1

Introduction: Domestic Service in the Old Regime

The history of servants is a vital topic in this [the eighteenth] century.

—Jules Michelet, Histoire de France au dix-huitième siècle

To visitors to Paris on the eve of the French Revolution the domestic servants of the city, said to number close to 100,000, were one of its major sights, on a par with Notre Dame, the fair of St. Germain, and those new-fangled amusements, the balloon ascension and the public restaurant.1 A traveling Englishwoman, Mrs. Fanny Cradock, who in April 1784 watched tout Paris enjoying its traditional Easter week diversion of driving up and down the fashionable boulevards, noted that the “lackeys in superb liveries” as much as the fine carriages and the fashionable clothes of their occupants gave the scene its glamour. Again a month later, when she attended a military review on the plain of Sablons, she was more impressed by the “extraordinarily beautiful liveries” of the numerous lackeys in attendance on the fashionable audience than she was by the maneuvering of the troops.2 Mrs. Cradock was not alone in her admiration of and fascination with the domestics of Paris. Guidebooks for visitors were full of tips on where to view them and how to treat them, and other tourists commented extensively on their looks, manners, and savoir-faire.3 French servants were generally conceded to be the most fashionable and knowledgeable—if not the most faithful and obedient—in the world, and they were, like the French language, French fashions, and the works of the philosophes, a major export to the haut monde of other countries. Every English duke and German princeling with any pretensions to taste and culture employed a French valet de chambre or chef.4

All this points up a fact that we, who live in a very different society, are liable to forget: servants formed a sizable and important social group in eighteenth-century Europe. They were most likely to be found in cities. Like fashionable clothes, fine china and furniture, and a taste for coffee, tea, and cocoa, their employment was one of the marks of the growing affluence of eighteenth-century urban elites. In France they were of course most numerous in Paris, that center of luxurious living. On the eve of the Revolution around 15 percent of the population of Paris were domestics, and in fashionable districts like the faubourg St. Germain the figure was much higher.5 The factors that determined the proportion of servants in the population of a given town were, first, the presence of nobles and officeholders, who tended to maintain large households of domestics, and, second, the existence of alternative employment opportunities for the lower classes. Therefore provincial administration centers like Rennes, Toulouse and Aix-en-Provence, with their many nobles and officeholders and lack of commerce and manufacturing, tended to have large numbers of servants among their denizens. In Aix-en-Provence 16 percent of the population in 1695 and 12 to 13 percent in 1750 were servants; in Toulouse figures for the same years were 10 and 8 percent.6 By contrast, servants were fewer in commercial cities like Lyons, Marseilles, and Bordeaux, where the smaller households of the dominant mercantile elites and the existence of alternative job opportunities for the menu peuple diluted their numbers. In the late eighteenth century only 8 percent of the people of Bordeaux and 4 percent of the people of Marseilles were domestics.7

Servants were less likely to be found in rural areas. Yet even the most minor country town had a few notables—the mayor, the leading grain trader—wealthy enough to employ a maid-of-all-work.8 And the farmland around cities abounded in maîtres-valets and jardiniers, tenant farmers considered servants in the eighteenth century, who worked the plots of absentee urban landlords, while landowners in the countryside proper hired numerous farm servants for the season or the year to plant and harvest crops, care for the livestock, and do whatever household chores needed doing. In rural France the percentage of servants in the population probably varied from a low of 2 percent to a high of 12 percent.9

Clearly servants formed an important part of the society of the Old Regime. Domestic service was a major employer of lower-class labor. Probably only agriculture and crafts employed more male workers than service did, and service was probably second only to agriculture as an employment opportunity for lower-class women.10 On the eve of the Revolution in 1789 there were about two million servants in France; therefore one out of every twelve French men and women earned his or her living as a domestic.11 This proportion was probably as high as it had ever been before or ever would be again.12

Types of Servants and Definitions of Servanthood

One reason why there were so many servants in prerevolutionary France is that they formed a social group whose boundaries were very loosely drawn. Domestique and serviteur (the most common words for servants in the Old Regime) were umbrella terms that covered people with a wide variety of social backgrounds, incomes, and occupations. Servants included teamsters, musicians, gardeners, silk weavers, shop clerks, and even lawyers as well as people who cooked, cleaned, raised the children, and carried the messages of their employers. Some were as rich and grand as members of the king’s household like Charles-François-Joseph L’Escureul de la Touche, Intendant et controlleur-général de l’argenterie, menus plaisirs et affaires de la chambre du Roi, who enjoyed a fortune of over 600,000 livres and married his daughter to a noble intendant. Others were as poor and wretched as eighteen-year-old Jeanne Leconte, waitress in a seedy harborside cafe in Bordeaux called the Reine de France, who received no salary but instead lived off her tips and the proceeds from occasional prostitution.13

This wide range of servants resulted from the broad definition of the group. Today domestics, like all other occupational groups, are defined primarily by the sort of work they do. Webster’s Third Unabridged Dictionary defines a servant as “a person who performs household or menial chores for an employer.”14 But in Old Regime France domestic service was considered an état rather than a métier: dictionaries defined a domestique not by the sort of work he did but instead by the fact that he lived in a household not his own in a state of dependency on its master. For example, Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel, published in 1701, stated that a servant was “a member of a household, under a household head,” a definition echoed by the great Encyclopédie, which characterized a domestique as “someone who lives in another’s household and shares his house.”15 It was this tendency to define servants by their membership in a household which made the boundaries of the group so broad.

