The Glory and The Sorrow A Parisian and His World in The Age of The French Revolution Timothy Tackett Full Chapter

The Glory and the Sorrow: A Parisian
and His World in the Age of the French

Revolution Timothy Tackett
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The Glory and the Sorrow
The Glory and
the Sorrow
A Parisian and His World in the
Age of the French Revolution
T I M O T H Y TAC K E T T
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tackett, Timothy, 1945– author.
Title: The glory and the sorrow : a Parisian and his world in the age of
the French Revolution / Timothy Tackett.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020058273 (print) | LCCN 2020058274 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197557389 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197557402 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197557419
Subjects: LCSH: Colson, Adrien-Joseph, 1727–1797. | France—History—Louis
XVI, 1774–1793. | France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799. |
Colson, Adrien-Joseph, 1727–1797—Correspondence. | Lemaigre, Roch,
1735–1808—Correspondence. | Lawyers—France—Paris—Biography. |
Paris (France)—Biography.
Classification: LCC DC 146.C 63 T33 2021 (print) | LCC DC 146.C 63 (ebook) |
DDC 944.04092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058273
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058274
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197557389.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue 1
1. Arrival in Paris 6
2. Life in Paris before the Revolution 16
3. Making a Living 35
4. Understanding the World 51
5. The World Changes 65
6. Days of Glory 79
7. Rumor and Revolution 100
8. Becoming a Radical 125
9. Days of Sorrow 149
Conclusion 163
Appendix: Translations of Selected Letters 171

Notes 181
Bibliography 201
Index 209
Acknowledgments
Readers familiar with my previous study, The Coming of the Terror,

may recognize the letters of Adrien-Joseph Colson as one of the
more frequently cited sources in that book. In the end I found
Colson’s correspondence so rich and the personality of this or-
dinary citizen living in the center of Revolutionary Paris so fas-
cinating, that I decided to consecrate a biography to him alone.
Nevertheless, the chapters on Colson’s life before the Revolution
would have been far less developed without the aid of my research
associate and cousin by marriage, Mary Kergall. Mary’s dogged de-
termination and very considerable skills in the archives of Paris—
especially in ferreting out obscure details of Colson’s life and
neighborhood—were of immeasurable assistance in the develop-
ment of this project. May I here offer her my profound appreciation
for all her help.
I would also like to express my appreciation to the University
of California for a three- year Edward A. Dickson Emeriti
Professorship, a grant that was of very considerable assistance in
the research and writing of the book.
A conversation over lunch early in the writing process with
Suzanne Desan in Portland, Maine, was extremely useful, as were
discussions with my colleagues and friends, Dominique Julia,
Claude Langlois, Daniel Roche, Frank Bean, Sarah Farmer, and Ian
Coller. The complete penultimate version of the manuscript was
eventually read by Suzanne Desan, Susan Ferber, David Garrioch,
Marisa Linton, and Peter McCormick. Susan Ferber’s editorial
comments and general assistance were particularly valuable. Even
viii Acknowledgments
when I did not agree with all of their suggestions, I found their
comments enormously helpful and I want to express my appreci-
ation for the time they took from their busy schedules to examine
my drafts.
An overview of the manuscript was read at the conference in
honor of Peter McPhee at the University of Melbourne in July 2019;
and an earlier version of c hapter 3 was presented at the virtual joint
meeting of the Rudé Seminar and the Society for French Historical
Studies, originally planned to be held at the University of Auckland
in July 2020, but moved to the internet because of the outbreak of
Covid-19.
I was also assisted at various stages of the research by Marc Du
Pouget, director of the Archives départementales of Indre; and by
Valentine Weiss, director of the Centre de topographie parisienne
in the Archives nationales.
Finally, may I express my immense gratitude, as always, to Helen
Harden Chenut and Nicolas Tackett for their love and support
throughout the process of researching and writing this book.
The Glory and the Sorrow
Prologue
In the drizzle and gloom of the early summer of 1797, Adrien-

Joseph Colson lay dying in his upstairs apartment in the center of
Paris. For decades he had been something of a fixture on his street.
Neighbors could always spot him: the elderly lawyer, a confirmed
bachelor, walking about in his powdered wig and three-cornered
hat; his colorful waistcoat, knee breeches, and white stockings; his
Swiss pocket watch and copper knobbed cane—or green umbrella
in inclement weather.1 Even though most citizens in this generally
working-class neighborhood had ceased presenting themselves
in such dress during the great Revolution that had swept across
France since 1789, and even though he spoke like someone who
had spent time in school, a bourgeois of sorts, no one had ever
suspected him of being a counterrevolutionary. He had always been
a good patriot, attending the meetings of his neighborhood sec-
tion and even marching with the local national guard despite his
age. And he had always been kindly, never condescending, stop-
ping to chat with those he encountered in the street, whatever
their professions; forever curious, forever interested in what his
neighbors thought or imagined of the astonishing series of events
they were all experiencing.
But now one of the priests, who had only recently been allowed
by the government to return to his pastoral activities, had been seen
entering Colson’s building, carrying the Eucharist and the holy oils
of extreme unction to administer the last rites. People guessed that
the dizzy spells Colson had complained of over the past few years
had not gone away this time.2 In any event, the onset of his illness
must have been relatively sudden. According to the two young
2 The Glory and the Sorrow
women who lived just below him, his most recent laundry package
still lay unopened in his room beside the bed. Colson’s landlord, the
candle maker Jean-Louis Ladoubé, from whom he had rented his
apartment for over twenty years, had brought in two elderly widows
to care for his needs, day and night, during his sickness. And it was
Ladoubé who would soon take charge of Colson’s funeral.3
Perhaps those who knew him best, like Monsieur Ladoubé or
the café owner Psalmon who lived across the street and with whom
he often chatted while he ate his meals, may have wondered what
was passing through Colson’s mind as he lay sick in his apartment.
Surely he must have reflected on the halcyon days of the early
Revolution, when the whole world seemed to be changing; on the
intense feelings of equality and brotherhood; and on the emergence
of a politics of self-determination that would have been quite un-
imaginable only a few years earlier. How could he, how could any
of them, forget the great decree of August 4, 1789, abolishing feu-
dalism in France; or the stunning Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen only a few weeks later; or the ensuing suppression
of the nobility, the creation of the first French Republic, the abo-
lition of slavery, and the considerable expansion of the rights of
women? But as he lay dying, it must also have been difficult to forget
the fear and terror that had accompanied that Revolution from its
earliest days. There were the successive dangers from invasions
by foreign and counterrevolutionary armies, armies determined,
so it was feared, to wreak havoc on Paris and on much of its pop-
ulation. Perhaps above all, there were the ever-present rumors of
threats from lurking aristocrats, ready to destroy everything they
had struggled to achieve, fears that at times had utterly dominated
their lives. And as Ladoubé and Psalmon well knew, such emotions
had been compounded after 1792 by the personal disappointment
and sorrow that the events of the Revolution had brought about in
Colson’s personal life: the collapse of the relationship with his prin-
cipal employer and of the friendship of his closest friend; and the
closing and destruction of the church he had so long attended.
Prologue 3
Under normal circumstances after his death—and after the

