A Wilderness So Immense Read online

  Before Miró could finish reading the documents Father Sedella had given him, the monk had rushed from the governor’s office as quickly as he had arrived. The next day, ablaze with the urgency of his holy assignment, the Capuchin grew impatient as the hours passed without word from Governor Miró. At six o’clock, from his spartan room near the Place d’Armes, Father Sedella sent Governor Miró a formal order complaining that the success of his assignment for the Inquisition was imperiled by Miró’s “tardy measures.” He demanded that Miró “inform me without further delay what steps you intend to take so that I may proceed promptly to accomplish my task.”5

  That night the newly appointed representative of the Inquisition was roused from his bed by heavy knocking. As yet unaware of the parallel between his midnight visitors and Carlos Ill’s midnight expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain for their complicity in an assassination plot and growing support of the Inquisition in 1767, the Capuchin monk greeted Governor Miró’s officer and the platoon of royal grenadiers who stood at his door.

  “My friends, I thank you and his Excellency for the readiness of his compliance with my request,” Father Sedella said, “but I have now no use for your services. You shall be warned in time when you are wanted,” he promised as he prepared to return to his sleep. “Retire then with the blessing of God.”6

  Instead, the captain placed Father Sedella under arrest. “What!” exclaimed the monk, “will you dare lay your hands on a Commissary of the Holy Inquisition?”7

  “I dare obey orders,” the officer replied, as he ushered Father Sedella aboard a vessel that sailed the next day—April 30, 1790—for the Spanish port of Cádiz.8

  “When I read the communication of that Capuchin,” Governor Miró reported to the ministry in Spain, “I shuddered.” The emerging policy of strengthening the Spanish borderlands through population growth—a policy Miró fully supported—depended upon “the pledge that the new colonists should not be molested in matters of religions, provided there should be no other public mode of worship than the Catholic.” Miró knew that “the mere name of the Inquisition uttered in New Orleans would be sufficient, not only to check immigration … but would also be capable of driving away those who have recently come.”9

  As it was, Miró feared that his prompt deportation of Father Sedella might still have “fatal consequences” arising from “the mere suspicion of the cause of his dismissal.”10 The success of Spain’s new defensive policies in the borderlands depended not on the fidelity and zeal of the Spanish Inquisition but on winning the loyalty of new settlers, most of them American Protestants, during a cataclysmic decade that challenged loyalties of every kind in Europe and the Americas.

  The revival of Pére Antoine’s appointment as Louisiana commissary of the Inquisition and his specific assignment to root out subversive literature were direct reflections of Spain’s initial reaction to the French Revolution—an event that shocked the Atlantic world, played havoc with Spanish efforts to maintain control of the Mississippi River Valley, and in many ways set the stage for the Louisiana Purchase. Already vulnerable to attack from the north, Louisiana was now exposed both to the imperial wars unleashed by the French Revolution and to the example of a successful slave revolt, fueled by revolutionary propaganda, in the Caribbean colony of St. Domingue.

  “Spanish by its government,” New Orleans merchant James Pitot wrote, Louisiana’s population was “still generally French in its tastes, customs, habits, religion, and language.” At a distance of three thousand miles from the Parisian crowds and their pikes, the early patriotic appeal of the French Revolution—“Arise ye children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived!”—melted thirty years of disenchantment with a nation that had abandoned Louisiana to the Spanish in 1761. The residents’ nostalgia for la Patrie gave the colony’s governors—Miró, who returned to Spain at forty-seven in 1791, and his forty-four-year-old successors, Governor François-Louis Hector, baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, in New Orleans, and Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos in Natchez—new reasons for worry. “In our very midst in this province,” Gayoso wrote in July 1792, “there is one disadvantage which must be watched with as great care as those offered by our enemies.” Louisiana “is inhabited by people of French extraction,” he warned, and “although many of them are pacifically inclined, the majority are fond of novelty, have communication with France and with [French] posessions in America, and hear with the greatest pleasure of the revolution in that kingdom.” Gayoso feared that “if war were declared on France, we should find but few inhabitants of Lower Louisiana who would sincerely defend the country.”11