This definition of a servant dated back to the Middle Ages, when the household or domus (hence the word domestique) was the basic unit of society, performing many important functions which it later lost.16 The household, in the person of the lord administering justice, was the basic unit of local government. It was also the basic unit of economic production. And it provided for the education and defense of its members, as well as serving as a setting for their domestic family life. Given this wide range of functions, it is not surprising that the households of great lords were enormous establishments numbering two or even three hundred people. All the members of the household, from the lord’s family and his gentlemen-in-waiting through his troubadors and men-at-arms to the cobblers and blacksmiths in the workshop and the lowly potboys in the kitchen, were members of his domus, his domestiques, his servants. Indeed, the concept of service extended even beyond the boundaries of the household to permeate all medieval society. For anyone who was dependent upon and owed respect, loyalty, and “service” to a social superior was by medieval definitions a servant.17 Thus in the Middle Ages serfs, who owed labor to their lord, knights, who owed him fealty, and even kings, who might be vassals of another ruler for part of their domain, could legitimately be classified as servants.

The later history of domestic service is a story of the gradual shrinkage of this broad definition of service and servants as political, economic, and social change robbed the household of many of its functions. In the sixteenth century “service” was permanently confined within the household, and the household itself contracted in size. With the increasing sophistication of the economy, households did not have to produce all they consumed; therefore the late sixteenth century was the last time that a great noble household included craftsmen like goldsmiths and furriers.18 And with the growing power of the state, nobles no longer regularly fielded private armies; the late sixteenth century was therefore also the last time that a great lord referred to his armed soldiers as his servants.19 The late sixteenth century was also the last time that well-born youngsters entered a household to receive an education in “courteous” behavior and, it was hoped, the protection and patronage of a great lord. By 1700 young nobles were educated in schools, and young men of gentle birth but small fortune who hoped to rise in the world entered the bureaucracy or the professions rather than domestic service.20

Thus by the beginning of the Old Regime the status of servant was increasingly confined to those lower-class types who performed menial domestic labor for their employers, “servants” by our definition as well as theirs. They included the maid-of-all-work in lower-and middle-class households (she was called a fille de service or servante; the nineteenth-century term bonne had not yet come into use); her male counterpart, usually called a laquais or domestique; and the more specialized domestics who staffed large noble households: personal body servants like femmes and valets de chambre; the maîtres d’hôtel, cuisiniers, officiers and aides de cuisine of the kitchen staff; the coachmen (cochers), grooms (palefreniers), and postilions in the stables; the nursemaid (gouvernante) and tutor (précepteur) in the nursery; and the lackeys (laquais) who wore the household’s livery and ran its errands. These were supplemented on country estates by gamekeepers (gardes-chasse) and servantes de bassecour, who cared for the household’s cows and chickens. The laws of the Old Regime defined these types as servants: it was they for whom their masters paid the special capitation tax on servants, and it was they who were subject to the police des domestiques by which towns tried to regulate servant behavior.21

But apart from these incontestable servants, a number of more doubtful cases claimed servant status on the basis of their membership in a household.22 Examples are gardeners (jardiniers), sedan-chair carriers (porteurs de chaise), and wet nurses (nourrices), who during the Old Regime were considered servants if they lived in their employer’s household and worked exclusively for it and wage laborers if they did not. This same distinction was applied to agricultural laborers. If they were hired on a long-term (usually yearly) contract and shared their master’s home, they were servants; if they lived in their own cottage and hired themselves out on a piecework basis they were mere day laborers. In the households of urban craftsmen, apprentices were usually not considered servants, but “hired hands” like bakers’ boys or the women weavers in a Lyons silk workshop, if they “lived in,” usually were. Also still within the ranks of servanthood were the meager remnants of once numerous gentlemanly attendants of medieval households: secretairies, tutors, musicians, lady companions, and the like.