deaths of those who had known him—the life of Adrien Colson
would soon have disappeared from memory. He never published,
he never held office, he never had his portrait drawn, and his name
can be found scarcely a dozen times in the official records of the
period—in parish registers and the files of notaries and justices of
the peace. Like the vast majority of those living in times past, his
existence would essentially have been “swallowed up by history
and erased by the passage of time.”4 Posterity would have known
nothing of the passions and ambitions, the struggles and successes,
the loves and animosities and tragedies that must inevitably have
marked his passage on this earth. Nothing would have been known
of his experiences in the great political upheavals through which
he lived.
Yet as fate would have it, a testimony of Colson’s life was almost
miraculously preserved, a testimony embedded in over a thousand
letters penned by the lawyer to a friend, Roch Lemaigre, living in
the province of Berry in central France.5 This long correspondence
is particularly fascinating for a number of reasons. First, it paints a
picture of the lives of the common people in Paris in the course of
the Revolution. To be sure, Colson was hardly a man of the people.
As a lawyer, making his living as a business agent and legal advisor
for a noble family and a family of wine merchants, his literacy and
his modest but relatively comfortable economic situation clearly
distinguished him from the great mass of the city’s inhabitants at the
end of the eighteenth century. But in other respects he might well
be considered a kind of social intermediary. He resided in a small
apartment in the midst of one of the poorest and most crowded
neighborhoods of Paris, in the central Right Bank, just north of the
island of La Cité. It was a quarter that had long been abandoned by
most of the Parisian elites, who had largely moved farther north
and west to the newly developing areas beyond the Louvre or
across the Seine to the upscale Saint-Germain district. Moreover,
Colson himself—unlike the great majority of Parisian lawyers of
his time—came from a family of artisans in a small country town.6

One often has the impression that he felt more at ease chatting with
the shopkeepers and craftsmen in his neighborhood than with the
elites of his own “class”—with neighbors like the candle maker, his
wife, and daughters, who lived just downstairs and who served, in
many respects, as a surrogate family. At any rate, his letters provide
a remarkable testimony of the rise of radicalism in central Paris,
and of both the moments of intense enthusiasm and the periods
of terrible anxiety and rumors that repeatedly swept through his
quarter of the city.
Second, Colson’s testimony affords insight into the little known
relations of the Old Regime nobility with the commoner agents
and stewards who looked after their affairs. Colson’s descriptions
of those relations reveal a complex mixture of deference and loy-
alty, on the one hand, and frustration and irritation, on the other.
This would especially be the case during the Revolution, as Colson
found himself struggling to resolve the dire economic difficulties
encountered by the noble family he served after the abolition of
feudalism, and as he struggled, more generally, to distinguish good
patriotic nobles from conspiring “aristocrats.”
Third, the letters are revealing of the experience of a relatively
elderly citizen at the time of the Revolution. It has often been
said that revolutions are primarily an affair of the young. And in-
deed, the average age of all the commoner deputies in the first
National Assembly was only about 45, and that of the most prom-
inent speakers was significantly less.7 Among the best-known
Revolutionary leaders, Mirabeau was 40 in 1789, Jacques Brissot
was 35, Maximilien Robespierre was 31, Georges Danton was 30,
and Antoine Barnave was only 28. Yet the case of Adrien Colson,
62 years old at the beginning of the Revolution, provides ample
proof that even an older citizen could passionately follow and some-
times participate in the spectacular changes transpiring in Paris
and Versailles during the last decade of the eighteenth century.
Prologue 5
The story of this ordinary citizen in extraordinary times, as it is

