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 Copyright

Copyright © 2019 by Jeremy D. Popkin

Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

Cover images: The Taking of the Bastille, 14 July 1789 (oil on
canvas), French School (18th century) / Chateau de Versailles,
France / Bridgeman Images; © MaxyM / Shutterstock.com
Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the
value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers
and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without

permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you
would like permission to use material from the book (other than for
review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank
you for your support of the author’s rights.

Basic Books
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
www.basicbooks.com

First Edition: December 2019

Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a

subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and
logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that
are not owned by the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Popkin, Jeremy D., 1948- author.

Title: A new world begins : the history of the French Revolution /
Jeremy D. Popkin.
Other titles: History of the French Revolution
Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019019101| ISBN 9780465096664 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780465096671 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: France--History--Revolution, 1789-1799.
Classification: LCC DC148 .P665 2019 | DDC 944.04--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019101
ISBNs: 978-0-4650-9666-4 (hardcover), 978-0-4650-9667-1 (ebook)

E3-20191025-JV-NF-ORI
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface: Why a New History of the French Revolution?

1: Two French Lives in the Old Regime

2: The Monarchy, the Philosophes, and the Public
3: The Monarchy Adrift, 1774–1787

4: “Everything Must Change”: The Assembly of Notables and

the Crisis of 1787–1788

5: A Nation Aroused, June 1788–May 1789

6: Revolution in a Tennis Court: From the Estates General to
the National Assembly, May–July 1789

7: A People’s Revolution, July–August 1789

8: From the “Great Fear” to the Declaration of Rights, August

1789
9: Constitution-Making and Conflict, September–December
1789
10: A New World Divided, January 1790–June 1791

11: A Runaway King and a Constitutional Crisis, June–

September 1791
12: A Second Revolution, October 1791–August 1792

13: A Republic Born in Crisis, August 1792–May 1793

14: The Revolution on the Brink, June–December 1793

15: The Arc of Terror, January–July 1794

16: The Republic’s New Start, July 1794–October 1795

17: The Republic in Question, October 1795–September 1797

18: From Fructidor to Brumaire, September 1797–November

1799
19: The Slow Death of the Republic, 1799–1804

Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Jeremy D. Popkin
Notes
To my parents, Richard H. Popkin
(1923–2005) and Juliet Popkin
(1924–2015), who inspired me
with a love of learning, and my
grandmother Zelda Popkin (1898–
1983), who made me want to be a
writer.
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The force of things has perhaps led us to do things
that we did not foresee.

Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, 1794

 Preface

WHY A NEW HISTORY OF THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION?

AT THE END OF 1793, A PRINTER IN THE AMERICAN FRONTIER SETTLEMENT of

Lexington, Kentucky, as far away from the French Revolution as any
point in the Western world, published The Kentucky Almanac, for the
Year of the Lord 1794. Along with a calendar and weather forecasts
for the coming year, the almanac’s main feature was a poem, “The
American Prayer for France.” Addressing the deity as the “Protector
of the Rights of Man,” the anonymous poet implored him to “make
thy chosen race rejoice, / and grant that KINGS may reign no more.”
His message was clear: the outcome of the French Revolution
mattered, not just to France’s “heroes brave, her rulers just,” but to
all those around the world who believed that human beings were
endowed with individual rights and that arbitrary rulers should be
overthrown. At the same time, however, the poet’s words showed
how hard it was to interpret the upheaval that had started in France
in 1789 from a distance. Even as the Kentucky author implored God’s
protection for the Revolution, the revolutionaries were suppressing
religious worship in France, and as he praised the justice of their
actions, their Revolutionary Tribunal was straining the definition of
justice to its limits.1
Today, more than two hundred years since the dramatic events
that began in 1789, the story of the French Revolution is still
relevant to all who believe in liberty and democracy. Whenever
movements for freedom take place anywhere in the world, their
supporters claim to be following the example of the Parisians who
stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Whoever reads the words of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, published in August
1789, immediately recognizes the basic principles of individual
liberty, legal equality, and representative government that define
modern democracies. When we think of the French Revolution,
however, we also remember the violent conflicts that divided those
who participated in it and the executions carried out with the
guillotine. Likewise, we remember the rise to power of the
charismatic general whose dictatorship ended the movement. As I sit
in my study in Lexington today, making sense of the French
Revolution is as much of a challenge as it was for the anonymous
author of the Kentucky Almanac.