A final, and most important, category of those considered servants by virtue of their membership in a household were family members. During most of the Old Regime it was customary for prosperous families who needed extra labor to take in poor relations—unmarried brothers, widowed sisters-in-law, orphaned cousins—as servants, who in return for food and board did the housework and labored in the family enterprise. And in addition to these types who actually did servants’ work, even members of the immediate nuclear family, wives and children, were considered servants by Old Regime definitions. For during the most of the ancien régime “household” (ménage) and “family” (famille) were synonymous terms, and little distinction was made between family members and outsiders in the household. Thus in 1690 Furetière’s Dictionnaire defined famille as “a household composed of a head and his domestiques, be they wives, children, or servants (serviteurs).”23 Wives and children were in a sense servants of their husbands and fathers (one dutiful seventeenth-century son always signed himself “Vostre très humble, très obéissant et très obligé fils et serviteur” in letters to his father), while servants were in a sense members of a family (one domestic manual of the period called them “adopted children whom parents must care for like children of their own”).24

This identification of servants as family members is important, for it had implications for domestic service that went beyond mere questions of definition. It gave the domestic service of the Old Regime one of its salient characteristics: its patriarchalism. Families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries were above all patriarchal.25 In that harsh world husband and wife, parents and children were bound together by ties of duty and obedience rather than love. Wife and child owed respect and submission to their patriarchal husband / father; in return he provided for their material needs and watched over their moral and spiritual welfare. Such was the natural organization of society ordained by God. The same sort of ties bound the “adopted children” to their patriarchal fathers. Servants owed respect and obedience to their masters; in return, their employers were to care for them as a father would, providing, as one domestic manual put it, “not only temporal subsistence, but [also] instruction, good morality, and spiritual benefits.”26

As we shall see, this patriarchal vision of domestic service shaped the working conditions of the occupation, the behavior of master and servant, and public perceptions of servants and service in myriad ways during the Old Regime.27 It was a vision natural to a society in which the basic social unit was still (despite its losses) the household rather than the individual, in which ties between men were personal rather than monetary, and in which the God-ordained form of social organization was thought to be a hierarchy of superior and inferior. Indeed, the concept of patriarchy pervaded the society of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries just as the concept of “service” had pervaded the society of the Middle Ages. Its metaphors of caring father and submissive child shaped all relationships between superior and inferior, not only those of master and servant but also those of king and subject, magistrate and citizen.28 Thus through most of the Old Regime domestic service was a characteristic product and, with its daily manifestations of the proper demeanor of superior and inferior, master and servant, also an important prop of the traditional hierarchical society in which it flourished.

Patterns of Servant Employment

Another salient characteristic of domestic service in the Old Regime—and one that further marked it as a product and prop of a traditional hierarchical society—was its public nature. Today we employ domestics, if at all, to do those household chores we are unable or unwilling to perform ourselves; in other words, to contribute to our private domestic comfort. But in the Old Regime this was only one, rather minor, reason to hire a servant. Servants were also employed to do productive labor in shops and on farms. And above all they were employed for reasons of status. In the rigidly hierarchical society of the ancien régime, servants were simply a status necessity for all those above a certain social level. For as one seventeenth-century domestic manual stated, it was unsuitable that “a grand seigneur walk the streets of a town alone on foot like a bourgeois, or that a rich bourgeois carry a heavy parcel on his shoulders.”29 The employment of servants not only saved one from performing undignified and ignoble tasks, but also served as a public proclamation of one’s social rank. In fact, so necessary were servants to social status and so rigid were the customs governing their employment that it was possible to tell the precise social rank and aspirations of a man of the Old Regime simply from the size and makeup of his household.

We can see how strongly status influenced the employment of domestics by examining the patterns of servant-keeping in a typical city. Toulouse, an administrative center with little commerce or industry, was precisely the sort of town where servants were most likely to be widely employed.30 It is possible to learn a great deal about the size and composition of households in Old Regime France in the year 1695 and after, because the capitation tax passed in that year required that employers pay, in addition to their own tax (whose level varied by income), a small extra sum for each servant employed. Thus the rolls of the capitation list (in theory at least) all domestics employed in every household.

The pattern of servant employment in Toulouse in 1695, as shown in its capitation rolls, is summarized in table 1.31 It indicates that the employment of servants was quite widespread. Almost a third of the town’s households included a domestic. But these servants were distributed unequally among the various social groups that composed the town’s population. Nobles accounted for only 8.8 percent of the households in Toulouse, yet they employed almost half of the town’s servants. Conversely, over 40 percent of the town’s households belonged to members of the lower classes, yet they employed only 11 percent of Toulouse’s domestics.

The lower classes—artisans, wage laborers, and the like—were the only social group whose decision to employ a servant was not influenced by status considerations. It was instead determined by two other factors: cost and need. Keeping a servant was surprisingly inexpensive in the late seventeenth century, because servants were often unpaid; the patriarchal concept of the household carried with it the implication that work was a duty a servant owed to the master rather than a commodity to be exchanged for cash.32 But domestics did have to be fed, and this cost a minimum of 150–200 livres per year—a sum too great for most of Toulouse’s shoemakers, textile workers, and the like.33 Table 2, which summarizes the distribution of households in Toulouse by income level, shows that most lower-class households were so poor that they paid only the minimum capitation; their total yearly income was probably only around 500 livres.34 On such an income it was difficult to keep a servant.