revealed in his correspondence and in a certain number of other
documents, invariably falls into two parts. The first part (chapters 1
to 4) follows Colson’s itinerary, from his birth in a small town on the
border of the Austrian Lowlands to his life and career in Paris at the
end of the Old Regime. It focuses on the neighborhood where he
lived, his day-to-day activities, his professional life and relationship
with the noble family he represented, and what can be discerned of
his “culture,” his manner of ordering and understanding the world.
The second part (chapters 5 to 9) traces Colson’s experience from
the eve of the Revolution itself through his death in 1797 and the
way in which daily life for him and his neighbors was transformed
by events. Among the major themes to be explored are how, in
fact, he came to embrace the new Revolutionary values; how he
became more radical in his views over time; the fear and rumors
that continually swirled through his neighborhood and necessarily
marked his opinions and those of his neighbors; and his ultimate
disenchantment with many aspects of the changes through which
he lived.
For well over 200 years historians have struggled to understand
the French Revolution—its origins, its development over time, its
embrace of a political culture of violence, and how it came to an
end. Obviously, the biography of this one individual cannot an-
swer all of these questions, although it does provide new insights
into many. Yet Colson’s rich and always thoughtful correspond-
ence can reveal a great deal of what it was like to experience, to
struggle to understand, and ultimately to participate in this world-
transforming event.
1
Arrival in Paris
Perhaps, as Colson lay sick in his room in 1797, he may also have
thought back almost half a century to the day he first entered the
gates of Paris. For a young man of 23, who had known only the
small towns of eastern France, the sounds and colors and odors,
the extraordinary bustle, the unimaginable expanse of the city must
have seemed quite overwhelming. His hometown of Varennes-
en-Argonne could claim only about a thousand people clustered
around a single main street and a small town square, surrounded
by farmland and forests. But the capital of France in the mid-
eighteenth century already contained over 600,000 souls, making
it the second largest city in Europe—after London—and one of the
larger metropolises in the world at that time.1
As Colson soon came to realize, it was a city of great extremes.
There were the monumental palaces of the Louvre and the Tuileries
and the Luxembourg; and the town houses that often resembled
small palaces of some of the wealthiest aristocrats in Europe. There
was the magnificent Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame on the cen-
tral island of La Cité—the historic core of Roman Paris—along
with dozens of churches and chapels large and small, some even
older than Notre Dame, scattered across the city. There were the
impressive Renaissance structures of the city hall and many
segments of the Palace of Justice. There were the grandiose open
spaces created by a succession of Bourbon kings—the Place Louis-
Le-Grand (today’s Place Vendôme), the Place Louis XV (Place de la
Concorde), the Champs-Elysées to the west, and the Place Royale
(Place des Vosges) to the east. And there was a whole line of bridges
crossing the Seine, most with narrow shops and houses squeezed
Arrival in Paris 7
precariously along the two sides. He must also have been impressed
by the great number of barges moving up and down the river Seine
or anchored along its banks, unloading cargoes of all kinds, some
from France itself, some from elsewhere in Europe or from beyond
the seas, all for the provisioning of the city.
As Colson also soon learned, however, from the experience of the
neighborhood where he would take up residence, much of the city
was still dominated by a labyrinth of narrow lanes and alleys, dark,
dirty, smelly, and often unpaved, of small cluttered courtyards, and
poor and somewhat dilapidated three-to five-story structures with
Figure 1.1 View of Paris along the Right Bank of the Seine toward
the northwest in the last decade before the Revolution. On the left are
the towers of Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle on the island of
La Cité. In the distance is the Notre Dame bridge, with the medieval
structure of the Châtelet just beyond and the palace of the Louvre in
the distance. Colson’s residence on the Rue des Arcis, not visible here,
was about three blocks away from the river and the bridge to the right.
The image depicts the enormous daytime activity along the ports
of the Seine, the crowds and bustle, and the barges filled with wheat
that Colson would have encountered when he first entered the city.
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
tiny shops at street level. It was a far cry indeed from the Paris of
the late nineteenth century. The “city of lights,” with its broad tree-
lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes, and department stores, would
emerge only after Paris had been massively rebuilt a century later
by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann.
Within this extraordinary metropolis, Colson would soon come
across an amazing mixture of some of the wealthiest and some of
the most humble inhabitants in the entire French kingdom. He
would have daily encountered great lords and ladies rushing about
in their elegant carriages; soberly dressed merchants and profes-
sional people going about their business; nuns and clergymen in
their diverse clerical garb; off-duty soldiers hanging out in cabarets
or houses of ill-repute; artisans and shopkeepers at work in their
small shops; and a whole variety of street peddlers, market women,
water carriers, and rag pickers, not to mention prostitutes, pick-
pockets, thieves, and diverse ne’er-do-wells. Although most of the
population adhered to the Catholic faith, there was also a scattering
of Protestants and Jews.2
Amid this great mass of humanity, Colson would have joined the
large numbers of young men and women streaming into the cap-
ital in the eighteenth century from all over France, and even from
several neighboring countries, with myriad accents and styles of
dress, all searching for work and more hopeful futures. By certain
estimates, some 10,000 new faces appeared in the city each year.
Most of the migrants arrived from northern France, from a broad
swath of provinces from Normandy to Lorraine. But others came
from farther afield, bringing with them the customs and languages
of Provence and Languedoc in the south, of Brittany in the far west,
of Alsace to the East. Perhaps the largest group of new arrivals
consisted of those looking for positions as servants. Wealthy
households in the eighteenth century might have dozens of women
and men in domestic service, and even more modest middle-class
families could have one or two. Thousands more of the immigrants,
a great many of them from Auvergne and Limousin in central
Arrival in Paris 9
France, were drawn to the capital by work in the building trades for
a city in full expansion.3 Indeed, in the course of the century, Paris
was bursting beyond its medieval and seventeenth-century walls,
as whole new neighborhoods were created, especially in the west
where the wealthy classes were building residences.
As the eighteenth century progressed, an impressive number of
the better educated joined an overabundant population of hopeful
young writers, with visions of demonstrating their genius and of
embracing the goals of the Enlightenment—the great reform move-
ment of the eighteenth century—and of becoming new Voltaires or
Diderots or Rousseaus. Many, unfortunately, would only be able to
scrape by with degrading jobs writing pornography or serving as
police spies—“gutter Rousseaus” as they were called in the nine-
teenth century. There was also a growing surplus of those trained
in the law. In the late eighteenth century, well-educated young
men who might once have gone into the clergy seem increasingly
to have opted for legal careers. A certain number, like the future
Revolutionaries Camille Desmoulins and Jacques Brissot, might
also have hoped to carve out careers as writers. In this respect,
Colson was no doubt fortunate to have arrived at mid-century, a
decade or two before the great influx of unemployed or underem-
ployed lawyers.4
Indeed, Colson’s career was all the more unlikely in that he
originated in a family of artisans, while the vast majority of lawyers
in Paris came from milieus of middle-class professionals or even
from the nobility.5 He was born in 1727, the son of another Adrien
Colson, a tanner in Varennes, in the northeast corner of France, not
far from Luxembourg and what were then the Austrian Lowlands
and would later become the sovereign state of Belgium. It was
a frontier zone, not only politically but also in terms of both lan-
guage and religion. Although the population of Varennes and the
immediate region had long spoken French, the German-speaking
zone of Lorraine was not far away. During both the French Wars
of Religion of the sixteenth century and the Thirty Years War in
the seventeenth century, the town, protected within its walls, had
remained securely Catholic, even as Protestant armies ravaged the
nearby countryside. It was only in 1659 that Varennes and the re-
gion of the “Clermontais” in which it was located had come per-
manently into the French sphere of influence, with Paris as its
political and cultural focal point.6 Yet the frontier mentality may
well have affected Colson, as seen both in his strong adherence to
Catholicism and in his feelings of French identity, frequently indi-
cated in his correspondence well before the French Revolution.
Colson had been one of nine siblings born to his father and his
mother Marie Mallot, six coming before him and two after.7 Sadly,
however, all of his brothers and sisters had died either in infancy or
in early childhood. Such a frightful mortality rate was not altogether
unusual in Old Regime France, a hecatomb of babies and small chil-
dren swept away by disease, sometimes aided by malnutrition that
was even worse during the prolonged warfare and generally colder
weather at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Whatever the
realities described by demographers in abstract charts and graphs,
it would be callous to think that women and men ever entirely over-
came the loss of these little beings they hardly knew and whom
they could only send off to heaven with prayers for their souls. And
for Colson the ever-present reality of death had struck home even
more tragically after his mother died, worn out at age 51 when the
future lawyer was just 12, leaving him an only child, living with his
father. Thereafter, the father never remarried, and one must think
he was probably too elderly to have had anything but a platonic re-
lationship with Barbe Bisot, the middle-aged women who cared for
the family and kept house after the mother’s death.8 In any case, it
is little wonder that for the rest of his life, Colson—like so many
others of his age—would remain obsessed with illness and death.
Yet as a result of the tragedies of his family life, Colson now
found himself the sole heir to what was clearly an upwardly mobile
family. His grandfather had been a simple shoemaker in a nearby
village. His father, with the help of a judiciously chosen wife and the
Arrival in Paris 11
Figure 1.2 Map of France in 1789, indicating the location of Colson’s

birthplace, the chateaus and lands of the Longaunay family, and the
site of the Ravary vineyards.
accompanying dowry, had been able to set himself up as a tanner,

an occupation normally indicative of an income somewhat above
the average for a minor town like Varennes. Indeed, at the time of
his death, the father had begun calling himself a “merchant-tanner”
and he had been able to acquire several pieces of land in the area
and a three-story house in the central town, directly across from
the parish church. Yet the cultural milieu of the family remained
that of the small-town artisan. In his youth, Adrien-Joseph must

have spent time helping his father in the tanning works just outside
of town and perhaps also checking up on the family’s farms—an
experience that would invariably have helped him later in life when
he oversaw the lands of a noble family. In reality, town and country
were much closer and more tightly interconnected before the age of
industrialization.
Both parents and grandparents had lived through the grim days
of the final wars of Louis XIV, especially difficult for a small com-
munity near the frontier with territory controlled by Austria—the
archenemy of France. The young Colson would have been raised
with tales of the ever-present threat of foreign invasion from across
the border just 40 kilometers away, and of the burden of dealing
with unruly French soldiers billeted in their homes or in barracks
constructed in the town in the early eighteenth century. The fear
of being overrun by German-speaking invaders was constantly in
the minds of the inhabitants of Varennes under the Old Regime,
as it would continue to be during the French Revolution.9 Perhaps
such memories help us understand Colson’s frequent references to
war at home and abroad in his correspondence and his personal
alarm when it seemed as though Paris might be invaded by German
troops in July 1789 and again in the summer of 1792 and the spring
of 1793. Nevertheless, for certain elements of the population of his
town, war could also have had its benefits. The soldiers stationed
in and around the valley of the Aire where the town was situated
were in constant need of boots and leather goods for themselves
and their horses, requirements that had undoubtedly contributed
to the incomes of both his grandfather and his father.
Colson never wrote in his correspondence about his early years
in Varennes or his education. As was so often the case under the
Old Regime, it had probably been the parish priest, who resided
just across the square, who had first recognized his intelligence
and potential in the catechism classes and who had urged the fa-
ther to promote his son’s education. Thereafter, the younger Colson
Arrival in Paris 13
would have followed the classical curriculum that had dominated

