Gambling in Revolutionary Paris--The PalMs Royal: 1789-1838 Russell T. Barnhart
By the revolution of 1789, the four-story, quadrangular Palais Royal in Paris had become the most glittering tourist center of Europe, with 180 shops and cafes in its ground floor arcades. By 1791, its basement and secondary story contained over 100 separate, illicit gambling operations featuring the most popular dice and card games. The mania for gambling had been transferred from defunct, monarchical Versailles to the thriving, bourgeois Palais Royal, where the five main gaming clubs throbbed from noon till midnight. During the Revolution, Prince Talleyrand won 30,000 francs at one club, and after Waterloo in 1815, Marshal Blucher lost 1,500,000 francs in one night at another. To bring the situation under control and raise taxes for the state, in 1806 Napoleon legalized the main clubs, which from 1819 to 1837 grossed an enormous 137 million francs. When the anti-gambling forces triumphed in 1837 and the clubs were closed down, the National Guard had to be called out to evict the mobs of gamblers who refused to leave the tables. Dramatic reports from Revolutionary police raids, and quotations from the memoirs of humorous French gamblers and shocked foreign visitors, provide anecdotal illustrations of the 49 years during which the Palais Royal was the most intriguing and picturesque gambling mecca of E u r o p e - a n d probably of the world.
INTRODUCTION:
SETTING
All 142 legal gambling casinos in France today stem from Napoleon's legalization of gambling at the Palais Royal in Paris in
Editor's note: A longer version of this article, with more complete bibliography and footnotes, can be found in W.R. Eadington and J.A. Cornelius (eds.), Gambling and Public Policy: International Perspectives, Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming, University of Nevada, Reno, 1991. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Russell T. Barnhart, 400 W. 119th Street, Apt. 6A, New York, New York 10027.
Journal of Gambling Studies Vol. 8(2), Summer 1992 9 1992 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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1806. Just a few score yards across the Rue de Rivoli, north of the Louvre, stands the gracious, four-story Palais Royal, occupying a roughly six-acre, oblong block. Entering through the main south gate, one soon finds oneself in a quiet, four-acre courtyard beautified by alleys of trees, flowerbeds, benches, and fountains. By 1800, the formal, central garden alone-always beloved by sitters and strollerswas 700 feet long and 300 feet wide. The upper three stories of the surrounding building, faced with fluted pilasters, look like a p a r t m e n t s - w h i c h they once w e r e - a n d beneath the second floor along the east, north, and west, runs an arcaded gallery, from whose 180 classical arches hang as many wrought-iron lanterns, whose blaze at night illuminates the fronts of the high-class shops running beneath the half-mile-long arcade. Such is the Palais Royal today, and such it was in 1787; but how it grew, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, to become Europe's largest and most famous gambling center, is a rather bizarre story (Galignani, 1826; Lurine, 1844, pp. 194-203; Rice, 1976, pp. 13-18). Throughout the 18th century, the Palais Royal was the home of the Orleans family, the cadet branch of the French monarchy, and each Orlfians duke bequeathed it to the next in line. In 1785, the palace was inherited by Louis Philippe Joseph I, on his becoming Duke of Orlfians. After King Louis XVI himself, Philippe of Orlfians was the richest man in France. His annual income alone was an enormous seven million francs (de Gramont, 1967 p. 410). Just the same, Philippe of Orlfians accomplished the impossible by continually living beyond his means. As a gambler, he loved betting the horses. As for table games, on February 21, 1771, at one of his private parties in the Palais Royal, he introduced to Parisian society the English game of hazard (father of American craps), which the French called kreps or creps. It was to become one of the popular dice games in the public gaming houses of the Palais Royal. But gambling was a minor expenditure in this man's extravagance (Britsch, 1926). Realizing he was bankrupting himself, the Duke of Orlfians had, what was to him, a brilliant idea: instead of cutting down on his profligacy, he would raise money by turning his sumptuous, four-story palace into a commercial enterprise. Thus, the garret rooms and third floor he turned into rented apartments. The ground floor, behind the 180 illuminated arches running round the three-sided gallery, he
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turned into 180 high-class shops, naming each gallery after one of his three sons--Valois, Beaujolais, and Montpensier. After all this commercial transformation was finished, out at Versailles, King Louis X V I remarked to Queen Marie-Antoinette: "I suppose now we shall see the Duke of Orleans only on Sundays--he has become a shopkeeper!" (Jouhaud, 1809, pp. 52-65; Montfimont, 1847, pp. 105-12; d' Espezel, 1936, pp. 166-80) More importantly for our special interest, however, the attractive, connected basement rooms, and second-floor salons over the elegant ground-floor shops, the duke rented out as cafes, restaurants, and social c l u b s - never dreaming that as early as 1791, only two years after the French Revolution had begun, in these second-floor apartments and basement social clubs, there would emerge over 100 separate gambling operations offering the most popular dice and card games. But how could this be? Wasn't public gambling illegal under the kings of France? Indeed it was, but if you were a Paris police chief, how motivated would you be to raid a royal palace-especially if its ducal landlord was becoming increasingly popular (though only at the beginning of the Revolution) as the king and queen themselves, out at Versailles, were becoming proportionately disliked and disparaged? Almost overnight, Philippe of Orleans' transformation of his Palais Royal was a tremendous commercial success, and in this we perceive one of the causes of the sudden and extraordinary growth of gambling during the French Revolution. For generations, the French people had been legally deprived of the pleasures of gambling, and naturally looked with envy towards all royal palaces, where only the gentry and aristocracy, of course, were invited to play for money at dice and cards. Except for the back rooms of sordid inns, where nobody wanted to go, the middle and lower classes were legally debarred from gambling, and if caught, were regularly punished with harsh fines and even imprisonment (Grussi, 1985; Dunkley, 1976, pp. 114; Dulaure, 1859), vol. 6, pp. 310-12, 390-93; Michel, 1983, vol. 1, pp. 63-65). Given this background, the Paris middle class was both appalled by and envious of the immense sums squandered on the privileged gaming tables of the Versailles palace, sums increasingly reported by anti-royalist gossips and scandalmongers as the Revolution of 1789 approached. For example, in only a single evening, the Marquis de La Vaupalibre won 120,000 francs. The Marquis de Travanet won 10,000
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6cus in only one night and by dawn had lost them all back. Most glaringly, dealing the faro bank at Marie-Antoinette's table, Colonel Chalabre, in only four hours, won the enormous sum of 1,800,000 francs (Marquiset, 1929, pp. 11-15; Alvarez-Detrell & Paulson, 1982, pp. 1-15). Although Louis X V I himself bet very little and strongly disapproved of reckless wagering, he found himself as powerless to stop his courtiers' activity as to halt the growth of the Revolution itself. O n her part, Marie-Antoinette was obsessed with faro, and night after night stayed up till dawn, winning and losing large sums at the game. And the public knew it (Kunstler, 1940, p. 81; Sweig, 1933, pp. 99-100). In contrast, when the very liberal Duke of Orl6ans threw open the doors of his own home, the middle classes streamed inside and, for the first time, began gambling as cautiously or as recklessly as they chose, within the walls, as it were, of their o w n palace.