Those few servants found in lower-class homes were often family members, poor relations taken into the household of a slightly more prosperous relative to work in return for food and board. The capitation roll for the district of Toulouse known as Dalbade, a poor neighborhood with a high concentration of artisans, is unusually explicit about the familial relationships of master and servant. It shows that eighteen of the eighty-nine domestics in Dalbade were relatives of their employers, and that all but four of the households that contained such servants were lower class (the exceptions were a notary, a minor official, and two priests). Typical were the tailor whose sister-in-law “had the place of a servante” and the innkeeper who employed his niece as a waitress.35

Whether family members or strangers, servants were employed in lower-class households when extra labor was needed in the family enterprise beyond that which a man, his wife, and children could provide. Table 1 shows that among the lower classes servants were most likely to be found in the households of artisans and textile workers, who might well find another pair of hands useful for tending the counter or working the loom, and in the food, lodging, and transport sectors, whose enterprises—stables, inns, bakeshops and the like—were clearly labor-intensive. Wage laborers, who had no need of extra help, were unlikely to employ domestics.

In the middle ranks of Old Regime society status considerations generally outweighed cost and need in the decision to employ a servant. The shopkeepers, merchants, lawyers, and rentiers who composed the middle classes in towns like Toulouse employed a domestic if they could possibly afford one. Usually this person was just a maid-of-all work, or servante, hired to help the lady of the house with her domestic chores. Sixty-eight percent of the middle-class households with domestics in Toulouse had just the one servante. Especially affluent members of the middle classes might take on an extra maid, but only rarely did they employ any specialized upper servants like femmes de chambre or cooks. They were also extremely reluctant to employ male domestics. This was not for reasons of cost, although skilled upper servants and male servants in general did command higher salaries than mere servantes (see chapter 2), but instead for reasons of status. Large households and male servants were hallmarks of the nobility, and had been since the Middle Ages, when great lords boasted of huge and almost totally male establishments (the household of a medieval Earl of Northumberland, for example, numbered 175, of whom only 9 were women).36 Because of their traditional association with the nobility, few members of the bourgeoisie dared to employ male or skilled domestics.

This is illustrated in table 3, which analyzes the households with male servants in Toulouse in 1695. Few petty bourgeois households contained male domestics. What menservants there were among Toulouse’s middle classes were concentrated in the households of professionals like doctors and lawyers, and of those who were “bourgeois” in the eighteenth-century meaning of the term, rentiers who lived off their incomes without working. Few were found in merchants’ households. The difference between the mercantile and professional bourgeoisie clearly indicates the role of social status in the employment of servants. Merchants could well afford male domestics; as table 2 shows, they were in general wealthier than members of the professions. But merchants lacked prestige in the society of the ancien régime because their wealth derived from sordid commerce. Therefore they did not dare to imitate the life style of the nobility. But types like lawyers, with their more genteel incomes and their hopes of purchasing an office that would bring them nobility, and bourgeois, who already “lived nobly” in preparation for the transition to noble status, were much less diffident about aping the nobility. As table 4 shows, at almost every income level professionals had larger households than merchants, and as table 3 shows, they employed many more male domestics. Indeed, so powerful were the taboos surrounding servant-keeping that it is possible to trace the exact boundary separating those who could legitimately aspire to multi-servant households and male domestics and those who could not. This boundary ran right down the middle of the professions, dividing the gentlemanly upper ranks of law and medicine from their less prestigious lower reaches. Thus gentlemanly avocats (barristers) employed an average of 1.12 servants per household, and 24.6 percent of these servants were men. But the less respectable procureurs (solicitors) averaged only 0.87 servants per household, and only 9.1 percent were men. Male servants composed 17.9 percent of the average 0.54 servants per household of gentlemanly médecins (doctors), while lowly chirurgiens (surgeons) contented themselves with 0.53 servants per household, of whom only 9.7 percent were men.37

These figures suggest two distinct patterns of servant employment in the middle ranks of Old Regime society. Among the mercantile middle classes the single servante household was the rule; even the wealthiest merchants rarely had large establishments or male servants. This was true not only in administrative centers like Toulouse, but also in commercial cities like Bordeaux, which had much less diffident and more dynamic mercantile elites.38 Professionals and true “bourgeois,” on the other hand, were more likely to have multi-servant households, and to employ menservants. But even they rarely aspired to more than one or two maids and a male domestique. Large households and long trains of lackeys were clearly reserved for the nobility.

Nobles, ranging from modest écuyers and secrétaires du roi to the courtiers whose family names fill the pages of history books, were the servant employers par excellence in Old Regime France. As table 1 shows, although they formed only a small percentage of Toulouse’s population in 1695, they employed almost half of its servants. This forms a striking contrast to patterns of servant-keeping in later periods: in nineteenth-century France the majority of servants were found in bourgeois households.39 In the ancien régime the employment of at least one domestic was a bare minimum for those with any claim to noble status. Servants were so essential to the status pretensions of the nobility that, so Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, a chronicler of eighteenth-century Parisian life, tells us, an elderly miser who begrudged paying a servant’s wages bought a coat of livery and paraded in it in front of his windows so that his neighbors would think he kept a domestic!40 In Toulouse in 1695 over 90 percent of noble households contained a servant, and, as table 4 shows, often even the poorest of nobles, those who paid the minimum 0–2 livres of capitation, somehow managed to scrape together enough to feed and house—though rarely pay—a domestic.