When I began my own career as a scholar and teacher in the 1970s,

the memory of the worldwide student protest movements on
university campuses in the 1960s was still fresh. Those movements
had inspired interest in the French Revolution, which seemed to
stand alongside the Russian Revolution of 1917 as one of the great
examples of a successful overthrow of an oppressive society.
Ironically, the understanding of the French Revolution in those years
of upheaval seemed largely fixed: virtually all historians agreed that
it had resulted from the frustrations of a rising “bourgeois” class
determined to challenge a “feudal” old order that stood in the way of
political and economic progress.
By the time I participated, along with researchers from all over
the globe, in commemorations of the bicentennial of the French
Revolution in 1989, the situation had changed drastically. The
communist regimes in Eastern Europe were now tottering, and the
fact that the French Revolution had inspired the Soviets was a
reason to ask whether France’s upheaval had foreshadowed
totalitarian excesses more than social progress. The polemical essays
of a dynamic French historian, François Furet, challenged the
orthodoxy that had dominated study of the Revolution; among other
things, he appealed to scholars in the English-speaking world to turn
to the subject with fresh eyes.
The decades since 1989 have brought even more questions about
the French Revolution to the fore. In 1789, the French proclaimed
that “all men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—but
what about women? At the start of the American Revolution, John
Adams’s wife, Abigail, famously urged him in a letter to “remember
the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your
ancestors.”2 In revolutionary France, the issues about women’s
rights and relations between the sexes that still preoccupy us today
were openly debated in the press, in political clubs, and even in the
nation’s legislature. Mary Wollstonecraft, recognized as the pioneer
of modern feminism, wrote her trailblazing Vindication of the Rights
of Women in revolutionary Paris, but a French reviewer commented
that women there had already shown they could do more than even
Wollstonecraft imagined.3 Some of the women of the period—the
playwright and pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges, the novelist and
salon hostess Madame de Staël, the backroom politician Madame
Roland, and the unhappy queen, Marie-Antoinette—became
prominent public figures and left ample records of their thoughts.
Others took part in mass uprisings or exerted influence through their
daily grumbling about bread prices. Under the new laws on marriage
and divorce, some women welcomed the possibility of changes in
family life; others played a key role in frustrating male
revolutionaries’ efforts to do away with the Catholic Church. A
history of the French Revolution that does not “remember the ladies”
is incomplete.
In today’s world, the issues of race and slavery during the French
Revolution also command attention they did not receive in the past.
On the map, the scattered islands of France’s overseas empire in
1789 looked insignificant compared to the holdings of the British, the
Spanish, and the Portuguese, but their importance was out of all
proportion to their size. In 1787, the colonies provided 37 percent of
the goods imported into France and took 22 percent of its exports.
One French colony alone—Saint-Domingue, today’s Haiti—provided
half the world’s supply of sugar and coffee. These profits came from
the labor of enslaved black men and women. In 1789, the 800,000
slaves in the French sugar islands in the Caribbean and the Indian
Ocean outnumbered the 670,000 in the thirteen newly independent
American states; indeed, the number of Africans being transported
to the French colonies reached its all-time peak just as the French
revolutionaries were proclaiming that “men are born and remain free
and equal in rights.” The French colonies and their slaves were far
away from Europe, but they preoccupied the minds of thinkers in
France. The abbé Guillaume Raynal’s History of the Two Indies, a
multivolume work with passages condemning colonialism and
slavery, was a bestseller in the prerevolutionary years. In 1788,
Marie-Antoinette authorized the gift of a gilded watch for “Jean-
Pierre, Madame de Boisnormand’s mulatto,” a playmate of her son.4
The question of how to reconcile the principles of freedom with the
economic importance of the colonies tormented revolutionary
leaders throughout the 1790s. After much controversy, they voted to
abolish slavery and to grant full rights to people of all races, but only
after they were faced with history’s largest slave uprising, the
beginning of a “Haitian Revolution” that ended in 1804 with the
creation of the first independent black nation in the Americas. A
history of the French Revolution that gives this previously neglected
topic the attention it deserves changes our understanding of the
movement’s meaning.
The events of the first decades of our century, which have led to
widespread questioning of traditional political institutions, also send
us back to the French Revolution. Revolutionary-era protests against
economic globalization and the consequences of free trade often
sound eerily similar to the demands of present-day movements.
Because they argued that government needed to represent the will
of the people, the French revolutionaries were the forerunners both
of modern political democracy and of modern anti-elitist populism,
and the events of the 1790s in France vividly demonstrate the
conflicts that can arise between the two. As the world attempts to
cope with a resurgence of militant nationalism, the ways in which
the French Revolution turned the word “nation” into an explosive
force demand new attention. The Revolution’s violent debates about
the proper place of religion in society, and the powerful resistance to
its efforts to impose secular values, also foreshadow conflicts of our
own time. Like people today, participants in the French Revolution
felt they were experiencing a transformation of the communications
media; the proliferation of newspapers and pamphlets, for example,
made it seem as though time itself had speeded up, and difficulties
in distinguishing between political truth and false rumors were a
constant of the period. Finally, in an era in which “disruption” has
become a political program, the history of the French Revolution’s
experiment in deliberately demolishing an existing order has never
been more relevant. Our own experience of disruption also lends
new relevance to the revolutionaries’ efforts, in the five years
between the end of the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon, to
stabilize their society without undoing the movement’s positive
achievements.

The French Revolution unfolded at a moment when public taste

favored melodramatic plays and novels featuring stark confrontations
between good and evil. Histories of the Revolution often repeat this
pattern, even if their authors disagree about which figures and
movements should be cast as heroes and which as villains. My own
personal itinerary as a scholar of the Revolution has inclined me to
strive for a balanced view of the men and women of the
revolutionary era. My first research projects on French revolutionary
history were devoted to writers and journalists who opposed the
movement. Although I never embraced their conservative
philosophies, I was challenged by learning that intelligent and
articulate people had argued so strenuously against the ideals of
liberty and equality that I accepted as self-evident. As I broadened
my studies on the journalism of the revolutionary period, I had to
engage with the writers who favored the movement, or who even
thought it had not gone far enough, and grapple with the paradox
that the loudest proponents of democracy during the Revolution,
such as Jean-Paul Marat and the pseudonymous Père Duchêne, were
also vociferous advocates of overt violence.
Midway through my scholarly career, I found myself exploring the
dramatic events that led the French revolutionaries to their historic
declaration, in 1794, that slavery was an unacceptable violation of
human rights, and that the black populations of their colonies should
be full French citizens. I discovered that although in one obvious
sense the Revolution was a drama in black and white, it was not a
simple confrontation between heroes and villains. Abolitionist
reformers in France understood the injustice of slavery and racial
prejudice, and yet many of them were so convinced that blacks were
not yet ready for freedom that they hesitated to draw what now
seem the obvious conclusions from their own principles. The blacks
in the French colonies who revolted against oppression did not
always see the French revolutionaries as allies. Toussaint Louverture,
the main figure in the movement that eventually led France’s largest
and most valuable overseas colony to independence, initially told the
French that he was fighting for “another liberty,” not the form of
freedom the revolutionaries were prepared to offer.
Hardly any of the hundreds of figures readers will meet in these
pages can be portrayed in simple terms. Louis XVI and Marie-
Antoinette could not comprehend the revolutionary principles of
liberty and equality, but they had a sincere devotion to what they
saw as their duty to defend the nation’s long-established institutions.
Prominent revolutionary leaders, from Mirabeau to Robespierre,
advocated admirable principles, but they also approved measures
with a high human cost in the name of the Revolution. Ordinary men
and women were capable of both acts of courage, such as the
storming of the Bastille, and acts of inhuman cruelty, including the
September massacres of 1792. Certainly all of the participants could
have agreed on at least one thing: the truth of the words of a young
revolutionary legislator, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, when he
remarked that “the force of things has perhaps led us to do things
that we did not foresee.”5
The continuing relevance of the French Revolution does not mean
that the events of 1789 are simple or that they can offer clear
answers to the questions of our own day. Our new perspectives on
the role of women in the Revolution, on the importance of the
revolutionaries’ debates about race and slavery, and on the ways in
which revolutionary politics prefigured the current dilemmas of
democracy may give us a new view of the movement, but the
Revolution’s message and its outcome remain ambiguous. Liberty
and equality turned out to mean very different things to different
people at the time, as they have ever since. One of the most
relevant lessons of the Revolution, first driven home by the
conservative critic Edmund Burke, and most forcefully articulated by
the great nineteenth-century political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville,
is that actions inevitably have unintended consequences. An equally
important lesson of the Revolution, however, is that it is sometimes
necessary to fight for liberty and equality, despite the risks that
conflict entails. The respect for individual rights inherent in the
Revolution’s own principles does require us to recognize the
humanity of those who opposed it, and it requires us as well to
consider the views of those who paid a price for objecting that the
movement did not always fulfill its own promises. Despite its
shortcomings, however, the French Revolution remains a vital part of
the heritage of democracy.
 1