THE REVOLUTION
Thus, in the French Revolution, the opening of public gambling houses in the Palais Royal radically altered popular betting habits in two important ways. For the first time in Paris history (excluding certain annual church fairs, like that of Saint-Germain), the middle class could gamble in a respectable place with little worry of arrest by the police (Isambert, 1896, pp. 193-197). And the gambling activities of these classes had not only a symbolic, but also a palpable financial effect. The Versailles palace was no longer the center of French gambling: this activity had shifted to the very bourgeois Palais Royal. But as the Duke of Orleans never intended to rent his second-floor apartments and basement rooms to gambling-house proprietors, how were over 100 of them offering gambling games as early as 1791 ? How, in other words, did they manage to infiltrate themselves? (de Goncourt, & de Goncourt 1880, pp. 20-27). One way was to open a so-called social club--and any name would d o - a n d indeed the Duke of Orl6ans himself, in 1789, founded and was the first president of an ostensibly innocent social circle called the Valois Club (after one of his three sons and located in the gallery of that name), whose amenities included a fine dining room, and a
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lounge. The avowed purpose of the Valois Club was to provide facilities for non-gambling games such as checkers, backgammon, billiards, cards, and chess (the favorite game of Robespierre at the nearby Caffi de la R~gence -- naturally he would never gamble). For those members preferring conversation, the avowed purpose was discussion of politics and current e v e n t s - a n d considering the Duke of Orleans' own political ambitions (unlikely to become king, he was hoping perhaps for the presidency of the first French republic), political discussions were very liberal indeed (Isambert, 1896, p. 190). Gradually, however, those members uninterested in incessant political discussion retired to the game room of the Valois Club, and began gambling for real money. Given his own well-known gambling proclivities, the duke hardly objected. So far as gambling went, however, another so-called social club was far more typical, and that was the Polish Club (having no real connection to Poland) at arcade No. 145. In the August 26, 1791, issue of the Chroniqge de Paris we read: "At the head of the Polish Club are two men, formerly aristocrats [the Vicomte de Castellane and the Marquis de Livry, both to become two of the richest gambling-house proprietors in France], who in five weeks have won more than 500,000 francs, excluding d u b expenses." The other way to open a gambling house in the Palais Royal was to sublease an apartment from an already established tenant, and in Jean-Paul Marat's periodical, L'Ami du Peuple, for February, 1791 (Marat, 1791), we read how this was done (de Goncourt & de Goncourt, 1880, pp. 24-25). From a co-operative lady of easy virtue, one subleased her second-floor apartment (price undisclosed). T h e n one's daily expenses were: an adroit card dealer, 24 francs; some croupiers who exchange money for chips, 30 francs; a firewood porter, 9 francs; six bouncers, 48 francs; two door porters, 12 francs; four waiters, 12 francs; eight touts or steerers, 36 francs; a buffet tender, 6 francs; a n d - - m o s t expensive of all--"a hostess with savoir-faire," 96 francs. These expenses (plus others unnamed) came to 504 francs a day. And what was the steerers' role? To entice players to the secondfloor gambling houses, they wandered the three galleries, pestering visitors, whispering into their ears as they handed them a discreet advertising card: "A brilliant society, Monsieur, on the second floor." More subtle approaches were made by steerers who struck up conversations at tables d'h6te, cafes, and theater gatherings.
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P e r h a p s t h e b e s t w a y to c o m m u n i c a t e b o t h t h e e x t e n t a n d d i s o r d e r of Paris Revolutionary gambling activities, both within and beyond the P a l a i s R o y a l , is to q u o t e f r o m t h e P a r i s p o l i c e b l o t t e r o f 1790 a n d 1791 a few o f t h e i t e m s l i s t e d b y t h e F r e n c h h i s t o r i a n A l e x a n d e r T u e t e y . T h e following reports, in Tuetey's words (1890-1914), were made by police officers a n d m i l i t i a ( t h e N a t i o n a l G u a r d ) to t h e R e v o l u t i o n a r y commis-
saire de police, o r p r e c i n c t c a p t a i n , o f t h e P a l a i s R o y a l a r e a ( a n d s o m e times beyond): No. 1472: around the Palais Royal cafes and cabarets three touts are paid to follow and menace players complaining about the gambling-house proprietors. No. 1748: officers seize the paraphernalia of parfaite-figalit~-three dice, the dice box, and the small layout with its row of squares marked from one to six. No. 1933: certain officers are found to have accepted bribes from the operator of the game called biribi. [70 numbered balls were shaken up inside a soft leather sack; the croupier removed a random ball and announced its number; the payoff was 63 to 1; until the advent of roulette around 1796, hiribi was very popular.] No. 1948: officers find 100 gambling dens in one arrondissement (district) a l o n e - m a n y with triple-barred doors and spies to warn of police raids. No. 2073: at the Palais Royal an operator cheats the players by jiggling the table to change the up-side of the dice. No. 2101: brought in from the Palais Royal, a whore-house madam upbraids the commissaire de police and states that her cardinal preoccupation is always to "defend the honor, probity, and decency of her young ladies." No. 2159: at the Palais Royal, at the gambling house above arcade No. 92, officers raid all the games: the proprietor pays a fine of 3,000 francs. No. 2219: from off the Palais Royal, on Richelieu Street, gamblers lodge a complaint that an operator refused to pay off a one-louis bet: games offered are biribi, the dice game of passe-dix, and all card games. No. 2235: at the Palais Royal bouncers throw out a player who complained after losing at biribi. No. 2236: at the nearby Radziwill building, in the passage leading off from the Palais Royal, in a gambling den a player discovers that at parfaite-6galit6 the dice box contains a b a s c u l e - a hinged false bottom through which the dice may be changed. No. 2251: a gambler, a coachman, complains that a biribi proprietor angrily kicked and beat him with a cane. No. 2268: while a crowd watches, a large detachment of National Guards breaks down some shop doors at the nearby Radziwill building and destroys all the gambling paraphernalia. No. 2348: at the Palais Royal, at gambling house Number 113, the stairway from the arcade is barred, explains the proprietor, in order to protect his clientele from unpleasantness during police raids.
