Free Daily Life During the French Revolution by James M. Anderson Page A

and the plethora of internal customs
houses. Further, they found that there was no national language either spoken
or understood by a great many of the illiterate inhabitants and no uniform
system of administration, laws, taxes, weights and measures.
    Although French people did not seem to travel much within
their own country, those who did, with interests different from those of
foreign visitors, have also left accounts that help portray the daily life of
the time. About half of the members of the Convention were sent out on
assignments to the departments (administrative districts) or to the army, and
some reports of their missions are available. For many, such as a
representative from Paris, a journey to the south was like going to a foreign
land.
     
     
    MODES OF TRANSPORT
     
    Major rivers in France, such as the Seine, Loire, Saône,
Rhône, and Garonne, had long been used as a means of transportation. To
supplement the river system and move cargo, some important canals were built in
the seventeenth century, including the Brienne, Orléans, and Languedoc. The Canal
du Midi, running from Toulouse to Béziers, made it possible to link the
Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean through southwest France. One could
travel on riverboats pulled by horses along the banks that in Paris embarked
from the Palais Royal or the bridge of Saint Paul. Arrangements for private
travel on commercial barges or riverboats over long distances seemed not to
appeal to many who, for whatever reason, preferred to go by horse and carriage.
For this manner of travel, the transportation system was in place, with
scheduled stops and prices. One could, for example, go to the Royal General
Bureau of Coaches and Freight and book a trip to anywhere in the realm.
    By the late eighteenth century, the region of the Ile de
France had the best-constructed roads in Europe, greatly admired by foreigners.
However, when traveling by horse drawn vehicles over large distances, travelers
found that the roads sometimes became just bumpy tracks and that the journey
was slow and tedious. Going to Bordeaux or Strasbourg from Paris took six days;
traveling to Toulouse took seven or eight days, and to Marseille, nine days.
    Most of the time, it was impossible to move heavy loads
conveniently outside the well-paved postal roads, and, according to Adam Smith,
to travel on horseback was difficult. Mules, he thought, were the only
conveyance that could be trusted.
    Despite the fact that roads in some places were excellent
by the standards of the day, others, such as the road from Aix to Marseille,
were, in the words of Mary Berry, “abominable”; she wrote, “The narrow wheels
of the loaded charrettes of this country would spoil the best road in a short
time, and the more so from the heavy weights being placed upon two instead of
upon four wheels.”
    In 1780, the countess of Carlisle had a similar complaint
when she wrote from Montpellier that after heavy rains she was compelled to
delay her journey to Lyon, maybe for a month, and that the traffic in carts cut
the roads to pieces.
    Other travelers, among them Arthur Young, found very little
traffic on the roads; 3 Doctor Charles Burney met not a single carriage, horse,
or foot traveler between St. Omar and Paris the entire day; and the lawyer
Harry Peckman found the road from Chantilly to Calais depressing partly because
it had so little traffic. Some years earlier, the naturalist Thomas Pennant had
spent a night in a wretched inn at Ecouen, fifteen miles from Paris. There were
few people at the inn and even fewer on the road to the capital, where he saw
only one coach.
    Variations of coaches included the light, one-horse,
two-wheeled cabriolet, with a removable top and room for two passengers,
that was often used as a taxicab in the cities, as was the four-wheeled fiacre, with a high chassis for better viewing, glass windows, and room for four
people. The deluxe, four-wheeled berline, with good suspension,
comfortable