in France and in much of Europe since the sixteenth century, based
on a rigorous knowledge of Latin and the Latin classics. He most
likely followed the full course of secondary studies available in
Varennes’s régence latine and through the more advanced teaching
of the Cordelier friars living nearby.10 Whether or not Colson’s fa-
ther ever hoped to turn his tanning business over to his only son, he
had been persuaded that Adrien-Joseph might aspire to something
higher in society. The records have unfortunately been lost, but cir-
cumstantial evidence suggests that the “higher” in question may
initially have been an ecclesiastical career and that Colson spent
time in the lower orders of the clergy from the end of his secondary
studies to the age of 23. As we shall see, Colson would reveal signs
of strong Catholic piety throughout his years in Paris under both
the Old Regime and the Revolution, and his personal library would
contain religious books of considerable sophistication—beyond
the simple works of piety and devotion found in many other
households. Moreover, his age—23—on his arrival in Paris would
have been relatively late for him to have begun clerking for a no-
tary or an attorney; but it was precisely the age at which an aspiring
cleric would have ascended to the order of the subdeaconate, gen-
erally considered the point of no return for a career in the clergy.11
At some point he must have concluded that he did not have a
sufficient vocation for such a career. In any case, he was ultimately
able to convince his father that he could make what was always a
huge step upward within the value system of the Old Regime, from
the manual occupation of an artisan family into the professional
class, and should thus begin preparation for the law. Father and
son would have known many of the legal families concentrated in
Varennes, the capital of the Clermontais district with some fifty
magistrates, barristers, clerks, and notaries serving the valley of the
Aire. A few of these men may even have been distant relatives of
Colson through his mother and grandmother. With no other sons
to support or dowries for daughters to put aside, it was possible
to concentrate all of the father’s disposable revenues on Adrien-

Joseph’s education and preparation for a law career.12
So it was that Colson had arrived in Paris in 1750, taking up res-
idence on the Rue Bertin Poiré, on the Right Bank of the Seine.13
This first apartment was close to the principal centers of legal
activity at the Châtelet, half a kilometer up the Seine, and at the
Palace of Justice, on the island of La Cité, just across a branch of
the river—two courthouses Colson would come to know so well
throughout his career. During the early 1750s he would have spent
a period of apprenticeship as a clerk in the office of an established
notary or barrister, while also attending court proceedings in the
Parlement of Paris or the bailliage court in the Châtelet. He was
proud of these years and of the training they had afforded him,
which he considered far more important than a formal legal ed-
ucation. “University studies,“ as he would write many years later,
“led to nothing more than learning definitions by heart . . . and it
was only through actual experience in law offices and attendance
in courts that one could learn the profession in all its details.”14
Nevertheless, a formal university degree did carry an element of
prestige, necessary for finding a better position or going it alone
as a lawyer. And in 1755–56 he was registered in the University of
Reims, about 130 kilometers east of Paris, a law school notorious
for the ease with which it granted degrees. There he obtained the di-
ploma of licence ès loix that would permit him, in principle, to prac-
tice law anywhere in the realm. The degree would also allow him
to earn the coveted designation of “avocat en Parlement,” a lawyer
with the right to plead in the Parlement of Paris—the single most
important court of law in France.15
Sometime after 1756, having completed his apprenticeship and
obtained his diploma, Colson traveled back to Varennes.16 About
this time he must have announced to his father that he would not be
taking up a law career in his hometown, since he had been offered a
rather exceptional position in Paris as the legal and financial agent
for a noble family living there and that he would not be returning
Arrival in Paris 15
“for several years.” Did the father and the son feel a sense of grief at
the parting? Unfortunately, one will never know. Given the father’s
“great age” (85 years old at the time) and of his “longstanding
infirmities,” everyone suspected that he might soon pass away.
Indeed, the younger Colson drew up a power of attorney in favor of
a family friend to handle all their affairs in case of his father’s death.
Then in late 1758, Adrien-Joseph Colson, aged 31, departed from
Varennes for Paris, never to see his father again. By the time Colson
senior died in the spring of 1759, his son had already been gone
from his home town for some eight months and was beginning to
build a new life for himself in central Paris.
2
Life in Paris before the Revolution
Once reestablished in the capital and after one or two initial moves,
Colson took up permanent residence in a small apartment on
the Rue des Arcis, which he sublet from the master candle maker
Ladoubé, who lived and worked there with his wife and two adult
daughters. The street no longer exists, except for a small portion
attached to the bottom of the Rue Saint-Martin, while the building
itself disappeared in the nineteenth century when the broad Rue
de Rivoli was pushed through the neighborhood. Colson’s res-
idence took up the entire second floor of the five-story building,
a three-room L-shaped apartment, wrapped around a common
stairwell, with a sitting room, an office of sorts, and a bedroom,
and with exposed wooden beams in the ceilings throughout.1 The
privy, outside by the stairwell, held a pot and a seat shared by others
living above in the building. The pot would have been emptied
each night—when the contents were carried away in the nightsoil
carts— thus sharing its distinctive aromas with much of the
building. But then Parisians were accustomed to such odors, which
were, after all, part of everyday urban life—and would remain so
well into the following century.2 Overall it was a larger living space
than that inhabited by perhaps 80 percent of Parisians, as for a great
many of them, whole families were crowded into a single unheated
room. Nevertheless, it was a relatively modest abode for the typical
Parisian lawyer, whose residence more commonly occupied four to
six rooms.3
If one had entered Colson’s apartment, one would have found a
fairly cheery sitting room with two east-facing windows, trimmed
with blue curtains, looking out on the Rue des Arcis and bringing
Life in Paris before the Revolution 17
Figure 2.1 The Tower of Saint-Jacques in the early nineteenth

century, after the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie itself
had been destroyed. The view seems to be from the Rue des Arcis
down the Rue des Ecrivains. Colson’s apartment may have been in
the building on the very right edge of the image. All but the tower
disappeared after the broad Rue de Rivoli was pushed through in the
1850s. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
in the morning light. By leaning out one of his windows, the lawyer
had an excellent view to his right toward the Notre-Dame Bridge,
crossing over to the island of La Cité.4 It was the perfect platform
for watching the passing of life’s parade in his neighborhood—
where noisy activities often continued well into the night—and
for viewing the events of the Revolution. Indeed, as an extension
of the long, straight Rue Saint-Martin, the Rue des Arcis was part
of a major north-south axis through the city, “a busy street,” as he
described it, “where people pass by continually” and part of a route