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No. 2424: at the Palais Royal, Monsieur Lafond, proprietor of gambling house Number 36 in the Montpensier arcade, armed with a bayonet pursues and stabs a client who had had the poor taste to question his honesty. No. 2493: in the passage of the Radziwillbuilding, just offthe Palais Royal, the National Guards launch a raid and find themselves opposed by 60 thugs and teams of snarling dogs. No. 2588: the commissaire de police is accused of accepting a weekly bribe of 200 francs from the operator of a biribi game. No. 3391: on February 15, 1791, the National Assembly receives a deputation complaining of the gamblingfury sweeping RevolutionaryParis: it is stated that there are now over 3,000 gambling houses, of varying sizes, flourishingin the city (Tuetey, 1890-1914, vol. 2).
Such was the confusion and turbulence of Paris gambling before the government realized that only through legalization could such disorders be brought under control. The trouble was that the government was in chaos. In 1793 Louis X V I was guillotined on J a n u a r y 21, Marie-Antoinette on October 16, and the very liberal Duke of Orl6ans himself on November 6. When Philippe of Orl6ans was being transported to the guillotine, his tumbril paused before the Palais Royal, whose wall now bore a sign: NAT I O N A L P R O P E R T Y . He shouted one, short, obscene word. The president and founder of the Valois Club had gambled for very high stakes-- and lost. While these riotous events were occurring, gambling was reaching unheard of proportions. To quote the French historian Louis Madelin: "A passion for play seized everybody: there were a hundred gambling hells in the Palais Royal, and every table was heaped with gold . . . . The feasting, gambling, and merrymaking were to reach a pitch that bordered on insanity" (Madelin, 1922, p. 445, LaCroix, 1885, pp. 123-144). So far as gambling went, some members of the new Revolutionary government were just as reckless and obsessed as the monarchs and aristocrats whom they had denounced and affected to despise. The deputy Antoine Barnave lost 30,000 francs in only one evening, and his colleague Henri Larivi~re lost 40,000 in another. The future foreign minister, Bishop Talleyrand (deeming it prudent to forego his aristocratic title), publicly accused of having won at the Palais Royal 600,000 francs, felt obliged to publish a letter insisting that his win
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there had been only 30,000. Perhaps the most ardent gamester of all was the Chevalier Bouju, who, when dying, had himself carried in the arms of his friends to a trente-et-quarante table, where, his hands clenching the green baize, he won enough to pay for a splendid funeral.
AFTER THE REVOLUTION
After the guillotining of Robespierre in 1794 and the end of the Reign of Terror, with young General Napoleon Bonaparte off fighting the armies of European powers intent on invading France to put down the Revolution, life in Paris became, relatively speaking, much quieter and less dramatic. To bring under control the excessive gambling at the Palais Royal, the five Revolutionary leaders of the Directorate reduced the 100 operations there to five, large, a u t h o r i z e d - b u t still not l e g a l gambling houses located at arcade numbers 9, 50, 129, 154, and 113. Number 113 was to become the most famous gambling house in Europe, celebrated in Alexander Dumas' novel, The Woman with the Velvet Collar (1850), and Number 9 was to be celebrated in Balzads novel, Father Goriot (1835). In both books, the heroes win substantially at roulette. But the Directors, headed by Count Paul Francois Nicolas Barras (who lived in the Luxembourg Palace, where one of his guests lost at faro an incredible 2,000,000 francs on the turn of a single card), were too short-sighted to grasp the social and governmental revenue benefits from legalized gambling, so illegal gambling dens continued to flourish all over Paris, to the despair of the police. In fact in the Gazette de France for June 8, 1801, the editors complained of there being in Paris more gambling houses than educational institutions (Aulard, 1903-1909, vol. 2, pp. 344-345). During the Revolution, one of the important political functions of Paris gambling houses was to provide sanctuaries where counterrevolutionaries, trying to restore the Bourbon monarchy, could meet and conspire without arousing suspicion. To forfend this, the Directors had their secret police infiltrate the gambling houses, pretending likewise to be players, to overhear conversations of gamblers, croupiers, and owners. From one of his secret policemen, who had been making the rounds, Count Barras received the following report on January 3,
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1799. It should be m e n t i o n e d that the English e n e m y was suspected of p r o v i d i n g secret financial backing to certain g a m b l i n g houses: "Such, citizen Minister, is the present condition of the Paris gambling houses and of the persons involved in them. You will perceive that there is not a single one of the latter who cannot rightly be suspected of being an enemy of our government. The gambling houses are, we make bold to say, the hotbed of all the counter-revolutionary intrigues. In them is to be found the treasury of all the factions. If the government is desirous of winning a bloodless yet signal victory over all its enemies, it has but to close these places, which are their havens. What is the use of closing our seaports to English merchandise if Prime Minister William Pitt is free to have in Paris gambling houses proprietors who win from [revolutionary] dupes money that goes to support the counter-revolutionaries themselves?" (Duruy, 1896, vol. 3, pp. 346-347) F r o m the standpoint of g a m b l i n g history, however, in the Directory period, an unusual e c o n o m i c event o c c u r r e d in one of the gambling houses of the Palais Royal: the n o w well-known game of roulette, with zero and double zeros, was i n t r o d u c e d for the first time. A l t h o u g h its i n v e n t o r remains u n k n o w n , the so-called roulette wheel itself was i n v e n t e d by an a n o n y m o u s E n g l i s h m a n in L o n d o n a r o u n d 1720, and the layout of 36 n u m b e r s most p r o b a b l y derives from the 17th c e n t u r y Italian game o f b i r i b i ; b u t it was in the Palais R o y a l , a r o u n d 1796, that a most ingenious F r e n c h m a n c o m b i n e d the two by putting, as it were, the English wheel at the head of the Italian layout; and there we have roulette, which soon b e c a m e sensationally popular, and to this day is the one g a m e most c o m m o n to g a m b l i n g casinos the world o v e r ( B a r n h a r t , 1988). R e t u r n i n g from abroad, N a p o l e o n got rid of the D i r e c t o r y in 1799, m a d e himself First Consul in 1802, and c r o w n e d himself emp e r o r in 1804. After a t t e n d i n g carefully to l e n g t h y m o r a l a r g u m e n t s b y his Prefect o f Police, Pasquier, against legalized gambling, and to shorter but m o r e cogent financial a r g u m e n t s for it b y his M i n i s t e r of Police, Fouch~, N a p o l e o n sided with the latter, and on J u n e 24, 1806, the e m p e r o r signed the historic decree which for the first time legalized g a m b l i n g houses in F r a n c e - - b u t only at specific locations, the first being the city of P a r i s - m e a n i n g the five m a i n gambling houses in the Palais R o y a l (plus six within a few blocks) -- the second being those towns like Spa and Aix-les-Bains with mineral springs that qualified t h e m as health resorts. T o d a y these vacation resorts have grown from