TWO FRENCH LIVES IN THE OLD

REGIME

ON JANUARY 21, 1793, LOUIS XVI, KING OF FRANCE AND NAVARRE, HEIR to
fourteen centuries of French monarchy, mounted the steps of the
scaffold in Paris and met his death under the guillotine. His death
became the symbol of the victorious revolutionary movement that
had begun with the storming of the Bastille and the passage of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. Among those
who watched the king’s carriage on its way to his execution were
thousands of the commoners of Paris: the artisans, workers, and
shopkeepers whose fervent embrace of the promises of liberty and
equality had enabled that movement to topple France’s old order. A
few years later, a glazier (or glassfitter) named Jacques-Louis
Ménétra would become one of the few ordinary people to write an
account of his own life before and during the Revolution.
The experiences Ménétra recalled in his memoirs put him on one
side of the gulf between the two worlds—the world of hierarchy and
privilege, in which Louis XVI was raised, and the world of ordinary
people—that collided so violently during the French Revolution.
Ménétra’s experiences growing up had prepared him, if not to make
a revolution, at least to understand the possibilities of a world in
which individuals could make important choices about their own lives
and expect to be treated as equals. Louis XVI, in contrast, had been
taught from childhood that the existence of society depended on
people accepting the ranks assigned to them by birth. Louis XVI did
not always enjoy the strictly programmed life he had been given; at
times, he may have dreamed of living a freer existence, one more
like Ménétra’s. Certainly his wife, Queen Marie-Antoinette, had
imagined such an existence: she had an artificial village, the
“Hameau,” constructed on the grounds of Versailles, so that she and
her companions could play at being peasants. Neither the king nor
the queen, however, could imagine a society in which individuals
were free to change the situation into which they had been born.
What brought them to their deaths in 1793 was their inability to
accept the values that had come to seem natural and just to their
former subjects.

Louis-Auguste, the future Louis XVI, born in 1754, was the living
symbol of the hereditary privileges and social inequalities the
revolutionaries were determined to overturn. From the time of his
birth, his life was shaped by his ancestry. Raised in the palace of
Versailles, which his famous great-great-great-grandfather, Louis XIV,
had built to showcase the grandeur of the French monarchy, he
learned about the intricacies of status from an early age. He had an
older brother, the duc de Bourgogne, and little Louis-Auguste would
have been constantly reminded that it was this older sibling who
would someday be the king, and that, as his subject, it would be his
duty to obey him. Even as a small child, Louis learned to play his
part in court rituals, dressed in elaborate costumes that emphasized
his status. As was customary in aristocratic households, he saw little
of his parents. They left childrearing chores to a staff overseen by
the royal governess, who preferred his older brother, the presumed
heir to the throne, and his younger brothers, the comte de Provence
and the comte d’Artois, both livelier and more engaging children.
 In the hothouse environment of Versailles in which the future
Louis XVI was raised, the adults he encountered were either titled
nobles, acutely conscious of the minute gradations of status among
themselves, or servants whose obsequiousness served to emphasize
their masters’ and mistresses’ sense of importance. Centuries earlier,
dukes and barons had been warriors who ruled over their own local
fiefdoms. Over the centuries, Louis XVI’s ancestors had deprived the
nobles of their political independence, but the members of their
caste whom the young prince encountered in Versailles remained
influential as courtiers and as holders of well-paid positions in the
royal administration and the Catholic Church. The courtiers of
Versailles were part of a network whose members were scattered
throughout the kingdom, bound together by their special legal and
social status. To bind its most faithful servants more fully to them,
monarchs such as Henri IV and Louis XIV rewarded judges and high
officials with titles of nobility, even if they came originally from
commoner families. This practice created a division between the
noblesse d’épée, the “nobles of the sword” whose ancestors had
been warriors, and the noblesse de robe, who had gained their
status through service to the state.
Noble status was highly valued in French society because it
brought with it important privileges. Nobles were exempt from many
of the most onerous taxes, for example, particularly the taille, the
basic tax levied on peasants. The most prestigious positions in the
government as well as in the Church were reserved for them, as
were a specified number of seats in the royal academies and almost
all officer posts in the army and navy. Nobles had the right to wear
swords at their side in public and to emphasize their status by
adding the name of their estate to their family names with the noble
“particle” de. They had special seating privileges in their local
churches and at public ceremonies and the exclusive right to put
weather vanes on their chateaux or manor houses in the
countryside. Only nobles had the right to hunt game in the
countryside: they could trample over peasants’ fields as they chased
after stags and hares. When nobles were condemned to death, they
had the privilege of having their heads cut off. This was considered a
more dignified method of execution than hanging, which was
reserved for commoners.
To make it clear that they were motivated by honor rather than
monetary considerations, nobles were not supposed to engage in the
grubby business of commerce or in any kind of manual labor. Various
mechanisms allowed wealthy commoner families to obtain noble
status, a process that usually took several generations, but once
they became anoblis, they abandoned the occupations that had
made their fortunes. In theory, nobles were expected to live on the
incomes they derived from their landed estates, although in practice
they found ways to share in the profits of France’s expanding
commerce and manufacturing during the eighteenth century by
investing in enterprises ranging from factories to slaving voyages. A
small group of very wealthy aristocrats surrounded the king at
Versailles, squabbling over the most desirable court positions and
royal rewards. At the other extreme were impoverished noble
families who owned little but their titles and a few acres of land, and
who frequently resented the favors lavished on the well-connected
court nobility. Still, nobles were, on average, richer than even the
most prosperous members of the bourgeoisie. Commoners watched
their expenses carefully, knowing they could lose their social status if
they failed to pay their bills. Nobles had no such worries: their
standing was secure, and as a class, they were notoriously careless
about running up debts.

