable time at the same work. He was able, further (as Charpentier certainly was not), to complete and check the testimony of the archives by means of the memoirs of prisoners — the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, Renneville Dumouriez, and a host of others. In these circumstances it would be surprising if his conclusions were not somewhat different from those of Charpentier a hundred years ago.
The gravamen of the Athenæum’s objection is that M. Funck-Brentano’s description of the treatment of prisoners in the Bastille applies only to the favoured few, the implication being that M. Funck-Brentano has shut his eyes to the cases of the larger number. But surely the reviewer must have read the book too rapidly. M. Funck-Brentano shows, by means of existing and accessible documents, that the fact of being sent to the Bastille at all was itself, in the eighteenth century at least, a mark of favour. Once at the Bastille, the prisoner, whoever he might be, was treated without severity, unless he misbehaved. Prisoners of no social importance, such as Renneville, Latude (a servant’s love-child), Tavernier (son of a house-porter), were fed and clothed and cared for much better than they would have been outside the prison walls. A young man named Estival de Texas, who was being exiled to Canada because he was a disgrace to his family, wrote to the minister of Paris on June 22, 1726, from the roadstead of La Rochelle : “Your lordship is sending me to a wild country, huddled with mean wretches, and condemned to a fare very different from what your lordship granted me in the Bastille.” Here was a friendless outcast looking back regretfully on his prison fare! On February 6, 1724, one of the king’s ministers wrote to the lieutenant of ix police : “I have read to the duke of Bourbon the letter you sent me about the speeches of M. Quéhéon, and his royal highness has instructed me to send you an order and a lettre de cachet authorizing his removal to the Bastille. But as he thinks that this is an honour the fellow little deserves, he wishes you to postpone the execution of the warrant for three days, in order to see if Quéhéon will not take the hint and leave Paris as he was commanded.” It is on such documents as these, which are to be seen in hundreds at the Arsenal Library in Paris, that M. Funck-Brentano has founded his conclusions. Anyone who attacks him on his own ground is likely to come badly off.
With M. Funck-Brentano’s permission, I have omitted the greater part of his footnotes, which are mainly references to documents inaccessible to the English reader. On the other hand, I have ventured to supply a few footnotes in explanation of such allusions as the Englishman not reading French (and the translation is intended for no others), might not understand. On the same principle I have attempted rhymed renderings of two or three scraps of verse quoted from Regnier and Voltaire, to whom I make my apologies. The proofs have had the advantage of revision by M. Funck-Brentano, who is, however, in no way responsible for any shortcomings. The Index appears in the English version alone.
The portrait of Latude and the views of the Bastille are reproduced from photographs of the originals specially taken by M. A. Bresson, of 40 Rue de Passy, Paris.
GEORGE MAIDMENT.
August, 1899.
[Click on the Chapter Number, Title, or Page and it will open in a new browser window.]
page
Men of Letters in the Bastille 147
xiiVII. THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU 166
Model of the Bastille Frontispiece
Facsimile of Du Junca’s note regarding the entry of the Iron Mask Facing page 115
Facsimile of Du Junca’s note regarding the death of the Iron Mask ” 116
Facsimile of the Iron Mask’s burial certificate ” 142
Facsimile of the cover of Latude’s explosive box ” 173
Facsimile of Latude’s writing with blood on linen ” 188
The Capture of the Bastille ” 257
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