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the half dozen in Napoleon's time to as m a n y as 142, and gambling in France is now a multi-billion-franc industry, well regulated, well supervised, and contributing substantial revenues to the public purse. And what of the Palais Royal? Its five gambling houses were not, of course, its only attraction though they were certainly its principal one. In 1804, around its enchanting garden pulsated fifteen restaurants, 29 cafes, seventeen billiard parlors, eighteen jewelers, six watchmakers, four booksellers, sixteen portrait painters, eight milliners, twelve tailors, six wigmakers, eleven pawnbrokers, two shoeblacks, a manufacturer of pictures in hair, and a silhouette cutter (Robiquet, 1963, p. 134). And in addition to innumerable high-class (at least they thought so) ladies of prostitution in the garret and third-floor apartments, as well as those that strolled the garden and the galleries, visitors could appreciate, behind and beneath the arcades, the performances of actors, dwarfs, giants, ventriloquists, dancing dogs, puppets, quack doctors, mountebanks, pornographers, and an orchestra of blind musicians (Lemaistre, 1803, pp. 98-102). Cynics declared that to appreciate fully the pleasures of the Palais Royal one should begin by making a clean breast of matters to a priest living in the garret; then one succumbs to a prostitute on the third floor; then one descends to the gambling houses on the second floor offering roulette, trente-et-quarante, passe-dix, creps, hazard, and biribi; then one pawns one's watch, rings, and other valuables in the entresol (mezzanine); and finally after another go at the gambling upstairs, if fortune hasn't smiled, one returns to the entresol and further pawns one's hat, coat, cane, shoebuckles, or sword, and from there goes to the armorer's shop in the ground-floor arcade to purchase a pistol with which to end one's career. Be that as it may, amid all the hubbub, the gambling houses were unquestionably the main economic engine that propelled the Palais Royal, and as the chief attraction, they opened at noon and went full blast until midnight. Napoleon himself never gambled at the Palais Royal (though as a young lieutenant, he did lose his virginity there to a young provincial prostitute). His sole gaming interest was to play for small stakes at twenty-one, when stranded on board ships or at boring evening parties. But Napoleon's younger brother, Senator Lucien Bonaparte, employed a cook who absolutely outdid everyone. Having no money, in August, 1802, the cook strolled into the famous gambling house Num-
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ber 113 and idly watched the players, while munching an orange from a handful he had brought with him. For one of the oranges, a thirsty player gave him six sous. The cook threw the six sous onto the biribi layout and won six francs, which he then increased to 200 via a roulette wheel. Taking the 200 francs to the trente-et-quarante table, he parlayed the sum into 24,000 francs. By the end of two years, he had won 200,000 francs, invested them in government securities, and retired forever (Nevill, 1909, p. 262; Aulard, 1903-1909, vol. 1, p. 341). It is ironic that the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the defeat of the very man who had authorized legal gambling in France, resulted for the Palais Royal in the most sensational financial year it ever enjoyed. After Waterloo, tens of thousands of English, Prussian, Austrian, and Russian troops descended on the conquered French capital and, after bivouacking in the Bois de Boulogne and along the Champs-Elys6es, went out for a wild time on the town-whose center was the Palais Royal (Prudhomme, 1814, vol. 2, pp. 103-114). The Prussian, Marshal Blucher, sharing victory with the Duke of Wellington, discovered gambling house N u m b e r 154 (considered the most elegant), and pounded on its trente-et-quarante table for service. He got it. In only one night there, he managed to lose an incredible 1,500,000 francs, and to pay the sum, had to mortgage his estates in Prussia. Just the same, Blucher continued spending days and nights playing trente-et-quarante, and between disastrous bouts would recuperate on a couch in a special room there called The Chamber of the Wounded, in which players could meditate, catnap, complain loudly to one another, and eat and drink. As for the Russian contingent, it was headed by the Grand Duke Constantine, who in only one month managed at the Palais Royal to gamble and spend on other entertainments 4,000,000 francs. The King of Prussia managed to spend considerably less, but then he wandered the galleries incognito. Even simple caf6 owners were enriched by the invaders. Falling ill in 1814, Monsieur Angelbert, proprietor in the Palais Royal of the Caf~ Rotonde, returned cured eighteen months later, only to discover that his caf6 had taken in 400,000 francs. Hearing of the wild times in Paris enjoyed by their fairly wellbehaved army, headed by the sober Duke of Wellington, English civilians streamed over from London not to miss out. One of them was
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Sir Walter Scott, who denounced in the Palais Royal "its accursed brothels and gambling houses . . . There was no distinction of persons . . . on the long tables, which were covered with gold, an artizan was at liberty to hazard his week's wages, or a noble his whole estate." (Littlewood, 1988, p. 6 2 ) J u s t the same, the Scottish baronet every day visited there the Car6 of the Thousand Columns in order to gaze, along with all the other male patrons, on the visage of its proprietress, M a d a m e Romain, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Paris. The Prince Regent, later George IV, heard that one of the gambling-house proprietors, the Marquis de Livry, bore a striking resemblance to him. Unable to cross the Channel himself, the Prince Regent sent over Lord Fife "to ascertain that momentous fact." English visitors well deserved their reputation for decorum, and one of them, J o h n S. Jessopp, was shocked when he witnessed a losing gambler actually snatch a croupier's rake and begin thrashing the man. Then the furious gambler "hit out at a huge chandelier