traversed by many of the great demonstrations of the period.5 It was
also situated quite near the City Hall, the Paris central market place
of “Les Halles,” and the cafes and shops of the Palais Royal. It was
thus a major focal point for rumors coursing through the city both
before and during the Revolution.
Colson’s rooms were a bit cramped and far from stylish, each
seeming to mix several different functions, and they were hardly the
space for elegant gatherings. Little wonder that he so rarely invited
visitors.6 Only very occasionally, notably during the traditional
New Year’s visits, did he mention having a friend or a priest come
by. The front room held a table and several wicker chairs, a rather
fine inlaid bookcase, an armoire, a fireplace, and a thermometer/
barometer affixed to the wall with which he kept track of trends in
the weather. The adjoining study contained several velvet-covered
armchairs, a writing desk, and a marble-topped chest of drawers, as
well as a second fireplace. The back room, with a window opening
onto the courtyard, held another armoire., It would no doubt
have been quieter, and may well have served as his sleeping quar-
ters. Colson also possessed no less than five mirrors, strategically
positioned throughout the apartment, so that he could verify his
appearance and his proper middle-class attire before he stepped
outside. Great stacks of folders and account books were normally
scattered about the three rooms, records in which he kept track
of past and present lawsuits and of the various expenditures and
sources of revenues for both the noble family and the family of wine
merchants who were his principal clients. The clutter was such that
he sometimes misplaced files and he had to ask his friend Lemaigre
to help him reconstruct documents that he could no longer locate.7
We know relatively little about the other tenants living in the
building, though at the time of the Revolution all of the rooms
above Colson were occupied by widows or younger unmarried
women. His only specific reference was to an elderly woman who
lived directly over him and whose piety he greatly admired.8 In any
case, if the structure was at all typical, the inhabitants would have
been progressively more humble as one climbed up the stairway,
with the poorest at the top, living without heating under the roof.
Below Colson the Ladoubé family had a kitchen and a dining room
on the ground floor, behind their shop, and sleeping quarters on
the floor above, reached by a private staircase. In the shop itself
they both sold and manufactured candles of various sizes, so that
the aroma of hot tallow—another relatively disagreeable odor—
would regularly have wafted up through the building as the melted
ingredients were poured into an array of molds of different sizes. In
many respects the Ladoubés and “the house”—as Colson frequently
referred to it—became the family he had scarcely known in his
youth. The stairway for the renters living above in the building was
at the back of the shop, and whenever the lawyer passed through he
might stop to chat with the family members present. If Colson had
to be out of town on business, he might even ask Monsieur Ladoubé
to keep an eye on his correspondence and to write back to Lemaigre
on specific issues. On one occasion he asked the younger of the two
daughters to stand in line for him to exchange gold at the bank.9
The candle shop was a perfect spot to pick up the latest news and
gossip circulating in central Paris. The shop’s work space opened di-
rectly onto the street with a large wooden door left open during the
day, except in the most inclement weather, so that customers and
neighbors might have easy access. Oil lanterns were still relatively
rare in most apartments, and a supply of candles was necessary if
inhabitants were to keep their homes lit in the evenings—amid
the nighttime darkness that would have seemed all the more per-
vasive since outside street lamps were few and far between on the
back streets where the poorer neighbors lived. Indeed, like the local
bakery or the public fountain or the cabaret, the candle shop was a
place where virtually everyone in the neighborhood normally had
to go from time to time and where local gossip could be shared.
Colson often sat downstairs with the family and chatted with the
customers or with the two daughters, who always seemed abreast of
the latest stories, both accurate and inaccurate. Colson was present
there one day during the early Revolution when a woman rushed in
and assured them all that the Châtelet courthouse was under attack
by a mob—a report that Colson easily disproved by walking to the
building itself.10
Within his apartment, as he himself described it, the lawyer lived
a simple existence, largely devoted to his professional activities. As a
bachelor in his small residence, he did not keep a servant or a cook.
When his friend Lemaigre once sent him a “magnificent basket” of
food items from the province of Berry, he had to apologize that he
could not use them, since “I don’t really take meals in my apart-
ment.” In the end, he gave the basket away as a gift. Although he
probably ate breakfasts in his room—coffee, bread, and butter, per-
haps brought up by one of the Ladoubé daughters—he claimed to
take all of his other meals with a “traiteur,” most likely in the wine
shop and café across the street run by Monsieur Psalmon where,
as he described it, “I spend much of my time.” It was there that he
invited guests visiting Paris from Levroux to dine with him. Indeed,
the wine shop would be another convenient spot for chatting
with friends and picking up gossip and rumors circulating in the
neighborhood.11
Throughout his life his revenues would have been ample enough
for him to eat relatively well and never feel the pinch of hunger that
was so often the lot of a large portion of the Parisian population. At
times in his correspondence he even seemed rather a connoisseur
of food. He commented on the seasonal fruits and vegetables—
green peas or strawberries and cherries—as they became available
in the market, and above all on the quality of the bread, which was
always an important element in every meal of every social class.
He also kept track of the quantity and quality of the grape harvests
around Paris and worried when excessive heat or rain might affect
the crop. The latter concern could partly be linked to his finan-
cial responsibilities for the Ravary wine-growing family, but it was
surely not unrelated to his personal consumption.12
In his day-to-day activities, Colson spent a fair amount of time

inside his apartment, drafting endless letters and legal briefs and
working over his accounts. Yet unless he was sick, he went out vir-
tually every day onto the streets of Paris to take his meals and to
tend to his personal and professional business. His neighborhood
was one of the oldest sections of Paris, already a part of the city
in Roman times when it was still known as “Lutetia.” Indeed, the
street he lived on marked the beginning of a major Roman road
heading north toward the Belgian provinces. The Rue des Arcis
was also well within the medieval walls of the twelfth century. In
the Early Modern period, the street remained one of the major
entrances for traffic coming into town from the north through
Saint-Martin’s gate. After 1674, a fine triumphal arch was built
at that gate, commemorating the return of Louis XIV following
his victories against the Dutch, an arch through which Louis
XV also marched back in triumph in the 1740s, after the French
successes in the War of the Austrian Succession. To be sure, the
street was not very wide; few streets were in eighteenth-century
Paris. There were no sidewalks, and many of the smaller lanes and
passageways adjoining it were not even paved. Those that did have
cobblestones commonly had gutters running down the middle,
where inhabitants could conveniently empty chamber pots and de-
posit other offal, not to mention shoveling aside the piles of horse
manure that quickly accumulated. Among the more grisly specta-
cles occasionally passing along the Rue des Arcis were the corpses
pulled from the Seine—from accidental drownings or suicides—
and carried on ladders to the police commissioner’s office just up
the street from Colson’ apartment.13
The upper stories of some of the houses on the Rue des Arcis ex-
tended a few feet over the street to give the inhabitants more room
in the floors above—even though such extensions had long been
officially forbidden. But by cutting off much of the sunlight, except
when the sun shone directly from the south, life on the street could
seem almost like dwelling in a tunnel. And sometimes the way was
Figure 2.2 Reconstruction of Colson’s immediate neighborhood,

