Daily Life During the French Revolution (27 page)

Went
to the Hospital de Salpetriere, a little way out of Paris, a sort of workhouse
for girls and women, of which there are in the house 7500. I saw 400 at work in
one room: 500 in another. They embroider, make lace and shirts, and weave
coarse linen, also cloth; all which is sold for the benefit of the hospital. .
. . It is also an Asylum to such poor families whose head is dead, or has
deserted them; in short, it is the asylum of the miserable, tho’ each is
obliged to work to support the whole.

Bicêtr
e, an even larger hospital, was farther
from the center of Paris and had fewer curious visitors. According to Dr. John
Andrews, it was a place for “defrauders, cheats, pickpockets . . . convicts for
petty larceny . . . vagrants, idlers, mendicants.” He went on to speak of the
mentally ill and the unemployed. Discipline was severe. Andrews considered
Bicêtre
a humane and useful institution, but opinions differed. In the autumn of
1788, Sir Samuel Romilly, a lawyer and reformer, traveled to Paris and visited
the hospital in the company of others, including the antiroyalist Mirabeau.
Both were horrified at what they saw.

Romilly followed Mirabeau’s suggestion that he write down
what he had seen, and Mirabeau later translated his notes into French and had
them published. The publication was suppressed by the police, but Romilly
published the English text in London. The tenor of the essay was expressed in
the first paragraph:

I
knew, indeed, as every one does, that it [
Bicêtre
] consisted of an
hospital and a prison, but I did not know that, at Bicêtre an hospital means a
place calculated to generate disease and a prison, a nursery of crime.

There were boys under the age of 12 incarcerated there, and
men who were often kept for years in underground dungeons. In the common room
were boys and men who had simply argued with or insulted the police on the
streets of Paris. Every vice was practiced; the author felt obliged to describe
these in Latin.

DENTISTS

Joseph Daniel, who called himself a surgeon dentist, fitted
crowns of a new design that would function like natural teeth. He claimed that
they would always keep their color. One of his advertisements read as follows:

DENTALSURGEON

M.
Daniel, dental surgeon, Fossés-St. Germain l’Auxerrois Street, no. 15, has
acquired, by long experience, much dexterity in removing the most difficult
teeth and roots when they cannot be preserved. He cleans, whitens and dries
them and destroys the nerve, fills them successfully, takes out **geminates,
puts back the good ones and inserts artificial teeth, **on spring-loaded posts
of a new invention, stable and unbreakable. He has also discovered a metallic
thread for teeth and false teeth much cheaper than gold. He blends a toothpaste
for tooth and gum care; 3 livres and 6 livres per jar.

CP—13 April 1792

In addition to cleaning and extracting teeth, dental
practitioners sold a variety of painkillers. They were also interested in the
repair of decayed teeth and the replacement of lost ones. By the 1790s, complex
restorative and prosthetic techniques and specialist dental practice was well
established.

To have a tooth extracted, the patient was normally seated
in a low chair or on the ground, while the dentist stood over him, tongs in
hand. As the patient held on to the dentist’s legs for support, the toothpuller
could certainly tell how much pain he was causing by the intensity of the
grasp, but conducting the procedure in this manner benefited the dentist, for
it allowed him to get a good grip on the tooth and jerk it out.

One of the most flamboyant mid-eighteenth-century tooth
extractors was a huge man called Le Grand Thomas, who could usually be found on
the Pont Neuf in Paris. Accompanied by his magnificent horse, adorned with an
immense number of teeth strung like pearls around its neck, assistants would
examine the teeth of any willing passerby to see what might need to come out.
Thomas stood by in his hat of solid silver, which balanced a globe on top and a
cockerel above that. His scarlet coat was ornamented with teeth, jawbones, and
shiny stones, a dazzling breastplate represented the sun, and his heavy saber
was six feet long. A drummer, a trumpet player, and a standard-bearer made up
the balance of his retinue. Grand Thomas did not live to see the revolution,
but there were thousands of such rogues around the country who seem to have had
little trouble finding patients. Most people of the time neglected their teeth
until something drastic had to be done. Only the rich could afford a qualified
dentist.

By 1768, to become a dentist, a practitioner was obliged to
present himself for examination by the community of surgeons of the town in
which he wished to practice and to have previously served either two complete
and consecutive years’ apprenticeship with a master surgeon or an expert who
was established in or around Paris or three years’ apprenticeship with several
master surgeons or experts in other towns. Dentists in Paris and other large
cities were trained at the
Collège Royal de Chirurgie
(Royal College of
Surgery), which opened in 1776. They had to pass examinations in both dental
theory and practice and, by the second half of the century, were obliged to
take two separate examinations during the same week—the first one theoretical,
the second practical.