with scores of wax candles in it and frantically smashed it. Panic and confusion . . . a company of gendarmes was called . . . [who] arrested everyone." (de Polnay, 1968, pp. 215-218; Alger, 1904, pp. 138-139; Boutet de Monvel, 1911, p. 101) After the conquering Allied armies withdrew to their homelands, Paris became its civilized self again. Louis X V I I I was restored to the throne, and the gambling houses of the Palais Royal became noted for the quieter but quaint characters who frequented their tables. Later director of the Paris Opera and then editor of Le Constitutionnel, in 1816 Dr. Louis-D6sir~ V6ron was a poor medical student (V6ron, 1856, vol. 1, pp. 21-36). Thinking it a wonderful idea to pay for his internship through gambling, he obtained his first stake money by selling "a fine skeleton." Using the martingale or doubling-up system, he won 100 francs a day for three months, in consequence of which, he was soon the magnet of losing players who wanted to sponge money. "I often met at gambling house N u m b e r 129," he wrote in his memoirs, "a literary man with powdered hair and advanced in years, who in his lucky bets would rejoice over his winnings in Latin. He was a poor wretch whom the least loss would make penniless. One day he touched me confidentially on the shoulder and led me into the anteroom. 'Look here,' he said, 'take this Persius and this Juvenal and give me forty sous.' As I refused to pay less than five francs for these two Latin poets, his joy was excessive. But in half an hour he returned to me, putting his hand into his pocket. 'Look here,' he said, 'take this pair
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of black silk stockings and give me what you please.' I had consented to diminish his library, but I could not agree to wear his clothes. Another day I had 40 louis d'or on the black at trente-et-quarante. I left it there to double. An old frequenter of the house came up to me. 'Do you want to win?' he confided secretively. 'I have a disease--promise me ten francs so I may buy a bandage.' I won, and he soon lost his bandage at roulette . . . . " But all good things come to an end, and in only one day, Dr. V~ron lost back to N u m b e r 129 all the money he had won in three months with his martingale. "By six o'clock that night I had scarcely enough money left to pay for the dinner I had ordered. In the morning, rich with nine or ten thousand francs and lots of castles in the air, by evening I had neither a single sou nor an illusion . . . . Ah, behold--to what great lengths the sale of a skeleton had led me!" (V~ron, 1856, vol. 1, pp. 21-36) As Napoleon had foreseen, the legalization of the gambling houses in Paris would bring the government enormous tax revenues. Indeed the gross profit, in which the government shared heavily, of the eleven legal Paris gambling houses was annually anywhere from six to nine million francs. From 1819 to 1837, the eleven casinos grossed the huge sum of 137,313,403 francs (Calvet, 1978, pp. 186-187).
THE AFTERMATH But by 1836, the anti-gambling forces in the capital had finally regained the day, and on J u n e 17th the C h a m b e r of Deputies extended the legality of the Palais Royal gambling houses to only December 31, 1837. O n that date, at the stroke of midnight, the most famous gambling houses in Europe, which at that time meant the world, would have to close their doors forever. According to the issues of J a n u a r y 1st and 2nd, 1837, of the Gazette des Tribunaux, the final closing of the gambling clubs caused riotous disorders. During the last days of December, 1837, the eleven clubs were so packed with impassioned gamblers, that the official farmer of the games, Jacques Benazet, had to call for reinforcements of police and National Guards to maintain order, and to expel every night at closing
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time, more than 500 gamblers "who absolutely insisted on ruining themselves." O n December 31, 1837, the eleven gambling houses opened at 3:00 P.M. to an impatient mob. Fearing a possible robbery attempt at the cashier's cage, Benazet ordered the guards doubled. W h e n 6:00 P.M. arrived, he ordered N u m b e r 113, the most popular casino in the Palais Royal, closed down, after a workman had openly committed suicide, and despite a crowd of 800 gamblers shouting under its windows to be let inside. Benazet's own gambling house, not far from the Palais Royal, was called Frascati. W h e n 10:00 P.M. arrived, Frascati had been invaded by thousands of gamblers: its forecourt, stairways, and gaming rooms overflowed with a bobbing mass struggling to place their last bets at roulette, creps, and trente-et-quarante. Another gambler, unhappy because now he could never win back his losses, shot himself outside Frascati in full public view. Fearing a riot, Benazet ordered a strong detachment of police to clear all the rooms of Frascati, a feat they achieved with great difficulty. Finally, midnight arrived, and the casinos in the Palais Royal shut their doors tight. When the thousands of gamblers, prostitutes, and hangers-on were ejected into Richelieu Street, "the public greeted them with hoots, catcalls, and jubilant hollerings" (Barnhart, 1983, pp. 101102). The shutting down of the legal gambling houses had soon enough a disastrous effect, for within only a few years, the Palais Royal became a moribund place. As the throngs of gamblers no longer came to patronize its caffis and elegant restaurants, one by one they all closed down, leaving today only the Restaurant Grand V~four. The shops in the galleries, once so crowded, soon became bereft of even a single customer, so that most of the shopkeepers gave up and moved out to the Boulevard des Italiens and the livelier avenues of the city. Now in the arcades, only a few shops remain, selling slow-moving items like military decorations, rare books, antiques, stamps, and coins. By 1889, the Palais Royal, once the undisputed goal of every visitor and pleasure seeker to Paris, had become as quiet and forlorn as a cathedral close, and has remained so to this day. A few footfalls in the arcades, the flutter of pigeons, the cries of a handful of toddlers watched by as m a n y dozing governesses on a sunny a f t e r n o o n - s u c h are the ghostly remnants of the enthusiastic throngs of yesteryear.
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Today, the upper floors of the great palace are inhabited largely by government office workers busily weaving the webs of the Council of State and the Ministry of Culture. So while sitting outside in the garden, instead of the happy or outraged shouts of gamblers, from the second-floor windows one hears only the silence of bureaucrats thinking. Yet no hush of today can erase from memory, both nostalgic and otherwise, the entrancing hubbub of the old Palais Royal, from the Revolution of 1789 to the year 1838, when it was the most intriguing, picturesque, and exciting gambling mecca of E u r o p e - a n d probably the world.