  Slave conspiracies in 1791 and 1795 at Pointe Coupée, halfway between Natchez and New Orleans, compounded the problems facing the Spanish governors—as did the vacillating imperial policies of Carlos IV and his ministers, especially Manuel Godoy, as they reacted to the ramifications of tumultuous events in Europe. At the same time, Carondelet’s trade and Indian policies undercut the promising intrigues with James Wilkinson and other Kentucky separatists, while the continued growth of the American western settlements and the establishment of a stronger federal government under the new Constitution posed a greater threat from the north. Governor Miró’s prompt deportation of Father Antonio Sedella on a vessel to Cádiz averted one minor tempest in the colony, but in the years between the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the Treaty of Basle on July 22, 1795, Louisiana itself was like a tiny sloop caught in a hurricane of world events.

  • • •

  By itself, bad weather does not topple governments, not even the crippled monarchy of Louis XVI, who had ascended the throne of France at twenty on the eve of the American Revolution. Like his Bourbon cousin in Madrid, who was six years older, Louis XVI was a devotee of hunting who liked to tinker with clocks. On the eve of the French Revolution both men were comfortable in their mediocrity, chronically indecisive, and easily manipulated by their wives and courtiers. In an age of reason, neither man inspired confidence in the antique verities that supported absolute monarchy. It did not help that foreign wars and the expenses of the court at Versailles had rendered the monarchy bankrupt, forcing Louis XVI to summon for the first time since 1614 a meeting of representatives of the clergy, aristocracy, and people (roughly analogous to the British Parliament) known as the Estates-General.12

  On July 13, 1788, violent hailstorms swept across most of France. Huge pellets of ice ripped branches from trees, leveled crops, and killed birds and wildlife in a four-hundred-mile swath from Normandy, near the English Channel, to as far south as Toulouse and Languedoc, near the Mediterranean. The hail ruined grapevines from the Loire Valley east through Burgundy to Alsace. The storm wiped out apples, oranges, and olives in the Calvados and the Midi. South of Paris the hail destroyed fruits and vegetables in the Ile-de-France, flattened wheat fields around Orleans, and devastated cereal crops to the west in Beauce. “A countryside, erstwhile ravishing,” farmers complained, “has been reduced to an arid desert.”13

  As though some biblical curse had been unleashed upon the ancien regime, drought followed the hailstorm. The autumn harvest was meager, and a cruel winter, the worst since 1709, came hard on the heels of the drought. Grain grew scarce and flour even more dear, as ice froze the waterwheels of mills throughout the country and deep snow impeded shipments of emergency supplies. “Everywhere I have found men dead of cold and hunger,” a visitor reported from Provence in January 1789, “and that in the midst of wheat for lack of flour, all the mills being frozen.”14

  In normal times, bread was the dietary staple for three quarters of the French population, and in normal times the standard four-pound loaf cost about 8 sous. With average daily wages of 20 to 30 sous for a manual laborer, most families normally spent half their income on bread. After the devastating hail, drought, and winter of 1788–1789, however, prices of firewood and bread soared—by February a four-pound loaf of bread cost 15 sous. The failed harvest of 1788 drove day laborers into the cities in desperat
e hordes. As discretionary spending plummeted and markets for manufactured goods collapsed, urban artisans joined the ranks of the unemployed, soon followed by construction workers as economic depression brought building projects to a halt. By the summer of 1789 displaced laborers comprised between one third and three quarters of the French rural population, while in every major city tens of thousands of artisans and their hungry families were idle. Outside the mirrored halls and soothing gardens of Versailles, where the Sun King, Louis XIV, had relocated the royal court at a safe distance from Paris in 1682, starving French men and women grew increasingly fearful and angry, armed and organized.15