Laws to suppress those who practiced without a license were
poorly enforced up to and during the revolution. Charlatans would set up their
signs, a stage, and other paraphernalia in the square on market day or operate
from an inn or from private premises and advocate a variety of techniques to
remedy toothache, gum disease, and other ailments of the mouth. To ease the
pain of a teething child, magnetized bars were used, as were various
concoctions of herbs and roots. Rattles made of ivory or coral were often hung
around the child’s neck to be chewed on, thus helping to reduce the pain of the
inflamed gums. If necessary, the gum over the emerging tooth was lanced. Sometimes
a blistering ointment was rubbed into the area to make saliva flow.

Other curative measures for toothache included bleeding or
placing leeches behind the ears; the most frequently used remedy was a special
elixir made up of various ingredients to cure decayed and painful teeth.
Gondrain’s elixir was advertised as “dissipating toothache in a trice.” Other
potions eliminated swelling of the gums, nourishing and firming them at the
same time.

One method of stopping toothache was by destroying the
dental nerve by using a file, cauterization, vinegar, essences, and elixirs.
All were mentioned in a booklet put out in 1788. Transplants were also
attempted, but human teeth were scarce and expensive, and most failed to take
root. Taken from a living donor or a corpse, the teeth also had the potential
to transmit disease. Artificial teeth, made from ivory or bone, were also
unsatisfactory because they absorbed odors and soon became discolored. With the
discovery of porcelain for replacement teeth, prosthetic dentistry took a large
step forward at the beginning of the revolution.

Not a great deal is known about the fees charged by
dentists, but there is a document from 1785 that lists a fee of four livres
four sols for an extraction and a filling. Costs for elixirs were usually 5 and
10 livres a bottle, and toothpaste cost 3 to 6 livres. For a small brush
mounted in ivory, the cost was 3 livres. By the end of the eighteenth century,
a number of dentists practiced from a fixed location, especially in large
cities; when they worked in other towns, they rented premises for a few days.

The itinerant dentist, his patient, and interested
onlookers.

The extraction of teeth was very painful!

9 - RELIGION

With
some 170,000 secular and regular priests, the church in France represented the
first order of society, comprising about 26,000 monks and friars, 56,000 nuns,
60,000 curates, 15,000 canons, and 13,000 clerics with no permanent office or
regular duties.

Besides caring for the soul, the church held the monopoly
on primary and secondary education, as well as being a major source of charity.
It maintained registers of births, marriages, and deaths and ran the hospital
system, such as it was, under the old regime.

In rural areas, not only was the village church the center
for the spiritual care of the locals but also it served as the hub of
administrative affairs. The church put order into every aspect of country life:
the tolling of the church bells ordained the rhythm of the daily cycle,
resounding throughout the village when it was time to rise, at noon when it was
the hour for a break, and at vespers, in the evening, when it was appropriate
to pause and say a prayer. The sound of the bell was also the alarm alerting
the populace of a fire or warning of mischief in the village.

The kingdom was divided into 18 archiepiscopal provinces
and 136 dioceses. Many bishops held jurisdiction in more than one: the noble
bishop of Dol, in Brittany, for example, had 33 posts.

LIFE OF A NOBLE CLERIC

A rural abbot, Emmanuel Barbotin, financially well off as a
tithe holder and director of an agricultural business in the north of the
country, was elected representative from Hainaut to the Estates-General. He
wrote letters back to his parish about his day-to-day thoughts and experiences.
In one letter, penned while he was in Paris, he wrote to a fellow priest who
was looking after his farm at Prouvy in the north, with a number of
instructions about selling the oats, wheat, flax, and bundles of faggots in
good time; he informed his caretaker when to plant colza, when to bleach linen,
to whitewash the barns, the bake house, and the pigeon-cote. The abbot also
wondered if there was enough butter for the month of October and asked about
the amount and the quality of the harvest, insisting that the different grains
be sorted as cleanly as possible. Not least important was the condition of the
wine cellar. For this, his instructions were as follows:

If
the red wine is ready to be tapped, it must not be allowed to stand and spoil.
If you haven’t already changed the cask, the wine must be clarified. In order
to do this, you must first broach the cask and put in the cock, draw out the
bung, and, if the cask is full, draw off at least one bottle, beat the whites
of six eggs with a pint of wine, pour it all back into the cask, stir it in
with a stick for five to ten minutes, bung it up well again, let it stand seven
or eight days and then tap.

The abbot also made inquiries about his flock and asked
Father Baratte to try to find the time to teach the children of the village the
catechism:

It
is in childhood that the eternal truths of our religion are engraved most
readily on the spirit, when they can act freely upon hearts devoid of lustful
passions; and we are living in a time when religion needs to be upheld by our
preaching and even more by our practice.

From these instructions it is evident that the abbot lived
a comfortable life on his farm, as did all churchmen of rank in their abbeys,
palaces, and manor houses. Half of the revenues of the large abbeys went into
the pockets of the abbots, whose only qualifications for their positions were
noble birth and the amount of influence they exercised at the royal court.