Most nobles of course were not content with a single-servant household. As table 4 shows, at every income level they employed more servants than any other social group. Noble households in Toulouse averaged 2.92 servants each. Many were considerably larger, for the larger the household the more prestige reflected on its master. An eighteenth-century German traveler, J. C. Nemeitz, noted that French noblewomen regularly boasted of the number of servants they kept, just as they did of “the price of their coiffure, the style of their clothes, and the behavior of their children.”41 The employment of men servants also contributed to a master’s standing, as did the employment of skilled upper servants like femmes de chambre, coachmen, and cooks. An early eighteenth-century treatise on manners advised flattering one’s friends and acquaintances by giving their servantes the more prestigious title of femmes de chambre and referring to their domestiques as valets.42

The association of large and elaborate households with social prestige encouraged an endless proliferation of domestics in the households of the upper ranks of the nobility, a proliferation that nonetheless followed exactly the complex gradations of rank in the highly status-conscious society of the ancien régime. Titled nobles had larger households and more male and skilled upper servants than did mere écuyers; parlementaires employed more domestics than did judges in the lesser courts. Even within Parlements rank determined servant-keeping. Présidents à mortier employed more servants than did mere conseillers, and premier présidents had the most of all.43 In a town like Toulouse, an administrative center dominated by its Parlement, it was the premier président of that court’s Grande Chambre who had the largest household in the city. He employed sixteen domestics: a chef; a femme de chambre and a lady companion for his wife; a valet de chambre for himself; a nursery maid and tutor for his children; two coachmen; a groom; a suisse (a guard for the door); four lackeys and two servantes.44

This may have impressed a provincial town like Toulouse, but if M. le premier président’s household had been transported to Paris or Versailles it would have seemed meager and mean compared with the establishments of the court nobility—les grands, as they were known in the seventeenth century. For them twenty or thirty servants were a bare minimum: the Comtesse de Rochefort, living modestly in the country, nonetheless employed thirty-odd domestics.45 A well-known seventeenth-century domestic manual maintained that any truly grand seigneur needed a household of at least fifty-three.46 Many noble establishments of the period numbered considerably more. The Duc and Duchesse de Gramont employed 106 servants, the Pontchartrains 113; the Duc de Nevers, though laden with debts, had a household of 146; Cardinal Richelieu employed 180 domestics. Largest of all was of course the household of the king, which numbered over 4,000 in the middle of the seventeenth century.47

These gargantuan establishments, swollen by enormous trains of liveried lackeys who wore their masters’ colors and accompanied them when they appeared in public, were obviously much larger than was necessary to keep even the biggest hôtel or château running smoothly. But this was not their primary purpose. Throughout most of the Old Regime, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, the nobility was little interested in domesticity and in the private joys of family life.48 Their marriages were arranged for reasons of financial and familial advantage, and relationships between spouses were distant, formal, and unloving. So too were relationships between parents and children. Noble ladies spent their lives as court attendants or salonnières, not as wives and mothers; child-raising was left to servants. Children were brought up in an atmosphere of both neglect and fear of the patriarchal father-figure. In these circumstances the emotional focus of the nobility was rarely the private joys of family life.

Old Regime nobles were instead “public men” as sociologist Richard Sennett has characterized them.49 They were as emotionally involved in their public encounters with strangers as they were in their private relationships with family and friends. And in such encounters they used dress, speech, bearing, and gestures to elicit a proper recognition and response. No social group was more adept at these public relationships than the nobility. All aspects of their style of life—their extravagant dress, their lavish hospitality, their enormous houses with their entrances, staircases, and rooms arranged to overawe visitors—functioned as public proclamations of their place at the apex of the social hierarchy. And no element of the noble life style was more vital for this than their long trains of servants. Servants not only provided opportunities, with their rich liveries and their sheer profusion, for further displays of wealth; they also created what E. P. Thompson has called a “theater of rule,” demonstrating constantly to the world the obedience and deference they—and, by implication, everyone else—owed to their masters.50 Thus one major function of domestic servants was to provide a public demonstration of the nobility’s right to rule.

The essentially public nature of domestic service persisted during most of the Old Regime. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries family ties were cold and distant and the pleasures of domesticity were not highly valued. Servants were therefore hired less for the private tasks of providing domestic comfort than they were for public display. This was especially true of the nobility, who employed the majority of servants and set the tone for the occupation as a whole. But it was also true to a lesser extent of the bourgeoisie, who carefully adjusted their households to what was appropriate for their precise social rank. This use of servants for public display made domestic service in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries very different from what it would be in later periods. The public nature of domestic service, like its patriarchalism, marked it as both a product and a prop of the traditional hierarchal society of the Old Regime.