  Events moved quickly in the year following the hailstorm of July 13, 1788, as anger spread in the streets of Paris and along the roads of rural France. Censorship was suspended during the election campaigns for seats in the Estates-General, and a flood of pamphlets expressing Enlightenment ideas circulated throughout the country. In May and June 1789 the meeting of the Estates-General gave voice to pent-up grievances—then fell into interminable squabbles between the elected representatives of the Third Estate and the privileged clergy and aristocracy. While the king dithered between conciliation and force—never altogether certain that he could count on the loyalty of his army—orators and journalists called for liberty, equality, and fraternity (and retribution against the enemies of the people) while rioters helped themselves to bread, food, and weapons. One gunsmith reported that Parisians raided his shop thirty times, arming themselves with a total of 150 swords, 576 unfinished blades, 58 hunting knives, 20 pistols, and 8 muskets.16

  On June 12, a company of royal dragoons found itself outnumbered when sent to disperse an angry crowd at the Place Vendôme. A disorderly skirmish ensued, and by morning the king’s troops had retreated across the Seine, effectively abandoning the old city. Crowds of Parisians began dismantling the ten-foot wall around Paris built by the Farmers-General to enforce its high taxes on salt, flour, and other commodities. They destroyed forty of its fifty-four customhouses, then sacked the monastery of Saint-Lazare, carrying off grain, wine, vinegar, oil, and twenty-five Gruyere cheeses. With royal authority collapsing around them, city officials took charge, expanding their urban militia as a hedge against anarchy and a defense against royalist counterattack. Proper uniforms were an impossibility on short notice, so the militiamen decorated their hats and coats with a red and blue cockade, the colors of Paris. Days later, when he accepted command of the new national guard, the marquis de Lafayette interposed a band of white, the king’s color, in a gesture toward national unity.

  Armed at first only with kitchen knives, weaponry stolen from city gunsmiths, and antique halberds and pikes expropriated from a guardhouse near the Tuileries, Lafayette’s militia soon gained thirty thousand muskets and some cannon from the barracks at the Hotel des Invalides. They needed gunpowder—and regardless of General Lafayette’s moderation, they knew where it was stored.17

  On July 14—one year after the hailstorm—a crowd gathered at the fortress and arsenal of the Bastille. Built in the fourteenth century with walls five feet thick, a seventy-foot moat and drawbridge, and eight stone towers, the Bastille was a notorious symbol of Bourbon absolutism, the dungeon for political prisoners arrested in secret and held without trial, sometimes for months (as with Voltaire) and often for life. By nightfall, after ineffectual negotiations gave way to violence, the Bastille was taken. While the militia confiscated 246 barrels of gunpowder from the arsenal of the Bastille, unruly crowds murdered the commandant and paraded his severed head on a pike through the streets of Paris.18

  The next day at Versailles, the due de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt informed Louis XVI of the fall of the Bastille.

  “Is it a revolt?” the king asked.

  “No, Sire,” Liancourt replied, “it is a revolution.”

  At first, circumstances allowed Liancourt and responsible moderates like Lafayette and Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, some hope of a peaceful resolution to the nation’s political crisis—replacing Bourbon absolutism with a constitutional monarchy on the English model admired by philosophes like Voltaire and Montesquieu. At every critical moment, however, the revolution seemed to grow more violent and more radical. The freshly severed head of the commandant of the Bastille, bobbing on a pike high above the crowd that carried it triumphantly through the streets of Paris, inaugurated a gory ritual of blood lust—butchery only sanitized by the ruthless efficiency of an ingenious mechanical device invented by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.19

  Two days after the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI donned a simple morning coat and left Versailles for Paris in a plain coach drawn by eight black horses. The marquis de Lafayette and the National Guard, awash with red, white, and blue cockades, greeted the king at the edge of the city and escorted him to the Hotel de Ville, where Louis XVI spoke a few inaudible words of conciliation, accepted a tricolor cockade from the mayor, and pinned it to his hat. Throngs shouted “Vive le roi” and “Vive la nation” at the auspicious ceremony, and many who were present honestly hoped for constitutional reform and the rights of man and citizens. The revolution, however, marched to the cadence of a more violent crowd, hearkening to legislators who believed they must “destroy everything; yes, destroy everything; then everything is to be recreated.” The revolution spoke of constitutional reform, the rights of man and citizen, and ideals of equality and fraternity, but it followed the crowds who carried bloody heads on pikes, cheered each time the blade of the guillotine fell, and sang “Ca Ira”:

  Lafayette says, “Let he who will, follow me!”