1772–1791, based on a variety of documents from the period.
littered with various items for sale or supplies for one or another of
the small shops. In 1782 Colson had to represent his neighbors in
working out an arrangement with the police, after the inhabitants
received a collective citation for leaving too much clutter and trash
in the street. François Dulac, a mason who lived a few houses north
of Colson was more careful when he asked and was granted special
permission to pile his bricks up to six feet along his wall and into
the street.14 Nevertheless, there was always a substantial amount of
traffic passing through from outside the neighborhood or outside

the city, as people and coaches made their way as best they could
along the obstacle course.
When Colson left his building and stepped into the street, he
entered a whole vibrant small world. The neighborhood near his
residence was one of the most densely populated in all of Paris, a
melting pot of migrants who had arrived over the years from all
over the kingdom with a variety of accents and dressed in a diver-
sity of costumes. In the midst of the Revolution, the west side of the
Rue des Arcis, where Colson lived, averaged twenty-three people
for each four-or five-story building, and the population was un-
doubtedly even more dense on the smaller back streets. The Rue de
la Vannerie just to the south toward the river port had numerous
shabby inns with semi-furnished rooms in which new arrivals
might find an abode. The relatively large population of young male
immigrants living in such inns may help explain the regular night-
time violence in the neighborhood and the substantial presence
of prostitutes. In fact, prostitutes could be found in almost every
quarter of eighteenth-century Paris, but there seems to have been
a particular concentration farther down Colson’s street toward the
Seine.15
As did so many sections of the city, Colson’s neighborhood still
had something of the character of a village, where for the most part
everyone knew everyone else and could easily spot a stranger who
moved in or happened by for the first time.16 When some down-
and-out soul broke into Colson’s apartment one day looking for
money, the lawyer immediately knew who it was from the descrip-
tion given him by the Ladoubé daughters and he was able to con-
front the man.17 Fortunately for Colson, the thief had only come
away with a bill of exchange and he had no idea what to do with
it, so he readily turned it over. And the night a fire broke out just
up the street, after a young woman fell asleep reading a novel by
candlelight, neighbors on the Rue des Arcis quickly organized an
informal bucket brigade from a fountain on the Rue Saint-Martin.
For a time it looked like the whole street might catch fire, but the
improvised volunteers were able to extinguish the flames—though
the young woman’s mother was left badly disfigured and a neigh-
boring baker was said to have died from the shock.18
The neighborhood as a whole was not particularly prosperous,
with large numbers of relatively humble folk struggling to hold their
lives together. Colson encountered many of the more impoverished
walking along his street, along with peddlers, and beggers, and
wandering horses, and occasional lost children. Some of them lived
on the upper floors of the Rue des Arcis: apprentice craftsmen, with
or without families; widows on meager pensions; younger women
spinning or sewing in their cramped, unheated apartments.19 There
were also a certain number of relatively modest Jewish families a bit
farther north on the Rue Saint Martin. Although Jews had been for-
mally expelled from the kingdom in the fourteenth century, many
had made their way back into Paris in the eighteenth century. In
the opposite direction, as one approached the Seine and one of the
major ports of Paris, the street changed its name once again to the
Rue de la Planche-Mibrai. It was a somewhat more seamy section,
populated by butchers killing cattle in the street, houses of prosti-
tution, and rowdy cafés, where frequent thefts and fights between
men and sometimes between women were often reported to the
police.20
Yet Colson’s section of the street did have a number of shops
cultivating customers of somewhat greater means.21 There was a
goldsmith, a hat shop, a perfume shop, and the boutique run by the
widow Toutain purveying fine chocolates—specializing in vanilla
and pistachio flavored ”diablotins”—which were reputedly shipped
throughout the kingdom. There was also a haberdasher (mercier),
“the seller of everything and the maker of nothing,” as Diderot
would describe the profession, who often stocked a selection of fine
porcelain. As everywhere in Old Regime cities, the establishments
producing and selling the same products tended to cluster together.
On the Rue des Arcis the dominant artisans were the tablettiers,
whose guild office was on the nearby Place de Grève and who
specialized in a variety of fine wooden, ivory, and horn objects—
from buttons and snuff boxes to jewelry boxes, document cases,
game boards, and fans. There were at least seven such craft shops
producing and selling along the two short blocks north and south
of Colson’s house. Also found on those two blocks were a master
plumber, a couple of metal workers, and the manager of a used
clothing shop (the fripier), as well as Monsieur Dulac, the mason.
All of these establishments had their own particular shop signs,
signs that might be used in giving directions and locations at a time
when street numbers were only just beginning to appear in Paris—
and would not be imposed systematically until the Revolution.
Some were small works of folk art attached to the buildings or
sometimes hanging out over the street, swinging and rattling when
the wind blew—and occasionally falling on people and animals if
they became detached. The themes of the signs often seemed to
have been chosen whimsically and to have had no particular rela-
tion to the nature of the shops to which they were attached. Among
those on his street, Colson could see the “Pelican” (a tablettier), the
“Sun of Gold” (another tablettier), the “Spanish Arms” (the choco-
late shop), the “Crown of France” (the used clothing store), and the
“Green Monkey” (a haberdasher).22
One of the establishments that Colson would undoubtedly have
frequented, given the constant needs of his profession, was the
stationery shop of Louis Louvet, one or two buildings down the
street, appropriately situated at the corner of Rue des Ecrivains
(the “Writers’ Street”). According to an advertisement, the propri-
etor sold black, gray, and red ink by the pint; both swan and crow
writing quills; and paper and registers of every variety. During
the Revolution, Colson would indicate his relatively low opinion
of Louvet’s son, Jean-Baptiste, who would make something of
a reputation as a novelist and journalist, and later as an orator in
the Girondin faction of the Convention—a faction that Colson
would personally oppose.23 There were also a certain number of
professional men with offices on the Rue des Arcis, a notary with
his characteristic sign of the royal coat of arms, and a surveyor.
And several other men trained in the law—barristers and small-
time lawyers—lived in upstairs apartments, without any indication
of their presence on the street, individuals who, like Colson, took
advantage of the relatively low rents in the neighborhood and its
proximity to the Châtelet and the Parlement. But virtually all the
upper elites of the nobility and the high magistracy who had once
resided there had moved away over the previous century to more
upscale districts.24 It was the concentration of small shopkeepers
and craftsmen, with a sprinkling of lower-level professionals, who
would make the neighborhood a central zone for the radical poli-
tics of the “sans-culottes” during the Revolution.25
There were no bakeries on this segment of Colson’s street. The
closest was around the corner on the Rue des Ecrivains while an-
other was found a couple of blocks away on the notoriously odor-
iferous Rue Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie.26 It was no doubt an
apprentice baker from one of these shops who delivered bread
for the Ladoubés and Colson each morning, except when times
were hard and one had to line up in front of the shop from early
in the night in the hope of obtaining a loaf or two. Fortunately,
even during periods of grain shortages, Colson—unlike the great
majority of his neighbors—could substitute the more expensive
“petits pains” rolls sold by the limonadier up the street, a kind of
café selling strong liquors as well as non-alcoholic refreshments
and small munchables.27 On occasion, Colson may also have
frequented this establishment for meals. But his preferred base for
lunches and dinners was no doubt Monsieur Psalmon’s wine shop
across the street at the corner of the Rue Jean-Pain-Mollet, a shop
that apparently did double service as a traiteur or first-generation
restaurant.28 Psalmon’s position was somewhat unusual, however,
in that he actually owned the two buildings in which his ground-
floor establishment was situated. Most of the shopkeepers and
craftsmen were compelled to lease their places of business from
absentee landlords—nobles, wealthy bourgeois, or even higher-