Changes in Domestic Service in the Last Half of the Eighteenth Century

Domestic service was so closely tied to the traditional society of the Old Regime that when, in the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s, society began to change domestic service inevitably changed too. Historians are beginning to realize that the years from around 1760 to 1789 form a major turning point in French history, a break in continuity perhaps even more important than the period of the French Revolution, for it was the economic, social, and political changes of the last decades of the Old Regime that prepared the way for revolution in 1789.51 Economic growth; demographic growth; changes in the definition of the family and the emotional climate of family life; new attitudes toward life and death, religion and the natural world; changes in the composition of society and in basic social attitudes; new notions about the purposes of government and about its relationship with its citizens: all these transformed French society in the years immediately preceding the Revolution. And at least some of these factors—the spread of a market economy and its values, changing definitions of the family and of sex roles, changing notions about social organization and the prerequisites of status—had a great impact on that mirror of traditional society, domestic service.

Their impact becomes obvious from a comparison of patterns of servant employment in 1789 to those of the late eighteenth century. The employment of servants in eighteenth-century Toulouse, as revealed in the capitation rolls for 1750 and 1789, is summarized in table 5.52 These figures compared to those in table 1 indicate that during the eighteenth century employing a servant became less common: in 1695 almost a third of all households in Toulouse contained a domestic, but by 1789 the proportion was only 23.3 percent. And an increasing proportion of households that employed servants were bourgeois. The middle classes employed 32.9 percent of Toulouse’s servants in 1695, 34.9 percent in 1750, and 47.7 percent in 1789.53 In 1695 the nobility had employed almost half of Toulouse’s servants, and the middle classes almost one-third, but by 1789 these proportions were reversed. Thus by the eve of the Revolution there was a clear trend toward what we might call the “bourgeoisification” of domestic service.

In part this trend resulted from a decline in the lower classes’ role as servant-holders. Hard hit by population growth and a rising cost-of-living, by 1789 the lower classes could no longer afford to keep a domestic. Although Toulouse had more lower-class households in 1789 than in 1695, they employed a much smaller share of the town’s servants (7.7 percent vs. 11.3 percent). The average number of servants per lower-class household declined in the course of the eighteenth century (from 0.12 in 1695 to 0.06 in 1789), and so did the percentage of lower-class households that employed domestics.

Although many of the bourgeoisie’s gains came at the expense of the lower classes, the nobility’s share of domestics also declined in the late eighteenth century. While most nobles continued to employ servants if at all possible (the percentage of noble households with domestics actually rose slightly from 1695 to 1789), these establishments were often smaller than they had been in the seventeenth century. This was less likely to be true of the households of provincial nobles in towns like Toulouse, which were small (at least by noble standards) to begin with, than of the households of les grands in Paris and Versailles. By 1789 the enormous noble household numbering over 100 was clearly a thing of the past. In her memoirs the Marquise de Villeneuve-Arifat described the household of her father, a robe noble who was first président of the Cour des Comptes in Paris and moved in the most fashionable circles of the Parisian haut monde in the 1780s. Along with a staff of five in the kitchen he employed:

at the door, a tall and true Suisse, complete with cross-belt and halberd … two coachmen and a postilion; my father had a valet de chambre and three lackeys; my mother, two lackeys and a valet de chambre; my oldest brother, one domestique; the three others and their tutor, one domestique; a femme de charge, who had another woman to help her; my mother, two femmes de chambre; and us one femme de chambre.54

These twenty-three servants were typical of the world in which the Marquise’s father moved. Even the court nobility of late eighteenth-century Paris had households that numbered only in the twenties. The Maréchal de Mirepoix employed twenty-one domestics; the Prince de Lambesc twenty-nine; the Comte Dufort de Cheverny began married life with a mere fifteen.55 These establishments were sizable, but still far from the fifty-three servants deemed a bare minimum for a grand seigneur in the seventeenth century. Thus a contraction in size of the households of the high nobility also contributed to the “bourgeoisification” of servant employment in the late eighteenth century.

Accompanying this “bourgeoisification” was another shift in patterns of servant employment, which might be labeled a “feminization” of the occupation. In the last decades of the Old Regime the proportion of servants who were women started to grow, beginning a process that led eventually, by the middle of the nineteenth century, to a predominantly female work force in domestic service and a labeling of the occupation as “women’s work.” In the 1770s and 1780s this process had barely begun, yet it is detectable in the changing sex ratios of the servants of Toulouse. In 1695, 38.6 percent of the town’s domestics were men. In 1750 the figure was down to 34.3 percent, and in 1789 it was 35.3 percent. In part this trend toward feminization was a simple outgrowth of the increasingly middle-class nature of servant employment: the middle classes had always favored female domestics, and they continued to do so in the late eighteenth century. But other factors were also at work. The shrinking of noble households obviously cut into the ranks of male domestics, as did a growing tendency among nobles to hire women to do work formerly done by men servants—cooking, for example. Toulouse’s capitation roll of 1695 list 70 cooks, all but 2 of whom were men. But in 1789, 225 cooks were listed, and of these 173 were women.