  And patriotism will respond,

  Without fear of fire or flame.

  The French will always conquer,

  We will win, we will win, we will win….

  Let’s string up the aristocrats on the lampposts!

  We will win, we will win, we will win….

  And we will no longer have nobles or priests,

  We will win, we will win, we will win.

  Equality will reign throughout the world….

  We will win, we will win, we will win.

  As the marquis de Ferrieres feared it would, the French Revolution offered “a banner of blood … to all parts of Europe.”20

  Few events in modern history unleashed as many strong passions as the French Revolution. “Considering that we are divided from [France] but by a slender dyke of about twenty-four miles,” the British statesman Edmund Burke (an admirer of the American Revolution a decade earlier) gave thanks in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790) that his countrymen were “not the converts of Rousseau” and “not the disciples of Voltaire,” and especially that “atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.” Safe on the far side of the Atlantic, Americans from Maine to Georgia were initially united in joy at the creation of a sister republic—happy for the citizens of France who had sent them Lafayette, the king’s legions, and a fleet to help win American independence.21

  Then came shocking news of the execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, and the mad efficiency of Dr. Guillotin’s invention in the hands of Maximilien de Robespierre and the Jacobin party. Forty thousand people were executed during their Reign of Terror, when Robespierre headed the bloodthirsty Committee of Public Safety from April 1793 through July 1794. Whether the crime was treason, petty theft, or insufficient enthusiasm for Jacobin opinions, practice made perfect. In October 1793 Paris executioners beheaded twenty-two Girondin leaders (former allies of the Jacobin party) in thirty-six minutes. Two months later, executioners in Lyon lopped off thirty-two heads in twenty-five minutes. A week after that residents of rue Lafont complained that blood from the scaffold at Place des Terreaux, where the executioners dispatched twelve heads in five minutes, was flooding the drainage ditches near their homes.22

  After 1793 the French Revolution became an equal-opportunity calamity, more divisive than any domestic issue in American politics. For twenty-five years—from the Bastille to Wa
terloo—its wild oscillations offered everyone something to fear: violence, repression, and cowardice, tyranny and anarchy, mobs and dictators, atheists and demagogues, imperialism, civil war, and world war. Like the reflection in a fun-house mirror, the French Revolution distorted the beauties and blemishes that Americans saw in one another, polarizing Federalists and Republicans, who voiced their opinions in blindingly passionate rhetoric. “Behold France,” warned a Massachusetts Federalist, “an open hell, still ringing with agonies and blasphemies, still smoking with sufferings and crimes, in which we see … perhaps our future state.” Look at England, came the Jeffersonian reply, the corrupt tyrant of the seas, driven into perpetual debt by its war machine, trampling the liberties of citizens and neighbors alike. At issue in the French Revolution, Jefferson proclaimed from the safety of his study, was nothing less than “the liberty of the whole earth … but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth devastated.”23

  The French hailstorm of July 1788 may have dissipated in the foothills of the Pyrenees, but seen from Madrid those rugged mountains offered scant defense against the tempest of revolution. Carlos Ill’s trusted minister, José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, who had devoted his career to enlightened administrative, economic, and cultural reform, recoiled in horror at the first news of revolution to the north. Reform programs were shelved and he slammed the door on revolutionary ideas with ironclad censorship. His measures established a cordon sanitaire at the Pyrenees that kept revolutionary tracts and pamphlets out of Spain, but no diplomatic tools could reverse the tide of revolution.24

  Carlos IV next called in his father’s ambassador to France, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, count of Aranda, who was known for his sympathy for French rationalism. A friend to Voltaire and d’Alembert, a grand master of the Spanish Freemasons, and a prime mover in the expulsion of the Jesuits, Aranda did all he could to mitigate the circumstances of Louis XVI—but the new republican government paid no heed to counsels of moderation from the Spanish Bourbons. Aranda’s young successor, the queen’s favorite and lover, Manuel Godoy, tried the machinery of negotiation one more time, greased by generous bribes to members of the French legislature, but again to no avail. In 1792 the Republic of France had declared war on Austria, and now a collision with Bourbon Spain had become inevitable.25