In the first years of his life, young Louis would have looked forward
to a life as an unusually privileged member of the nobility, but he
would not have expected to ever occupy a position of real power.
When he was seven years old, however, his older brother died,
leaving him second in line to the throne, after his father, the
Dauphin. Even royal status could not confer immunity to the many
diseases for which eighteenth-century medicine had no remedies.
To prepare him for the responsibilities he now stood to inherit,
Louis received an intensive education from a variety of tutors.
Religion was an important part of his upbringing, partly in reaction
against his grandfather, the ruling king Louis XV, who notoriously
flouted the rules of Catholic morality. The king’s official mistress
during Louis XVI’s early years, Madame de Pompadour, exercised
highly public influence at court, while a succession of younger
women were brought in to satisfy the king’s insatiable sexual
appetite. Louis’s parents made sure their son was raised in an
atmosphere of piety and strict moral rules. Only on rare occasions
were the royal children allowed some informal fun. One of those
occasions, as the glassfitter Ménétra remembered years later, was
when he and some other artisans were hired to repair windows at
Versailles. In the evenings, “we climbed up on the tables and
pretended to fence,” Ménétra recalled. “The royal children were
brought in to watch our antics.”1
The future king grew up to be a shy young man who never
became comfortable speaking in public. His reluctance to engage in
conversation led those who met him to underestimate his intellectual
abilities, which were nevertheless considerable. Louis took a special
interest in geography; a skillfully drawn map of the area around
Versailles demonstrates how well he had mastered the subject. Yet
Louis XVI had almost no experience of the world represented in his
maps. Except for ceremonial visits to Paris and the royal family’s
annual stays at other palaces near the capital, he saw nothing of his
future kingdom. Even after he became ruler, he made only two brief
trips to the provinces, one for his coronation in the cathedral city of
Reims in 1775 and another for the inauguration of new harbor
facilities in the Norman port city of Cherbourg in 1786, and he never
traveled abroad. The tutors who prepared young Louis XVI for the
duties he would someday assume did not spend much time teaching
him about the population spread across the territories he studied in
his maps. In his own notes to his son, dictated nearly a century
earlier, Louis XIV had observed that “every profession contributes, in
its own way, to the support of the monarchy,” but he had accorded
just one sentence to peasants and one to artisans.2 Louis XVI
learned little more about the wealthier and more educated
commoners—lawyers, doctors, merchants and manufacturers, lower-
level government officials—who might, on Sundays, put on their best
clothes and visit Versailles to gawk at the splendor of the palace and
its elegant courtiers. No matter how successful such men became,
they remained, like peasants and artisans, part of the “Third Estate,”
the catch-all category for all royal subjects except titled nobles and
members of the clergy.
Young Louis learned Latin, as did all educated young men in
eighteenth-century France, and several modern languages. From his
parents, the stern and gloomy Dauphin and the devout Maria-
Josepha, he acquired an early interest in history. His father was
especially fond of the British historian David Hume’s History of
Charles I, the story of the seventeenth-century monarch who had
been executed by his subjects in 1649. The image of a king brought
to the scaffold by his own subjects was engraved in the future Louis
XVI’s mind; he would later recommend the book to his wife, Marie-
Antoinette. When Hume was received at Versailles in 1763, the nine-
year-old Louis delivered a little formal speech to welcome him. The
lengthy summary of the principles of French royal absolutism that
Louis copied out for his gouverneur, the duc de la Vauguyon, during
his early teenage years shows that he knew the major
accomplishments of his royal ancestors and the lessons he was
supposed to have learned from the many crises France had
experienced through the centuries.

In most ways, the future Louis XVI’s childhood could not have been
more different from that of his future subject Jacques Ménétra,
whose horseplay had once entertained him at Versailles. Ménétra
was born in 1738 in Paris. His father was a glazier, and Ménétra’s
birth probably took place in the cramped apartment in the center of
the city where the family lived. Like the future king, the future
glasscutter saw little of his parents during his infancy: as was
customary among Paris artisans, he was placed with a wetnurse so
that his mother could return as quickly as possible to helping her
husband run the family business. Ménétra was still boarding with the
wetnurse’s family when his mother died giving birth to her next
child: commoners’ families were even more familiar than the king’s
with the ravages caused by eighteenth-century medicine’s
helplessness in the face of disease. According to his memoirs,
Ménétra’s wetnurse tried to supplement the meager payments she
received for caring for him by teaching him “the profession of
begging.” Stopping by to check up on him, his grandmother was
appalled to see that the son of a respectable artisan was in danger
of slipping into a life of poverty. She took him home with her and
raised him until he was eleven.3
Whereas the future Louis XVI’s childhood and education were
strictly regulated, Ménétra’s early years were chaotic. He had a
sweet voice and was briefly a choirboy at the family’s neighborhood
church, where he would have received an education that might have
led to a career in the clergy, but he could not adjust to the school’s
discipline and soon returned to his grandmother’s home. He did
learn to read and write—by the middle of the eighteenth century,
most boys in Paris got at least some schooling, although their sisters
often did not—but in his memoirs he was more eager to recall how
he became “one of the leading mischief-makers in my
neighborhood.”4 From an early age, Ménétra was also immersed in
the adult world of work. Just as Louis XVI was prepared for the
family profession of kingship, from an early age Ménétra was trained
to follow in his glassfitting ancestors’ footsteps.
Whereas young Louis XVI had only the most limited exposure to
the realities of other people’s lives, Ménétra came into contact with
all levels of French society. The glazier’s trade took Ménétra into the
homes of the wealthy, and he spent a good deal of time working in
churches, whose structures incorporated more glass than other
buildings of the time. Exposure to religion made the future king a
dutiful Catholic, but Ménétra’s work gave him a behind-the-scenes
perspective on the Church that had the opposite effect. Working in
the abbey of Saint-Denis, where the kings of France were
traditionally buried, he learned that the monks themselves didn’t
know which saints’ bones were in the reliquaries they displayed to
earnest pilgrims, and he lost his faith in the sanctity of the Catholic
Mass when he witnessed a priest giving out unconsecrated hosts to
his parishioners. “So I never wanted to be with these hypocrites and
have never liked their company,” Ménétra concluded.5
From his history lessons, Louis XVI learned to think of himself as
a link in a chain of kings that extended back for over a millennium;
Ménétra remembered episodes that affected the common people of
Paris but that would never have found a place in the future ruler’s
schoolbooks. In his memoirs, Ménétra described a popular riot that
broke out in May 1750, when he was twelve, sparked by a rumor
“that they were taking young boys and bleeding them and that they
were lost forever and that their blood was used to bathe a princess
suffering from a disease that could only be cured with human
blood.”6 The story was false, but the willingness of the Parisians to
believe it showed that the common people harbored a deep distrust
of the elites who governed them. An angry crowd that included
Ménétra’s father responded to the rumor by attacking a police
station and burning a suspected informer alive. Although the riot
was put down and three ringleaders were executed, it taught
Ménétra that commoners could wield power when they acted
together. In 1757, just before he set out from Paris on the tour de
France that would complete his training as a glassfitter, he witnessed
a very different kind of historical event, one meant to demonstrate
the power of the monarchy: the torture and execution of Louis
Damiens, a domestic servant who had stabbed Louis XV with a
penknife. Damiens was drawn and quartered, his arms and legs torn
from his body by straining draft horses in a prolonged procedure
meant to inflict as much excruciating pain as possible.