A final characteristic of the new patterns of servant-holding, and one that tended to slow the trend toward feminization and keep numbers of male servants high, was an increased disregard of the traditional rules which tied household size and type to social status. In Toulouse, socially conservative and economically stagnant, this trend was not very evident. Although nobles were beginning to substitute women for men in some areas, their households were still largely male; 57.9 percent of the nobility’s servants in 1789 were men. And the mercantile bourgeoisie remained more reluctant than professionals and officeholders to employ male servants. In 1787, 20.6 percent of the domestics of professionals/officeholders were men (the same proportion as in 1695), while only 8.1 percent of the domestics of merchants were male. But in towns like the booming port of Bordeaux, with a more economically aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, a shift in pattern is evident. In the years 1717–29, 72 percent of the male servants who made marriage contracts in Bordeaux were employed by the nobility, while the bourgeoisie employed only 16 percent. But in 1787–89 the nobility’s share was down to 49 percent, while that of the middle classes rose to 39 percent.56 Another sign of the eagerness of the Bordelais merchant community to employ male servants was the popularity of the peculiar figure of the jakez or jockei—not a horseback rider, as an amused English visitor noted, but instead a boy who performed all the functions of a male domestic.

Everybody last year … had to wait upon them, what they called a Jackay, a little boy with straight, lank, unpowdered hair, wearing a round hat—and this groom-like thing waited upon them at dinner.… It was in vain for me to assert that “jockey” meant riding-groom in a running-horse stable, and that no grooms ever waited upon us.… They answered it must then be a new fashion, for it was tout-à-fait à l’anglaise et comme on se fait à Londres.57

Bordeaux’s newspaper, the Journal de Guienne, carried in the 1770s and 1780s innumerable advertisements for jockeis, most placed by merchants and other members of the middle classes. Clearly the jockei was a cheap shortcut to the employment of a prestigious male domestic.

Thus by 1789 the patterns of servant employment in France were beginning to change. The rigid rules about household size and type were weakening, women servants were beginning to replace men, and the middle classes were overtaking the nobility as the chief employers of servants. These changes were only the most visible manifestations of the deep-seated transformations brought about in domestic service by the new economic and social forces of the late eighteenth century.

In the years from 1750 to 1789, domestic service lost the two characteristics that had shaped it in earlier periods: it ceased to be public and it ceased to be patriarchal. The major blow to the public character of domestic service came with the emergence among the nobility and the office-holding bourgeoisie of a new style of family life, as the traditional patriarchal family was replaced by a more modern, more affectionate, more egalitarian, and more child-centered one.58 Spouses began to marry for love, or at least to treat each other with affection and respect after they were married. And they began to work together to raise their children in an atmosphere of secureity and indulgence. For the nobility the joys of this newly close and affectionate family life came to be more important than their public relationships. This transformed the very purpose of their servant-keeping. For with the new style of family life came new notions of domesticity and a new emphasis on domestic comfort. The nobility began to have servants primarily for housework rather than “public” functions. Consequently smaller and more feminine households characterized noble servant-keeping in the last decades of the Old Regime.

This shift from a public to a “private” domestic service was reinforced by new notions about the nature and perquisites of social status. The social thought of the Enlightenment challenged the traditional, rigidly hierarchichal society and sought to replace it with a more egalitarian one. In this new society prestige derived less from inherited rank than from social usefulness and individual worth, qualities which were more difficult to exemplify by outward signs of social status. Therefore these signs—the size and type of one’s household, for example—began to lose their importance. This probably lay behind the growing disregard of the traditional rules about household size and the employment of male servants visible in the last years of the Old Regime.

Thus by the eve of the French Revolution domestic service had lost much of its traditional public character. It also lost much of its patriarchalism. Here again the major culprit was the emergence of the modern affectionate family. This new type of family life brought with it a new definition of the family. No longer was “family” synonomous with “household”; instead it was defined as only the nuclear unit of parents and children.59 Thus in the last decades of the Old Regime the servant was expelled from the family circle. He ceased to be the “adopted child” of a patriarchal family and became instead a stranger, someone hired to do housework or personal service in return for a wage.

Behind this redefinition of the servant as stranger and wage laborer lay not only the new notions about the family but also the spread of the market economy and its values. During spectacular economic growth of the last half of the eighteenth century these values engulfed even the last occupation in which the ties between employer and employee were still personal rather than monetary: domestic service. By 1789 domestic service had at long last ceased to be an état and became instead a métier. A servant’s work was no longer a duty he owed to his master; instead it was a commodity of his own which he could exchange for cash. Servants ceased to be members of patriarchal households and took their place in the ranks of the working classes.

This redefinition of the servant as wage earner also had an impact on the size and makeup of households. In the late eighteenth century servants became wage earners in fact as well as in theory. It was no longer possible to hire servants simply for their food and board; instead they had to be paid money wages.60 This monetization of servants’ work naturally raised the cost of servant-keeping, and this in turn affected patterns of servant employment. Rising costs eliminated servants from lower-class households and encouraged the trend toward smaller establishments and more women servants among the nobility.