level churchmen. Such was the case of the Ladoubé family who had
long rented their building from the Marquis de Chambray—until
they were able to buy it as emigrant property after the marquis had
left the country during the Revolution.29
Only a block away, with its entry around the corner and up the
Rue des Ecrivains, was the parish church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-
Boucherie [Saint James of the Butchers], where Colson went for
mass and the diverse celebrations of the liturgical year. Cramped in
by relatively poor housing, it had a beautiful Gothic façade largely
dating from the fourteenth century and a magnificent sixteenth-
century bell tower in a late flamboyant Gothic style, lined with fine
gargoyles, that loomed high over the entire neighborhood. The top
of the tower was said to provide one of the best views of the city
in all of Paris. The church had received its name in recognition of
the confraternity of butchers whose activities were concentrated
just to the south and who had built their guild chapel inside. In the
Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period it had been an im-
portant pilgrimage stop on the route from northern Europe to the
church of Saint James of Compostela in northwestern Spain. Not
only was it dedicated to the same saint, but it also exhibited a few
small relics of Saint James as well as a piece of the True Cross.30
The interior of the church was large and sumptuously decorated,
with a Baroque overlay of the Gothic-inspired architecture. It held a
fine altar piece—where the relics were placed—a giant crucifix sus-
pended above the altar, and some eighteen side chapels dedicated
to a variety of saints, several of them home to local guild sodalities.
A description of the church toward the mid-eighteenth century la-
mented that most of the devotional confraternities, so prominent
during the previous century, were no longer active or had been en-
tirely abandoned.31 Yet to the end of the Old Regime no less than
twenty-two clergymen were attached there, including a parish
priest and two assistants—or vicaires—an organist, a choir director,
and several clerics in charge of the parish school for children. There
can be no doubt that the church remained active and continued to

serve as a central symbol of identity for a great many people living
in this quarter of Paris.32 For Colson it was a basic unit of reference
for his “neighborhood,” the one portion of Paris where he knew vir-
tually everyone and virtually everyone knew him.
The church of Saint-Jacques also permeated Colson’s life and
the lives of everyone nearby through the sound of its twelve great
bells, reverberating at intervals throughout the narrow streets
of the neighborhood or even playing in carillon fashion. The
lawyer sometimes commented on the other bells he could hear
from his apartment—those of Saint-Merry or of Saint-Nicolas de
Chardonnet just to the north, for example—since every set of bells
could be recognized by their own particular notes and timbres.
Yet Colson was convinced that, with the exception of the cathe-
dral of Notre Dame, his church had the finest bells in all of Paris.33
Depending on the number of bells sounded at one time and on
their specific syncopated rhythms, they could broadcast specific
messages. In addition to marking off the time of day, they could an-
nounce a wedding or a funeral or a public celebration or even some
threat to the neighborhood. The rapid and incessant tolling of the
“tocsin” warning bell, especially when it was rung in all the parishes
of the city at once, could produce an extraordinary din, alerting or
waking citizens to an impending danger—as it would often do in
the course of the Revolution.
But the omnipresence of church bells was only one element in the
soundscape of eighteenth-century Paris that rendered the experi-
ence of life in the city substantially different from that of the modern
urban world.34 As Colson worked in his apartment or sat in the café
across the street, he could hear a whole range of sounds that would
seem strange to the modern ear. There were the neighbors shouting
commentaries and the latest gossip from window to window across
the street. In the street itself there were the numerous women and
men crying out their wares or their services, many with the tradi-
tional calls of their trade—the rag pickers and water carriers, the
Figure 2.3 The façade of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, as depicted
in the seventeenth century. Colson frequented the church for Catholic
worship during the last twenty-five years of his life. From 1790 he also
attended meetings of the section of the Lombards held in the building.
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
knife sharpeners and chimney sweeps. With the hundreds of horses

passing during the day, there was an almost continuous noise of tap-
ping hoofs and rattling carriages reverberating on the cobblestones
of the Rue des Arcis. And with the line of butcher shops nearby,
cattle and sheep and pigs could frequently be heard vociferating as
they were herded in from the countryside and crying out in anguish
as they were slaughtered in the street. The sounds of the city would
also have included the singing and chanting of the numerous reli-
gious processions that took place throughout the year, processions
that continued well into the Revolution, while the more solemn
sound of a single small bell rung by a priest would indicate the pas-
sage of the Sacred Host—the body of Christ—carried for the last
rites to a dying parishioner. Much of this soundscape would be
transformed in the later years of the Revolution.
Colson’s business activities also regularly took him much far-
ther afield in pursuance of his duties on behalf of the Longaunay
family and various of his other clients. Indeed, since there was no
way to communicate in advance with those he needed to meet, he
often had to make multiple visits to clients or to colleagues until he
could find them at home.35 He could not afford a horse, let alone a
private carriage, and public transportation was still in its infancy.
Though he might sometimes have paid for a horse-drawn hackney
cab to move about, most of the destinations he went to in his daily
rounds were not very far away and he appears to have gone almost
everywhere on foot. Pedestrian movement, however, was far from
simple and safe. Sidewalks were still rare and only the largest streets
had cobblestones. “Many of our streets,” as he wrote to Lemaigre,
“those with less carriage traffic, are only partly paved.” One thus
had constantly to navigate puddles of mud and horse manure and
be on the lookout for carriages, many in the pay of nobles, rushing
at breakneck speed through the narrow streets. There were many
mentions in the police records of people on foot being seriously
injured or even killed by such vehicles.36 On one occasion, as he
walked to the post office, Colson had to dodge out of the way of a
speeding carriage and found himself so splattered with mud and

muck that he had to stop and ask a neighbor to help him wash up.
He felt obliged to apologize to Lemaigre that he had been unable to
remove all the filth from his letter.37
The Paris City Hall was only a few streets away, adjoining the
Place de Grève, where executions commonly took place. Colson
sometimes witnessed hangings or decapitations there, though he
always claimed that it was only by accident as he was passing by.
It was also the site of one of the principal labor markets for un-
skilled day workers in the city, with hundreds gathering there every
morning from 5 to 7 am; and after 1785 it was the place of choice
for demonstrations by striking workers. Yet the Grève could also
be a center for exuberant celebrations with feasting and fireworks
marking military victories or the birth of royal offspring, as well
Figure 2.4 Map of Paris in 1789, indicating some of the sites

mentioned by Colson in his correspondence.
as a notorious location for illicit dice games.38 Only a bit further to

