The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Here conditions were often appalling. Children from five upwards were taken from workhouses and orphanages to labour in the cotton mills for twelve hours a day. The smallest could pick up cotton from the floor. No one was forced to go – they were lured by promises of good food and pleasant working conditions; once in the mills, they were underfed, beaten and even tortured. Those who tried to escape were chained up. Some children even committed suicide. Adult workers laboured for fourteen hours a day, and lived in damp cellars provided by the employers. A labourer from the country might find himself assigned to a straw mattress on which a man had just died of fever. Workers had to watch their wives and children drawn into these conditions and working beside them in the mills and factories. Most of the children died young, or grew up permanently stunted.

Worse still, the new inventions began to make many workers unnecessary, so they were turned out to starve. When new power looms threw Yorkshire workers out of their jobs in the early nineteenth century, their reaction was to form secret societies whose aim was to blackmail the employers into getting rid of the machinery. They called themselves Luddites, after a man called Ned Ludd, who was supposed to have smashed stocking machines in the 1780s. They operated like the Ku-Klux-Klan, sending warnings to mill owners, threatening to smash windows or burn down their mills unless they got rid of their machinery. Many gave way to this intimidation. In 1812, the Luddites intercepted two weaving frames that were on their way to the mill of a man named William Cartwright; they smashed the frames and left the drivers tied up in a ditch. Cartwright appealed to the government for help, and they sent a small consignment of troops. On 11 April 1812, a mob of Luddites smashed down Cartwright’s gates and poured into the mill yard with axes. As they began to chop their way into the building, soldiers fired from upper windows. The mob fled, leaving their wounded behind. But this was only one victory in a bitter war that dragged on for another year. An employer named Horsfall who employed similar tactics was murdered in reprisal; in 1813 there were mass trials of Luddites, with many executions and transportations. It was a tragic and pointless conflict; the workers were unaware that the enemy was not the mill owners but the current of history itself. Almost two centuries later, the British trade unions are still fighting the same Luddite battle.

To understand the bitterness of these industrial conflicts, we need to go back to the age of Louis XIV. Like the Luddites, Louis was equally determined to make time stand still. When his minister Colbert brought prosperity to France by encouraging trade and industry, the king undid the good work by exempting the nobles from taxes and wasting the money on futile wars. Louis died in 1715; and things improved under the regency of the duke of Orleans, then under Louis XV and his minister Fleury, but the disastrous Seven Years War in 1756 led to the loss of most of the French overseas empire. There was a steady rise in the population – from sixteen millions in 1715 to twenty-six millions by the time of the Revolution – which flooded the towns with unemployed farm labourers and beggars. The more enterprising formed into robber bands that terrorised the countryside. While the poor died of starvation, the rich still managed to avoid taxes. So while England became the ‘workshop of the world’, France was torn by social conflicts.

But the major problem was not economic but psychological. The real conflicts of history are caused by men behaving like spoilt children. What infuriated the French peasantry was not the prosperity of the rich, but their arrogance. Louis XIV had never understood that history was being played according to new rules; he behaved as if he were Charlemagne, and his nobility followed his lead. Typical of his ‘Right Man’ attitude was an event that took place in 1661, when the French ambassador in London announced to the Spanish ambassador that if he drove up first to the palace gates his horses’ reins would be severed. The Spanish ambassador reacted by having them reinforced with chains. There was a fight and bloodshed. Louis XIV dismissed the Spanish ambassador in Paris, sending him back to Madrid with a message saying that if the French ambassador was not given precedence at all court ceremonies, there would be extremely serious consequences (meaning war). Spain under Philip IV was not strong enough to defy France; so an envoy was despatched to Louis to concede his demands and make a public apology in front of the assembled court. Louis was behaving like a headstrong brat, as we have come to expect monarchs to behave throughout history. But the world was changing, and Louis’s determination to have his own way led directly to the French Revolution.