REFERENCES Alger, J. (1904). Napoleon's British visitors . . . 1801-1815. New York: J. Pott & Co. Alvarez-Detrell, T. & Paulson, M.G. (eds). (1982). The gambling mania on and off the stage in prerevolutionary France, Washington, D.C.: University Press of America. Aulard, F.V. (1903-1909). Paris sous le Consular, Paris: L. Cerf. Balzac, H. (1835). Father Goriot, Paris: G. Charpentier. Barnhart, R.T. (1983). Gamblers of yesteryear, Las Vegas: GBC Press. Barnhart, R.T. (1988). The invention of roulette, in W.R. Eadington, (ed.) Gambling Research: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking, vol. 1, pp. 293-331, Reno: University of Nevada, Reno. Boutet de Monvel, R. (1911). Les Anglais g~ Paris: 1800-1850, Paris: Plon-Nourrit. Britsch, A. (1926). La maison d'Orlgans ~ la fin de l'ancien rdgime. La jeunesse de Philippe Egalitg (174 71785), Paris: Payot. Calvet, L. (1978). Lesjeux de la socigtg, Paris: Payot. Chronique de Paris, (August 26, 1791), Paris. d'Espezel, P. (1936). Le Palais Royal, Paris: Calmann-L~vy. de Goncourt, E. & de Goncourt, J. (1880). Histoire de la socigtLfran;aisependant la rgvolution, Paris: G. Charpentier. de Gramont, S. (1967). Epitaph for kings, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. de Polnay, P. (1968). Aspects of Paris, London: W.H. Allen. Dulaure, J.A. (1859). Les maisons de jeu, Histoire de Paris, Paris: Fume. Dumas, A. (1850). The woman with the velvet collar, Paris: Calmann-L~vy. Dunkley, J. (1976). Les jeux de hasard et la loi au XVIIIe si~cle, in Lejeu au X V I I I sikcle, Aix-enProvence: Edisud. Duruy, G. (ed.) (1896). Memoirs of Barras, New York: Harper & Brothers. Galignani (1826). Galiguani's new Paris guide, Paris: A. & W. Galignani. Grussi, O. (1985). La vie quotz'dienne desjoueurs sous l'aneien rggime gzParis et ~ la cour, Paris: Hachette. Isambert, G. (1896). La vie it Paris pendant une annge de la rdvolution, 1791-1792, Paris: F. Alean. Jouhaud, P. (1809). Paris clans le dix-neuv#me silcle, Paris: J.G. Dentu. Kunstler, C. (1940). The personal life of Marie-Antoinette, London: G. Bell & Sons. Lacroix, P. (1885). Le jeu, Direetoire, consular et empire, Paris: Firmin-Didot. Lemaistre, J.G. (1803). A rough sketch of modern Paris, London: J, Johnson. Littlewood, I. (1988). Paris, A literary companion, New York: Harper & Row. Lurine, L. (1844). Les rues de Paris, Paris: G. Kugelmann. Madelin, L. (1922). The French revolution, London: W. Heinemann. Marat, J. (1791, February). L'Ami du peuple, Paris.
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Marquiset, A. (1929). Jeux etjoueurs d'autrefois, 1789-1837, Paris: Emile-Paul Fr~res. Michel, J. (1983). La police des jeux, Du Paris de Louis X V g~ la marine de Louis XVI: l'oeuvre de Monsieur de Sartine, Paris: Editions de l'Erudit. Mont6mont, A. (1847). Guide universel de lgtranger dans Paris, Paris: Garnier Fr~res. Nevill, R. (1909). Light come, light go, London: MacMillan and Co, Prudhomme, L.H. (1814). Voyage descriptif et philosophique de l'ancien et du nouveau Paris, Paris: Chez rauteur. Rice, H.C., Jr. (1976). Thomas Jefferson's Paris, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Robiquet, J. (1963). Daily life in France under Napoleon, New York: Macmillan. Sweig, S. (1933). Marie-Antoinette, New York: The Viking Press. Tuetey, A. ( 1890-1914). Rdpertoire ggngral des sources rnanuscrites de l'histoire de Paris pendant la r~volution franfaise, Paris: Imprimerie nouvelle. V6ron, L. (1856). Les maisons de jeu de Paris, Mgmoires d'un bourgeois de Paris, Paris: Librairie nouvelle.
By the revolution of 1789, the four-story, quadrangular Palais Royal in Paris had become the most glittering tourist center of Europe, with 180 shops and cafes in its ground floor arcades. By 1791, its basement and secondary story contained over 100 separate, illicit gambling operations featuring the most popular dice and card games. The mania for gambling had been transferred from defunct, monarchical Versailles to the thriving, bourgeois Palais Royal, where the five main gaming clubs throbbed from noon till midnight. During the Revolution, Prince Talleyrand won 30,000 francs at one club, and after Waterloo in 1815, Marshal Blucher lost 1,500,000 francs in one night at another. To bring the situation under control and raise taxes for the state, in 1806 Napoleon legalized the main clubs, which from 1819 to 1837 grossed an enormous 137 million francs. When the anti-gambling forces triumphed in 1837 and the clubs were closed down, the National Guard had to be called out to evict the mobs of gamblers who refused to leave the tables. Dramatic reports from Revolutionary police raids, and quotations from the memoirs of humorous French gamblers and shocked foreign visitors, provide anecdotal illustrations of the 49 years during which the Palais Royal was the most intriguing and picturesque gambling mecca of E u r o p e - a n d probably of the world.
INTRODUCTION:
SETTING
All 142 legal gambling casinos in France today stem from Napoleon's legalization of gambling at the Palais Royal in Paris in
Editor's note: A longer version of this article, with more complete bibliography and footnotes, can be found in W.R. Eadington and J.A. Cornelius (eds.), Gambling and Public Policy: International Perspectives, Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming, University of Nevada, Reno, 1991. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Russell T. Barnhart, 400 W. 119th Street, Apt. 6A, New York, New York 10027.
