Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France

Abstract

Average Wages for All Types of Servant, Regime) were umbrella terms that covered people with a wide variety of social backgrounds, incomes, and occupations.Servants included teamsters, musi cians, 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-Fran�ois-Joseph L'Escureul de Ia Touche, Intendant et contro/leur-general de /'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 em ployer." 14 But in Old Regime France domestic service was considered an etat rather than a metier: 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, Furetiere's Dictionnaire universe/, published in 170 I, stated that a servant was "a member of a household, under a household head," a definition echoed by the great Encyclopedie, 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 member ship 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 so ciety, performing many important functions which it later lost. 16The house hold, 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 pro vided 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 establish ments 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 domes tiques, 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. 17Thus 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.) 6The Servants ' World: Household and HouseworkIt is necessary to overcome the repugnance and to dissipate the boredom which the reading of these writings [about the house hold and its organization] inspires.One must descend to details so ignoble that my pen would have fallen from my hand, had I not felt that the result would justify the undertaking.-Abbe Gregoire, De la Domesticite chez /es peuples anciens et modernesWhat was it like to be a domestic ser vant in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France?What attracted so many people to the occupation?We ourselves would, I think, find servanthood so distasteful that we find it hard to believe that anyone given another choice, would willingly have become a domestic.But the menu peuple of Old Regime France saw the occupation in a very different light.To them it was, in terms of its work, living conditions, and financial rewards one of the more desirable employment opportunities. Servants' WorkDuring the Old Regime, servants' work had three basic characteristics.It was, first of all, in comparison with other occupations, extremely unspecial ized.Tanners cured leather and cobblers made shoes, but servants were ex pected to be what one sixteenth-century poet called them: "varlets a tout faire" and "chambrieres a tout faire,"' jacks and jills of all trades, ready to turn their hands to a wide variety of tasks if the need arose.Secondly, the rhythm of servants' work was extremely erratic.Usually short bursts of frantic activity punctuated long stretches of comparative idle ness.Of course, uneven work rhythms were characteristic of all labor in the preindustrial period, before the Industrial Revolution made workers adapt to 23'/