the west, and also within easy walking distance, was the medieval
Châtelet courthouse, situated next to the river over a tunnel-like
archway. The archway led to the Pont-au-Change Bridge and the
Palace of Justice, the courthouse on the island of La Cité where the
Parlement of Paris and several other major courts met. If Colson
had walked there directly, from the bottom of his street across the
narrow lanes to the Châtelet, he would have passed through one
of the most insalubrious and malodorous sections in all of Paris.
According to the eighteenth-century writer and pioneer ethnog-
rapher, Sébastien Mercier, “a foul smelling exhalation never leaves
this spot, [and] the stink of the alleys so suffocates the pedestrian,
that one is compelled to hold one’s breath and walk by quickly.”39
Whether Colson found a more agreeable, round-about itinerary he
never tells us. But his walk farther north and west to the central post
office on the Rue de La Platrière, where he went almost daily, must
have been scarcely less redolent of stink and putrification, as he
passed by the church and cemetery of the Saints-Innocents. Many
generations of bodies had been placed there in common graves or
in the adjoining charnal house, and the odors could be almost over-
powering for those unaccustomed to the neighborhood. A bit fur-
ther was the great church of Saint-Eustache and the central market
of Les Halles, of whose market women he always had a rather low
opinion.40
Perhaps once a week in the late 1780s Colson crossed to the Left
Bank over the Pont Notre Dame and the Petit Pont bridges to reach
the office of Maître Vosday, the principal attorney with whom he
worked at the time of the early Revolution and whose residence was
in the Latin Quarter on the Rue des Rats (known today as the more
attractive Rue de l’Hôtel Colbert). Perhaps the two had first met
earlier in their careers when Vosday, about the same age as Colson,
lived on the Rue Saint-Jean-en-Grève not far from Colson’s resi-
dence.41 There were also weekly or bi-weekly forays into the upscale
Saint-Germain neighborhood, further west on the Left Bank,

where two of Colson’s noble clients—the Marquise and her younger
son the Count of Longaunay—lived for a time. On one occasion,
crossing the Seine on the Pont-Neuf, he ran into the count walking
in the opposite direction. Indeed, it was said that one could even-
tually meet everyone in Paris by standing on this central bridge
traversing the river at the western tip of the island of La Cité.42
Colson walked even more frequently to the residence of the
count’s older brother, the Marquis of Longaunay, who lived at var-
ious locations on the Right Bank. For a time, the marquis rented
an apartment just off the fashionable Rue Saint-Honoré, relatively
close to Colson’s residence, a neighborhood inhabited by a great
many noble families at the end of the eighteenth century.43 But
soon after the Revolution began he moved to the community of
Chaillot, outside the walls of Paris, not far from the site of today’s
Arc de Triomphe. Colson’s regular visits there entailed a long trek
through the center of the city, along the rue Saint-Honoré, past the
Louvre and the Tuileries Palace and Gardens, skirting the mag-
nificent Place Louis XV and up to the end of the still semi-rural
Champs-Elysées.44
After many of his forays on foot into greater Paris, Colson
might stroll through the Tuileries Gardens or stop to browse and
shop on the Rue Saint-Honoré or in the Palais Royal. He had been
stunned to watch how rapidly the Palais Royal’s great rectangle of
colonnades, filled with public shops and cafés, had been built in
the 1780s by Duke Philippe d’Orléans, who owned the premises.
Colson described the duke as a veritable magician: “It would seem
that for buildings, he has discovered a magic wand.”45 On occasion
he liked to sit there in a café with a glass of wine and watch the
world go by and occasionally chat with clients or colleagues who
passed through. Once the so-called pre-Revolutionary period had
begun, in 1787, he would often walk to the Palais Royal to browse
among the latest brochures displayed in the small book stalls and
watch from a distance the heated political rhetoric issuing from

young patriots standing on chairs or tables. As we shall see, his
frequent presence in the Palais Royal would play an important
part in the growth of his political consciousness during the early
Revolution.
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(1839-51)
I COSTA-CABRAL 143
1. Os ordeiros 143
2. A restauração da Carta 153
3. A Doutrina 158
II A REACÇÃO 170
1. A coalisão dos partidos 170
2. Torres-Novas e Almeida 175
3. A Maria-da-Fonte 183
III A GUERRA CIVIL 197
1. O 6 de outubro 197
2. A Junta do Porto 213
3. O Espectro 227
4. A primavera de 47 239
IV OS IMPENITENTES 259
1. O cadaver da nação 259
2. O conde de Thomar 269
LIVRO SEXTO
A REGENERAÇÃO
(1851-68)
I ALEXANDRE HERCULANO 283
1. A ultima revolta 283
2. O fim do Romanismo 293
3. O Solitario de Val-de-Lobos 302
II A LIQUIDAÇÃO DO PASSADO 328
1. A rapoza e suas manhas 328
2. A conversão da divida 334
3. Os historicos 348
III AS GERAÇÕES NOVAS 360
1. A iniciação pelo fomento 360
2. O iberismo 367
3. O socialismo 381
4. D. Pedro v 389
IV CONCLUSÕES 402
1. As questões constitucionaes 402
2. As questões economicas 413
3. As questões geographicas 419
APPENDICES
A. Chronologia 433
B. Os ministerios liberaes 445
C. Os ministros de D. Miguel 451
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The Glory and The Sorrow A Parisian and His World in The Age of The French Revolution Timothy Tackett Full Chapter

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The Glory and the Sorrow: A Parisian

and His World in the Age of the French

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

2. Life in Paris before the Revolution  16

4. Understanding the World  51

5. The World Changes  65

7. Rumor and Revolution  100

8. Becoming a Radical  125

9. Days of Sorrow  149

Appendix: Translations of Selected Letters  171

Readers familiar with my previous study, The Coming of the Terror,

In the drizzle and gloom of the early summer of 1797, Adrien-​

Under normal circumstances after his death—​and after the

his time—​came from a family of artisans in a small country town.6

The story of this ordinary citizen in extraordinary times, as it is

Figure 1.2 Map of France in 1789, indicating the location of Colson’s

accompanying dowry, had been able to set himself up as a tanner,

that of the small-​town artisan. In his youth, Adrien-​Joseph must

would have followed the classical curriculum that had dominated

to concentrate all of the father’s disposable revenues on Adrien-​

Figure 2.1 The Tower of Saint-​Jacques in the early nineteenth

described it, “where people pass by continually” and part of a route

In his day-​to-​day activities, Colson spent a fair amount of time

Figure 2.2 Reconstruction of Colson’s immediate neighborhood,

traffic passing through from outside the neighborhood or outside

absentee landlords—​nobles, wealthy bourgeois, or even higher-​

can be no doubt that the church remained active and continued to

knife sharpeners and chimney sweeps. With the hundreds of horses

speeding carriage and found himself so splattered with mud and

Figure 2.4 Map of Paris in 1789, indicating some of the sites

as a notorious location for illicit dice games.38 Only a bit further to

Saint-​Germain neighborhood, further west on the Left Bank,

watch from a distance the heated political rhetoric issuing from

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

Section 3. Information about the Project

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

2. Life in Paris before the Revolution 16

4. Understanding the World 51

5. The World Changes 65

7. Rumor and Revolution 100

8. Becoming a Radical 125

9. Days of Sorrow 149

Appendix: Translations of Selected Letters 171

In the drizzle and gloom of the early summer of 1797, Adrien-

Under normal circumstances after his death—and after the

his time—came from a family of artisans in a small country town.6

that of the small-town artisan. In his youth, Adrien-Joseph must

to concentrate all of the father’s disposable revenues on Adrien-

Figure 2.1 The Tower of Saint-Jacques in the early nineteenth

In his day-to-day activities, Colson spent a fair amount of time

absentee landlords—nobles, wealthy bourgeois, or even higher-

Saint-Germain neighborhood, further west on the Left Bank,