By the time he witnessed the gruesome execution of Damiens,

Ménétra was eighteen and nearing the end of the apprenticeship
that prepared him for his adult responsibilities. Louis XVI’s transition
from childhood to adulthood came more abruptly: his father died in
1765, making his eleven-year-old son, the Dauphin, the direct heir to
the throne. Even though Louis’s grandfather, Louis XV, was still a
vigorous man in his mid-fifties, the boy now knew that he might find
himself obliged at any moment to take on the responsibilities of
kingship. It was at this time that the royal governor, the duc de la
Vauguyon, decided to have the young Louis write out a two-
hundred-page summary of the main features of the French
monarchy, an exercise that was meant to prepare him for his future
obligations.
When Louis XVI’s mother died in 1767, it fell to his grandfather to
take the place of his parents. In some ways, young Louis may have
appreciated the change: his father had forbidden him to go hunting,
so Louis XV, a passionate hunter himself, introduced his grandson to
the sport. It became one of the future king’s great passions and the
main theme of the daily journal he began to keep in 1766, when he
was twelve. The practice of keeping private diaries to record the
events of individual lives was just beginning to spread in France at
the time. Although some of Louis’s contemporaries used their
journals to record their private thoughts and develop a sense of
themselves as distinct individuals, the dry and unemotional entries
the future king put down give little clue to his personality. Instead,
they faithfully record the thousands of stags, boars, and birds he
shot in the royal forests that surrounded Versailles. Hunting was a
privilege reserved for France’s nobility that set its members apart
from the common people. Louis’s obsession with the sport put him
on one side of the great divide that separated the privileged from
the Third Estate, to which Ménétra belonged.
It was probably during his teenage years that Louis developed
another hobby that, curiously, gave him something in common with
Ménétra. The future king enjoyed working with his hands. A master
craftsman named Gamain was engaged to teach him the skill of
lockmaking, just as Ménétra learned his glasscutting skills from older
artisans. Gamain claimed that, “in teaching his trade to Louis XVI,
[he] treated him with a tone of authority,” although one imagines
that his pupil was spared the beatings that were a normal part of an
apprentice’s training. Eventually, a workshop was set up for Louis in
a room in Versailles, where he frequently escaped to get away from
palace routine. At the court, his interest in the mechanical arts was
regarded as a bizarre eccentricity rather than as something that
might bring him closer to his ordinary subjects.7
Surrounded by courtiers who hoped to advance their own careers
by winning his favor, Louis was taught by his religious confessor to
“never let people read your mind,” an injunction that strengthened
his natural inclination to avoid conversation. Louis’s position as heir
to the throne after his father’s death made it essential for him to be
married as quickly as possible, so that he could carry out his most
important royal duty: the production of a male heir who would
assure the continuation of the Bourbon dynasty. That the king’s
marriage would be arranged for him was a given, as was the fact
that he could only be paired with a princess from another royal
dynasty. Louis XVI’s grandfather and father had both been married
to women from relatively minor ruling houses that were not in a
position to demand much from the French in return for the honor of
such an alliance. The arrangement that brought the fifteen-year-old
Austrian Habsburg princess Marie-Antoinette to Versailles in 1770 to
be united with the sixteen-year-old Louis was an entirely different
matter.
Along with the Bourbons, the Habsburgs were the most illustrious
and powerful of Europe’s dynasties. For centuries, the two families
had been each other’s archenemies. The royal history young Louis
had been made to memorize was a long saga of wars against Marie-
Antoinette’s ancestors, and the aristocratic generals who
commanded the king’s troops had also been raised on stories of
victories over the “Kaiserlichs.” It was a shock to them and to the
whole continent in 1756 when Louis XV and his closest advisers
engineered a “diplomatic revolution” that made Austria, rather than
Prussia, France’s main ally. Indeed, Austria and Prussia were bitter
rivals, and the ambitious ruler of the latter, Frederick the Great, had
plunged Europe into an era of conflict in 1740 when he had seized
the valuable province of Silesia from his Habsburg neighbor.
The marriage of Louis and Marie-Antoinette was meant to
consolidate the alliance between the Bourbon and Habsburg
dynasties. Whether the two teenagers were compatible with each
other was irrelevant to the diplomats who negotiated the
arrangement. Nor were they concerned about how the deep
unpopularity of the Austrian alliance in France might affect the royal
couple. The marriage was the last major victory of the minister
Étienne-François de Choiseul, a fervent partisan of the pact who was
ousted from power and exiled to his country estate shortly after its
conclusion. Young and inexperienced in politics as she was, Marie-
Antoinette understood that Choiseul’s disgrace left her without an
ally in French court circles. She would quickly acquire a reputation
for self-interested intrigue because of her efforts to win court favors
for Choiseul’s supporters and bring him back to prominence.