Journal of Gambling Studies Vol. 8(2), Summer 1992 9 1992 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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1806. Just a few score yards across the Rue de Rivoli, north of the Louvre, stands the gracious, four-story Palais Royal, occupying a roughly six-acre, oblong block. Entering through the main south gate, one soon finds oneself in a quiet, four-acre courtyard beautified by alleys of trees, flowerbeds, benches, and fountains. By 1800, the formal, central garden alone-always beloved by sitters and strollerswas 700 feet long and 300 feet wide. The upper three stories of the surrounding building, faced with fluted pilasters, look like a p a r t m e n t s - w h i c h they once w e r e - a n d beneath the second floor along the east, north, and west, runs an arcaded gallery, from whose 180 classical arches hang as many wrought-iron lanterns, whose blaze at night illuminates the fronts of the high-class shops running beneath the half-mile-long arcade. Such is the Palais Royal today, and such it was in 1787; but how it grew, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, to become Europe's largest and most famous gambling center, is a rather bizarre story (Galignani, 1826; Lurine, 1844, pp. 194-203; Rice, 1976, pp. 13-18). Throughout the 18th century, the Palais Royal was the home of the Orleans family, the cadet branch of the French monarchy, and each Orlfians duke bequeathed it to the next in line. In 1785, the palace was inherited by Louis Philippe Joseph I, on his becoming Duke of Orlfians. After King Louis XVI himself, Philippe of Orlfians was the richest man in France. His annual income alone was an enormous seven million francs (de Gramont, 1967 p. 410). Just the same, Philippe of Orlfians accomplished the impossible by continually living beyond his means. As a gambler, he loved betting the horses. As for table games, on February 21, 1771, at one of his private parties in the Palais Royal, he introduced to Parisian society the English game of hazard (father of American craps), which the French called kreps or creps. It was to become one of the popular dice games in the public gaming houses of the Palais Royal. But gambling was a minor expenditure in this man's extravagance (Britsch, 1926). Realizing he was bankrupting himself, the Duke of Orlfians had, what was to him, a brilliant idea: instead of cutting down on his profligacy, he would raise money by turning his sumptuous, four-story palace into a commercial enterprise. Thus, the garret rooms and third floor he turned into rented apartments. The ground floor, behind the 180 illuminated arches running round the three-sided gallery, he
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turned into 180 high-class shops, naming each gallery after one of his three sons--Valois, Beaujolais, and Montpensier. After all this commercial transformation was finished, out at Versailles, King Louis X V I remarked to Queen Marie-Antoinette: "I suppose now we shall see the Duke of Orleans only on Sundays--he has become a shopkeeper!" (Jouhaud, 1809, pp. 52-65; Montfimont, 1847, pp. 105-12; d' Espezel, 1936, pp. 166-80) More importantly for our special interest, however, the attractive, connected basement rooms, and second-floor salons over the elegant ground-floor shops, the duke rented out as cafes, restaurants, and social c l u b s - never dreaming that as early as 1791, only two years after the French Revolution had begun, in these second-floor apartments and basement social clubs, there would emerge over 100 separate gambling operations offering the most popular dice and card games. But how could this be? Wasn't public gambling illegal under the kings of France? Indeed it was, but if you were a Paris police chief, how motivated would you be to raid a royal palace-especially if its ducal landlord was becoming increasingly popular (though only at the beginning of the Revolution) as the king and queen themselves, out at Versailles, were becoming proportionately disliked and disparaged? Almost overnight, Philippe of Orleans' transformation of his Palais Royal was a tremendous commercial success, and in this we perceive one of the causes of the sudden and extraordinary growth of gambling during the French Revolution. For generations, the French people had been legally deprived of the pleasures of gambling, and naturally looked with envy towards all royal palaces, where only the gentry and aristocracy, of course, were invited to play for money at dice and cards. Except for the back rooms of sordid inns, where nobody wanted to go, the middle and lower classes were legally debarred from gambling, and if caught, were regularly punished with harsh fines and even imprisonment (Grussi, 1985; Dunkley, 1976, pp. 114; Dulaure, 1859), vol. 6, pp. 310-12, 390-93; Michel, 1983, vol. 1, pp. 63-65). Given this background, the Paris middle class was both appalled by and envious of the immense sums squandered on the privileged gaming tables of the Versailles palace, sums increasingly reported by anti-royalist gossips and scandalmongers as the Revolution of 1789 approached. For example, in only a single evening, the Marquis de La Vaupalibre won 120,000 francs. The Marquis de Travanet won 10,000
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6cus in only one night and by dawn had lost them all back. Most glaringly, dealing the faro bank at Marie-Antoinette's table, Colonel Chalabre, in only four hours, won the enormous sum of 1,800,000 francs (Marquiset, 1929, pp. 11-15; Alvarez-Detrell & Paulson, 1982, pp. 1-15). Although Louis X V I himself bet very little and strongly disapproved of reckless wagering, he found himself as powerless to stop his courtiers' activity as to halt the growth of the Revolution itself. O n her part, Marie-Antoinette was obsessed with faro, and night after night stayed up till dawn, winning and losing large sums at the game. And the public knew it (Kunstler, 1940, p. 81; Sweig, 1933, pp. 99-100). In contrast, when the very liberal Duke of Orl6ans threw open the doors of his own home, the middle classes streamed inside and, for the first time, began gambling as cautiously or as recklessly as they chose, within the walls, as it were, of their o w n palace.