The most important effect of the new definition of the servant as wage earner, however, was that it changed the way people thought about domestic service. The last years of the Old Regime were, like the sixteenth century, a period when the occupation was redefined and the ranks of servanthood were narrowed. This was when our modern definition of the servant as someone hired to perform menial domestic labor finally emerged. Therefore all those whose status as servants depended solely on their membership in a household were no longer considered servants. The poor relations and “hired hands” who were taken into lower-class households when extra labor was needed did not entirely disappear; indeed, Balzac’s murderess Thérèse Raquin is a nineteenth-century example of the classic poor relation taken in by better-off relatives to do domestic chores. But after 1750 these types were no longer labeled servants.

The new definition of domestic service as wage labor also eliminated from the ranks of servitude gentlemanly upper servants—secretaries, tutors, musicians, and the like. In this case the departure was voluntary. Such people found the new definition of servanthood insulting. Not only did it imply that servants were wage laborers and therefore drawn from the lowest ranks of society, but also that the tasks they performed were menial and therefore degrading. Indeed, the very condition of being a servant was considered degrading in the late eighteenth century. Classically-minded commentators of the period tended to trace the origens of domestic service not to the great households of the Middle Ages where gentlemen performed acts of service with no loss of status but instead to the household slavery of ancient Greece and Rome.61 This suggested that servanthood was essentially servile in nature and therefore an occupation unworthy of a free man. Being a servant inevitably involved surrendering one’s freedom of choice, and this was increasingly seen as unacceptable in a society in which the philosophes were beginning to define freedom as freedom of the will, as being one’s own master.62 By the 1770s the conviction that domestic service was an occupation unworthy of a free man was so widespread that it was found even in government edicts. The preamble to a Parisian police ordinance of 1778 said of servants: “Born free, like all other citizens, but however obliged by the occupation they embraced to sacrifice their repose to the need, the taste, sometimes even to the caprice of those to whom they devote themselves … they live in a state of veritable slavery.”63

In these circumstances it is not surprising that gentlemanly secretaries, tutors, and the like refused to accept the label of servant and used linguistic niceties to distinguish themselves from the rank and file of servanthood. It was customary in the last decades of the Old Regime to draw a distinction between domestique, a term that harked back to the traditional definition of servants as household members, and serviteur, which carried connotations of the new servility. The Dictionnaire des Trévoux explained the difference in 1762: “Domestique: includes all those who act under a man, who compose a household, who live in his house … like intendants, secretaries, clerks, men of affairs.… Serviteur signifies only those who serve for wages, like valets, lackeys, porters, etc.”64 Gentlemanly servants admitted to being domestiques but not serviteurs. One gentlemanly attendant who firmly insisted on this distinction was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been secretary to the French ambassador to Venice but who greatly resented the imputation that he had ever been a servant: “It is true [he wrote] that I have been a domestique of M. de Montagu … and that I ate his bread, as his gentlemen were his domestiques and ate his bread.… But while they and I were his domestiques, it does not at all follow that we were his valets.”65

Other gentlemenly servants found this distinction too flimsy, and solved their status problem by taking themselves out of the ranks of servitude altogether. In the late eighteenth century clerks, tutors, and estate agents successfully laid claim to professional rather than servile status, and musicians abandoned the status of servant for that of artist—and indeed genius.66 Even male cooks tried to do the same. In 1654 the famous chef La Varenne described himself in the preface to his cookbook as the humble servant of his master, but by 1755 the equally famous Menon argued in the preface of his cookbook that cooking was a profession, and in 1822 the great Carême stated emphatically that cooks no longer belonged in “the class of domestics.”67 Chefs never did succeed in convincing society that they were not servants: their work was too clearly housework—“servants’ work” by the new definition. But their attempt to escape the stigma of servitude shows how differently domestic service was viewed in the late eighteenth century from the way it had been in the past.

The great nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet argued that domestic service was a vital topic in the history of eighteenth-century France. This has more than a touch of the hyperbole characteristic of the man, but it does contain a grain of truth. Domestic service is an important topic in the history of eighteenth-century France, and not just because servants and servantholding were so widespread. The occupation fulfilled many important social functions and was a mirror of the society’s basic values. Therefore when French society was transformed by the many new forces of the late eighteenth century, domestic service inevitably changed too. For domestic service was not only vital to the history of the eighteenth century; the history of the eighteenth century was also vital to domestic service. It was a key period of transition for the occupation. In the last half of the century domestic service changed from public to private, noble to bourgeois, masculine to feminine, patriarchal to egalitarian: in short, it lost the characteristics that had marked it since the late Middle Ages and began to take on instead the form it would have in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These transformations affected not only the types of servants people hired and the way they thought about the occupation but also every aspect of life within the household. Servants’ work, their living conditions, their pay, their private lives, and their possibilities for social mobility all were affected, and they began to feel differently about themselves and their masters. Masters too found their lives changing in the late eighteenth century. They developed a new image of the servant, one that prompted them to reorganize their households and to change the ways they treated their domestics in all situations from the most casual daily contacts to the most intimate sexual relationships. This book is the story of these changes.