Louis XVI’s bride was young and pretty, and Louis XV and his court
became infatuated with her. “Nothing was spoken of except her
charms, her liveliness and the cleverness of her responses,” her lady-
in-waiting Madame Campan wrote in her memoirs. Her new husband
was less intrigued. His governor, the duc de la Vauguyon, had
warned him to be on his guard against any attempt to influence him
in favor of Austrian interests. The spectacular fireworks display in
honor of their marriage in Paris turned into a disaster when a panic
in the crowd set off a stampede in which over a hundred spectators
were trampled and suffocated. The young royal couple did not
witness the event—much to Marie-Antoinette’s annoyance, Louis XV
did not allow them to visit Paris for the first time until three years
after their marriage—but the fact that their union began with a
calamity was a bad omen. Ménétra never forgot the event. By 1770,
he had completed his tour of France, returned to Paris, and married;
he and his wife lost sight of each other in the crowd at the “night of
celebration” that “changed into a night of mourning,” and he spent
anxious hours before they were reunited.8
The young royal couple turned out to be woefully ignorant about
how to accomplish their most important duty, the production of an
heir. It took seven frustrating years before Marie-Antoinette’s
brother, the Austrian emperor Joseph II, discovered that Louis “stays
there for perhaps two minutes without moving, withdraws without
ever discharging, and bids good night,” and explained to the “two
incompetents” what they needed to do in order to consummate their
marriage. By that time, Louis’s inability to get his wife pregnant had
become the talk of Versailles and Paris, sorely undermining his
reputation. Florimond-Claude, comte de Mercy d’Argenteau, the
Austrian ambassador to France, served as Marie-Antoinette’s
“minder,” lecturing her regularly on her duties and reporting the
smallest details of her life to her mother, the Habsburg empress
Maria Theresa. He found “the coldness of the heir to the throne, a
young husband of twenty, with regard to a pretty woman…
inconceivable,” and wondered if he suffered from some kind of
physical deformity. Despite her best efforts, Marie-Antoinette could
not divert Louis from his two passions, hunting and what Mercy
described as “his extraordinary taste for everything that has to do
with building, like masonry, carpentry and other things of that sort.”
On one occasion, the two teenagers squabbled in front of their
courtiers until Marie-Antoinette’s complaints about Louis’s behavior
reduced him to tears.9
Distant as he may have seemed, Louis XVI was not entirely
closed off from the world outside of Versailles. One of the first
purchases he made when Louis XV gave him a personal allowance
was a set of the volumes of the Encyclopédie, a reference work
notorious for its expression of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment.
He may have appreciated its detailed explanation of the various
mechanical trades that interested him so much, but he could hardly
have failed to notice its controversial articles on politics and religion.
Not satisfied with the censored news in the official Gazette de
France, he subscribed to the Gazette de Leyde, an uncensored
newspaper published outside the kingdom.10 Nevertheless, when the
celebrated author Voltaire, the symbol of the Enlightenment, made a
triumphal visit to Paris in 1778 after years of exile in Switzerland,
Louis firmly vetoed any suggestion that he be received at court, lest
it appear that the monarchy approved his critiques of aristocracy and
revealed religion.
The unhappy Marie-Antoinette, bored with the formality of a court
routine that forced her to spend most of her time with older women
—such as her husband’s unmarried aunts—developed her own social
life. Once she was finally allowed to visit Paris, she often made
evening outings to attend plays and masked balls, leaving Louis,
who always wanted to be in bed by eleven o’clock, behind in
Versailles. These expeditions inspired malicious gossip, as did the
attention paid to her by various courtiers, including the king’s
younger brother the comte d’Artois, and her close relations with two
young friends, the princesse de Lamballe and the comtesse de
Polignac. Even when she stayed at Versailles, her conduct caused
scandal. Especially after Louis XV died, her passion for high-stakes
gambling set tongues wagging and discouraged proper society
women from frequenting the court.

Jacques Ménétra shared the young Marie-Antoinette’s penchant for

amusement and adventures. By the time the young glassfitter set off
on his tour of France, the traditional culmination of a skilled artisan’s
training, he had already mastered the art of lovemaking that posed
such a challenge for his future monarch. After learning the basics
from a chambermaid in one of his clients’ homes, Ménétra became a
regular customer of the prostitutes of Paris. “These interludes were
so pleasant that every day I tried to make new conquests,” he wrote
in his memoirs, although “in the end my reward was what you might
well imagine and that made me a little wiser.” Whatever lessons he
learned from his first bout of venereal disease, it hardly slowed him
down. His memoirs mention fifty-two sexual relationships prior to his
marriage at twenty-seven, a typical age for ordinary Frenchmen of
the time, and an additional thirteen extramarital affairs afterward.11
The king may have been at the pinnacle of a society based on
privileges, but his subjects had their own spheres of freedom, as
Ménétra’s busy sex life proved. The glassfitter’s adventures reflected
Other documents randomly have
different content
Hämorrhoiden.
Ein junger Herr Philologus
War ein Hämorrhoidarius.
Ein solcher armer Teufel ist
Gewöhniglich ein Pessimist,
Das kommt, weil von dem vielen Hocken
Die Blutgefäße ihm verstocken.
Er kauert stets in Bibliotheken
Vor schweineledernen Scharteken,
Irgend welchen unbekannten
Halbverschimmelten Folianten,
Oder einem Manuscript,
Das eine neue Lesart gibt.
Das Sitzbad that ihn rasch kurieren,
Jetzt kann er wieder fortstudieren.
 Heiserkeit.
Spricht jemand plötzlich rauh und leiser,
So weiß man, die Person ist heiser.
In solchem Falle laß’ ich sie
Im Wasser steh’n bis an die Knie’,
Und auch die Händ’ ins Wasser halten
Das hilft bei Jungen und bei Alten.
Hilft dies nicht, mach’ es umgekehrt,
Da Abwechslung sich oft bewährt.
 Husten.
Ich kenne Leute, die vor Husten,
Sich oft nicht mehr zu helfen wußten.
Doch wenn sie erst sich abzuhärten
Genau beflissen sind, so werden
Die einen später, die andern bälder,
Um manches weitere Jährchen älter,
Und wenn sie immer so weiter fahren,
Bringen sie’s noch zu Jubilaren.
Hypochondrie.
Der Zustand eines Hypochonders
Erweckt mein Mitleid ganz besonders,
Drum rat’ ich ihm als Rettungsmittel
Die sieben Abhärtungskapitel,
Dann werden Geist und Körper frisch
Und geh’n mit Appetit zu Tisch.
Den Sokrates, den alten Denker,
Verwünschte oft sein Weib zum Henker;
Ihm war ein jeder Mensch zu schlecht,
Und nichts im Hause war ihm recht.
Doch war er selber viel zu klug,
Und so erkannt’ er bald genug,
Daß er sich selbst kurieren müsse,
Gewöhnte sich an bloße Füße
Und ging damit im Schnee herum
Vor seinem griechischen Publikum.
Nur war, wie häufig manchesmal,
Veraltet schon sein Krankheitsfall,
Und trotz der strengen Abhärtmittel
Half nicht mehr dieses Kneippkapitel,
Und als er einst zu Haus krakehlte
Und auf die besten Bissen schmälte
Und endlich mürrisch sich empfahl,
Da goß Xantippe genial
Vom Fenster noch ihm über’s Haupt
Ein Schaff voll Wasser. Wer’s nicht glaubt,
Der merke, daß dies Kaltbad schon
Geschildert wird von Xenophon.
Besonders allen Junggesellen
Läßt sich das Kaltbad — warm empfehlen.
 Kalte Füße.
Ein Handwerksbursche, welcher fror,
Kam morgens an ein Gartenthor
Und sah am Boden — sonderbar —
Ein Socken- und ein Stiefelpaar.
Der Aberglaube dieses Lümmels
Hielt das für einen Wink des Himmels,
Und ohne daß er sich besann,
Zog er die Strümpf’ und Stiefel an.
Nach einiger Zeit trat unter’s Thor,
Des Dorfes Pfarrherr barfuß vor
Und fand daselbst — wie sonderbar!
Nichts als ein lumpiges Stiefelpaar,
Und erst nach einigem Stirnerunzeln
Begriff er es und mußte schmunzeln:
»Der Kerl hat durch mein Kneippverhalten
Unfehlbar warme Füß’ erhalten!«
Kurzsichtigkeit.
Der Bauer steht vor seinem Feld
Und zieht die Stirne kraus in Falten;
»Ich hab’ den Acker wohl bestellt,
»Auf reine Aussaat streng gehalten —
»Nun seh’ mir ein’s den Stadtfrack an!
»Was hat denn der im Feld gethan?!«