It is even possible to suggest a precise date for the origin of the Revolution: December 1725. It was in that month that the thirty-year-old dramatist Voltaire was talking rather too freely at the Comedie Frangaise about his prospects of becoming prime minister. An aristocrat, the Chevalier de Rohan, insulted him, and Voltaire replied sharply. A fight was avoided when a lady fainted. A few days later, Voltaire was dining with the Due de Sully when he received a message that someone wished to see him outside. He went out, and was beaten up by hired ruffians, while Rohan stood in the background and jeered.

Voltaire was mad with rage; he rushed indoors and asked the duc to sign a statement about the assault; his host refused to get involved – after all, the aristocracy had a perfect right to have a commoner chastised. And although Voltaire was a favourite at court – the queen was fond of him – nobody was interested in helping him obtain justice. Voltaire took fencing lessons, mixed with ruffians, and dreamed of revenge – which demonstrates that the psychology of men of genius is not so very different from that of criminals like Carl Panzram. The Rohans, one of France’s most powerful families, had him followed by police spies. When they appealed to a minister for ‘protection’, Voltaire was arrested and thrown into the Bastille; he was released only on condition he left the country. He was forced to go into exile in England.

Voltaire’s experience filled him with a seething hatred of the ancien régime, a hatred that turned him into the most witty and venomous satirist in Europe. His criticism of religion and society inspired other reformers – notably, Jean Jacques Rousseau; and it was Rousseau’s book The Social Contract (1762) that was mainly responsible for the French Revolution, in which many members of the Rohan clan lost their heads.

Another member of the Rohan family precipitated the scandal that led to the Revolution. Bishop Louis de Rohan was tall, suave and handsome, with a reputation for seduction as formidable as that of Pope Rodrigo Borgia. In 1770, he was bishop of Strasbourg when the next queen of France, Marie Antoinette, passed through the city on her way to meet her future husband. She was a beautiful fifteen-year-old ash-blonde, and Rohan’s susceptible heart was smitten. Unfortunately, it became clear over the course of the next ten years that the queen disliked him – Rohan had been ambassador at the court of Marie Antoinette’s mother Maria Theresa of Austria, and the Austrian queen had taken a strong dislike to him. Between 1770 and 1780, Marie Antoinette did her best to block various appointments, although she was unable to prevent Rohan being made a cardinal.

In 1780, Rohan became the dupe of a beautiful adventuress who called herself Countess de la Motte Valois – she was married to a penniless army officer named la Motte. The countess became his mistress, and somehow convinced him that the queen wanted him to act as intermediary in buying a very expensive diamond bracelet – it cost one million four hundred thousand livres – from two jewellers named Boehmer and Bassenge. In fact, the queen knew nothing of the scheme. Rohan was in raptures at the thought that the queen had changed her mind about him – who knew what was possible now? – and purchased the necklace on credit. At a secret meeting with ‘the queen’ in a garden, he was allowed to kiss her foot – in fact, it was a young courtesan who had been hired to play the part. When the first payment – of 400,000 francs – fell due, Rohan sent the demand to the queen through the countess, and received in reply a forged letter asking him to meet the payment himself. The countess thought Rohan a millionaire; in fact, his extravagance kept him permanently in debt. When he was unable to raise the whole sum, the jewellers applied direct to the queen, whose reaction was to fly into a rage and demand Rohan’s arrest. It was typical of her spoilt stupidity; it would have been better for everyone if she had allowed the matter to be hushed up. As it was, Rohan was arrested, together with the ‘magician’ Cagliostro, in whom he had confided; the countess and her lover were also arrested. (Her husband was in London selling the necklace.) The court case made Rohan a laughing stock, although both he and Cagliostro were acquitted. It also caused deep hostility towards Marie Antoinette, who was booed and hissed by the Paris mob. (No doubt they had heard her famous remark ‘Let them eat cake’ when told that the poor had no bread.) The countess was publicly branded and whipped, arousing widespread sympathy. (She died in London five years later, after falling out of a window when trying to escape her creditors.) The affair of the necklace totally discredited the monarchy – Napoleon later referred to it as the starting point of the Revolution.