Da kommt der Stadtfrack hochbeglückt,

Die Füße nackt bis an die Waden;
Am Feldweg er sich niederbückt,
Und ganz, wie Kneipp ihm angeraten,
Ergreift er schleunig Schuh’ und Socken,
Und findet sie noch ziemlich trocken.

Da wird’s dem biedern Bauersmann

Im Oberstübchen ziemlich helle;
Er fährt den armen Stadtfrack an
Und packt ihn an der Gurgel schnelle:
»Ist denn ein Kornfeld eine Wiese??
»Putzt anderswo die sauber’n Füße!!«
 Katarrh.
Muse, melde mir ein Mittel,
Ob man ohne Wollenkittel,
Nur mit Waschung Tag für Tag,
Sich vor Schnupfen schützen mag?

Die Muse spricht:

Wer sich fleißig abgehärtet,

Bleibt gewöhnlich ungefährdet,
Aber dieses Mittelein
Schützet dich noch nicht allein!

Nebenbei ermahn’ ich jeden

Niemals plötzlich einzutreten
In geheizten Aufenthalt,
Wenn es draußen ziemlich kalt.

Verschnupfte sieht man heute viel,

Doch ist das gern Komödienspiel.
Ein kalter Guß hat da schon oft
Kuriert Patienten unverhofft.
Nierenleiden.
Ihr schaut mich an so stumm und düster,
Ihr säftestockigen Bierphilister —
Vernahmt ihr denn nicht schon zu Zeiten
Das dumpfe Schlagwort »Nierenleiden?«

Da scheint man korpulent und frisch

Und so gesund als wie ein Fisch —
Und kann nichts thun und kann nicht laufen
Und kann nicht schlafen und nicht schnaufen,

Und schaut man gar in den Urin,

So ist er dick und Blut darin.
Erst durch das Bad mit Haberstroh
Und Wickel wird man wieder froh.
Nervenerschöpfung.
Sitzbad, Knie- und Oberguß
Jener Kranke nehmen muß,
Der dem Wasserdoktor klagt,
Daß ihn Nervenschwäche plagt.
Sehr vernünftig wird er handeln,
Wenn er sucht, im Schnee zu wandeln.
Wenn wir es genau besehen,
Wie die Raben und die Krähen
Solch’ ein Alter ohne Gleichen
Und voll Rüstigkeit erreichen
Und es lieben, oft in Haufen
Barfuß durch den Schnee zu laufen,
Sind wir fast versucht, zu schreiben,
Daß die Kerle Kneippkur treiben.
Ohrensausen.
Ein Fräulein, welches Kaffee trank
Im Kreis betagter Damen,
Die jede Woche, Gott sei Dank,
Sehr frisch zusammenkamen,
Klagt eines Tages ungemein,
Sie wisse nicht wo aus noch ein
Vor lauter Ohrensausen.

Zwar sei sie jenem Damenbund

Gar sehr zu Dank verpflichtet,
Man höre ja aus deren Mund
Getreulich stets berichtet,
Was Neues in der Stadt passiert,
Wer sich verging, wer sich blamiert,
Und wer demnächst verlobt wird.

Allein es könne nicht so schnell

In diesen wirren Tönen
Ein neugeworbenes Trommelfell
Sich völlig eingewöhnen;
Sie höre tagelang zu Haus
Nach solcher Schlacht ein Sturmgebraus
Als wie am Niagara.

»Mein Fräulein, ich gesteh’ es gern,

Das Leiden ist verdrießlich,
Doch bleiben Sie dem Kaffee fern,
Alsdann vergeht es schließlich;
Und daß die Heilung gründlich sei,
Versuchen Sie noch nebenbei
Kaltwaschung vorzunehmen!«
 Rheumatismus.
Das ist im Leben so dumm eingerichtet,
Daß rund um uns wir lauter Dornen seh’n,
Und wenn der Mensch auch noch so gern verzichtet,
So muß er doch einmal darüber geh’n;
Besonders wer das Rheuma sich erlesen,
Der litt gar oftmals ganz verfluchte Pein —
Wär’ ihm die Dampfkur schon bekannt gewesen,
So hätt’ er bald gesünder können sein.
Säuferwahnsinn.
Das Trinken rächt sich dann und wann
Sehr bitter durch den Säuferwahn.
Dann siehst du öfter ganze Haufen
Von Mäusen auf dem Boden laufen,
Und schwarze Mücken tanzen immer
Vor deinen Augen schlimm und schlimmer;
Da beut dir, seinem einstigen Hasser,
Gar edle Hilfe gern das Wasser,
Und Güsse, Wassersteh’n und Baden
Sind rasch und dringend anzuraten.
Schlaflosigkeit.
Du schwärmst für Wagnermusik,
Sie sei so deutsch, so tief;
Du kennst aus ihr zwar höchstens
Das hörnerne Siegfriedsmotiv,

Oder du trommelst etwa

Manchmal zum Zeitvertreibe
Der Gattin das Riesenmotiv
Auf einer Fensterscheibe —

So nahm dich wohl bis heute

Der Umstand noch nicht wunder,
Wie denn die Nixen im Rheingold
So lang sich halten munter?

Bedenk’, daß von zwei Übeln

Ihr W e l l e n b a d befreit:
Die Wellenmädchen von A s t h m a,
Die Hörer von S c h l a f l o s i g k e i t.
 Schlaganfall.
Ein jeder Mensch muß einmal sterben,
Und hat er Geld, so freut’s die Erben,
Doch hat er einen S c h l a g a n f a l l,
So hilft ihm Kneipp noch dieses Mal.
Gewöhnlich führt ein solcher Zustand
Zu Abschied, Pension und Ruhstand.
Hier gilt es rasch nach andern Seiten
Das Blut vom Kopfe wegzuleiten:
Der K o p f - und F u ß d a m p f ist probat,
Und ebenso das w a r m e B a d.
Was sonst noch wirkungsvoll gewesen,
Ist leicht bei Kneipp selbst nachzulesen.
 Schwermut.
Wenn in dein Inn’res und den Schmerz der Zeiten
Der ernste Geist sich allzu ernst versenket,
Und schwarze Dinge sich noch schwärzer denket,
Und über alles einen Schleier breitet,

Daß man kein Farbenspiel mehr unterscheidet,

Kein Außending uns mehr ein Lächeln schenket —
Dann heißt es: Freund, bei Zeiten eingelenket,
Daß dieser Zustand nicht noch weiter schreitet!

Denn Schwermut ist ein Leiden ernster Art,

Ein Alpdruck, welcher das Gemüt bedrückt,
Sich manchmal zwar poetisch offenbart,

Doch öfter noch so viel ist wie verrückt.

Wo aber Kneippkur angewendet ward,
Ist meistenteils die Heilung rasch geglückt.
Unterleibsverschleimung.
Man sollte meinen, rasche Räumung
Sei gut bei Unterleibsverschleimung!
Allein die Heilung durch Gewässer
Ist weitaus gründlicher und besser.
Nach Knieguß und zwei Obergüssen
Wird man im Wasser gehen müssen,
Auch Rückenguß und Geh’n im Gras
Hilft solchen Kranken immer was.
Unzufriedenheit.
Gold’ne Zeit, von der wir lesen,
Gold’nes Alter des Saturnus —
Bist du wirklich schon gewesen,
Wie im hesiodischen Turnus?

Willst du wirklich unsern Zeiten

Und der Welt im allgemeinen
Und uns Deutschen und mir selber
Nicht zum zweiten Mal erscheinen?

Komm uns gnadenreich hernieder,

Und wir wollen froh dir huldigen
Und die alten Dichter nie mehr
Plumper Schwindelei beschuldigen.

Komm herab, du gold’nes Alter,

Du allein kurierst mich nur,
Oder, in Ermangelung deiner,
Eine kalte Wasserkur!
Verfolgungswahn.
»Oheim, Oheim, lieber Oheim,
»Sag’, was fliehst du deinen Neffen?
»Wenn ich komm, dich anzupumpen,
»Bist du nie daheim zu treffen!«

Zweimal hatte schon der Studio

Seinem Oheim dies geschrieben,
Und die Antwort auf die Frage
Ist schon zweimal ausgeblieben.

Ach, er hatte seinem Oheim

Etwas Schlimmes angethan —
Denn der ewig Angepumpte
Litt nun an Verfolgungswahn!

Um des guten Onkels Leiden,

Möglichst gründlich zu beenden,
Ließ der Arzt »So sollt ihr leben!«
Jenem Neffen übersenden.

Und der Neffe, den es rührte,

Hat die Lehren wohl beachtet,
Hat fortan aus vielen Gründen,
Suff und Völlerei verachtet.

Und so ward durch Kneipps Belehrung,

Wenn auch mittelbar, allmählich
Der bedauernswerte Onkel,
Wieder ganz vertrauensselig.
Wassersucht.
Wohl dem, der bei der Wassersucht
Die Hilfe rasch beim Wasser sucht!
Die Wassersucht ist ein Gebrest,
Das sich sehr leicht vergleichen läßt
Mit Pfützen, die bei langem Regen
Entsteh’n auf Äckern oder Wegen:
Die abgestand’ne faule Pfütze
Ist niemals einem Wachstum nütze!
So wird als wäss’riger Morast
Uns oft der eig’ne Leib zur Last.
Doch wenn das Leiden nicht zu alt,
Hilft Wickel, Bad und Waschung bald.
Der nervöse Zeitungsleser.
Das war doch in der letzten Zeit,
Fast nimmer auszuhalten,
Die Schimpferei und Wühlerei
In allen Zeitungsspalten!

Man hangt und bangt in Schwebepein,

Inmitten all der Wahlen
Des Zentrums und des Deutschfreisinns
Und gar der Sozialen!

Die Lärmetrommeln dröhnen da,

Und dort die Wahldrommeten,
Aus Goethe’s Werken wird citiert,
Und alten Bismarckreden!

Drum rat’ ich, rasch nach jedem Blatt

Die Kleider abzuwerfen,
Zum Rücken-, Kopf- und Oberguß,
Das hilft den armen Nerven.
Schlußworte.
Doch »Nicht zu viel!« sprach Solon schon,
Der große Siebenweise.
Und Recht hat er! Zur Seite drum
Die Leier leg’ ich leise.

Nur einmal mit der Rechten noch,

Zum letzten Schlußakkorde,
Greif’ ich ins gold’ne Saitenspiel
Und singe diese Worte:

»Du Schwachbein, Dünnblut, Grillenfreund,

»Verlaß den dumpfen Ofen
»Und stähle dich, wie Meister Kneipp
»In seinem Wörishofen!«
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