THE REVOLUTION
Thus, in the French Revolution, the opening of public gambling houses in the Palais Royal radically altered popular betting habits in two important ways. For the first time in Paris history (excluding certain annual church fairs, like that of Saint-Germain), the middle class could gamble in a respectable place with little worry of arrest by the police (Isambert, 1896, pp. 193-197). And the gambling activities of these classes had not only a symbolic, but also a palpable financial effect. The Versailles palace was no longer the center of French gambling: this activity had shifted to the very bourgeois Palais Royal. But as the Duke of Orleans never intended to rent his second-floor apartments and basement rooms to gambling-house proprietors, how were over 100 of them offering gambling games as early as 1791 ? How, in other words, did they manage to infiltrate themselves? (de Goncourt, & de Goncourt 1880, pp. 20-27). One way was to open a so-called social club--and any name would d o - a n d indeed the Duke of Orl6ans himself, in 1789, founded and was the first president of an ostensibly innocent social circle called the Valois Club (after one of his three sons and located in the gallery of that name), whose amenities included a fine dining room, and a
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lounge. The avowed purpose of the Valois Club was to provide facilities for non-gambling games such as checkers, backgammon, billiards, cards, and chess (the favorite game of Robespierre at the nearby Caffi de la R~gence -- naturally he would never gamble). For those members preferring conversation, the avowed purpose was discussion of politics and current e v e n t s - a n d considering the Duke of Orleans' own political ambitions (unlikely to become king, he was hoping perhaps for the presidency of the first French republic), political discussions were very liberal indeed (Isambert, 1896, p. 190). Gradually, however, those members uninterested in incessant political discussion retired to the game room of the Valois Club, and began gambling for real money. Given his own well-known gambling proclivities, the duke hardly objected. So far as gambling went, however, another so-called social club was far more typical, and that was the Polish Club (having no real connection to Poland) at arcade No. 145. In the August 26, 1791, issue of the Chroniqge de Paris we read: "At the head of the Polish Club are two men, formerly aristocrats [the Vicomte de Castellane and the Marquis de Livry, both to become two of the richest gambling-house proprietors in France], who in five weeks have won more than 500,000 francs, excluding d u b expenses." The other way to open a gambling house in the Palais Royal was to sublease an apartment from an already established tenant, and in Jean-Paul Marat's periodical, L'Ami du Peuple, for February, 1791 (Marat, 1791), we read how this was done (de Goncourt & de Goncourt, 1880, pp. 24-25). From a co-operative lady of easy virtue, one subleased her second-floor apartment (price undisclosed). T h e n one's daily expenses were: an adroit card dealer, 24 francs; some croupiers who exchange money for chips, 30 francs; a firewood porter, 9 francs; six bouncers, 48 francs; two door porters, 12 francs; four waiters, 12 francs; eight touts or steerers, 36 francs; a buffet tender, 6 francs; a n d - - m o s t expensive of all--"a hostess with savoir-faire," 96 francs. These expenses (plus others unnamed) came to 504 francs a day. And what was the steerers' role? To entice players to the secondfloor gambling houses, they wandered the three galleries, pestering visitors, whispering into their ears as they handed them a discreet advertising card: "A brilliant society, Monsieur, on the second floor." More subtle approaches were made by steerers who struck up conversations at tables d'h6te, cafes, and theater gatherings.
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P e r h a p s t h e b e s t w a y to c o m m u n i c a t e b o t h t h e e x t e n t a n d d i s o r d e r of Paris Revolutionary gambling activities, both within and beyond the P a l a i s R o y a l , is to q u o t e f r o m t h e P a r i s p o l i c e b l o t t e r o f 1790 a n d 1791 a few o f t h e i t e m s l i s t e d b y t h e F r e n c h h i s t o r i a n A l e x a n d e r T u e t e y . T h e following reports, in Tuetey's words (1890-1914), were made by police officers a n d m i l i t i a ( t h e N a t i o n a l G u a r d ) to t h e R e v o l u t i o n a r y commis-
saire de police, o r p r e c i n c t c a p t a i n , o f t h e P a l a i s R o y a l a r e a ( a n d s o m e times beyond): No. 1472: around the Palais Royal cafes and cabarets three touts are paid to follow and menace players complaining about the gambling-house proprietors. No. 1748: officers seize the paraphernalia of parfaite-figalit~-three dice, the dice box, and the small layout with its row of squares marked from one to six. No. 1933: certain officers are found to have accepted bribes from the operator of the game called biribi. [70 numbered balls were shaken up inside a soft leather sack; the croupier removed a random ball and announced its number; the payoff was 63 to 1; until the advent of roulette around 1796, hiribi was very popular.] No. 1948: officers find 100 gambling dens in one arrondissement (district) a l o n e - m a n y with triple-barred doors and spies to warn of police raids. No. 2073: at the Palais Royal an operator cheats the players by jiggling the table to change the up-side of the dice. No. 2101: brought in from the Palais Royal, a whore-house madam upbraids the commissaire de police and states that her cardinal preoccupation is always to "defend the honor, probity, and decency of her young ladies." No. 2159: at the Palais Royal, at the gambling house above arcade No. 92, officers raid all the games: the proprietor pays a fine of 3,000 francs. No. 2219: from off the Palais Royal, on Richelieu Street, gamblers lodge a complaint that an operator refused to pay off a one-louis bet: games offered are biribi, the dice game of passe-dix, and all card games. No. 2235: at the Palais Royal bouncers throw out a player who complained after losing at biribi. No. 2236: at the nearby Radziwill building, in the passage leading off from the Palais Royal, in a gambling den a player discovers that at parfaite-6galit6 the dice box contains a b a s c u l e - a hinged false bottom through which the dice may be changed. No. 2251: a gambler, a coachman, complains that a biribi proprietor angrily kicked and beat him with a cane. No. 2268: while a crowd watches, a large detachment of National Guards breaks down some shop doors at the nearby Radziwill building and destroys all the gambling paraphernalia. No. 2348: at the Palais Royal, at gambling house Number 113, the stairway from the arcade is barred, explains the proprietor, in order to protect his clientele from unpleasantness during police raids.
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No. 2424: at the Palais Royal, Monsieur Lafond, proprietor of gambling house Number 36 in the Montpensier arcade, armed with a bayonet pursues and stabs a client who had had the poor taste to question his honesty. No. 2493: in the passage of the Radziwillbuilding, just offthe Palais Royal, the National Guards launch a raid and find themselves opposed by 60 thugs and teams of snarling dogs. No. 2588: the commissaire de police is accused of accepting a weekly bribe of 200 francs from the operator of a biribi game. No. 3391: on February 15, 1791, the National Assembly receives a deputation complaining of the gamblingfury sweeping RevolutionaryParis: it is stated that there are now over 3,000 gambling houses, of varying sizes, flourishingin the city (Tuetey, 1890-1914, vol. 2).
Such was the confusion and turbulence of Paris gambling before the government realized that only through legalization could such disorders be brought under control. The trouble was that the government was in chaos. In 1793 Louis X V I was guillotined on J a n u a r y 21, Marie-Antoinette on October 16, and the very liberal Duke of Orl6ans himself on November 6. When Philippe of Orl6ans was being transported to the guillotine, his tumbril paused before the Palais Royal, whose wall now bore a sign: NAT I O N A L P R O P E R T Y . He shouted one, short, obscene word. The president and founder of the Valois Club had gambled for very high stakes-- and lost. While these riotous events were occurring, gambling was reaching unheard of proportions. To quote the French historian Louis Madelin: "A passion for play seized everybody: there were a hundred gambling hells in the Palais Royal, and every table was heaped with gold . . . . The feasting, gambling, and merrymaking were to reach a pitch that bordered on insanity" (Madelin, 1922, p. 445, LaCroix, 1885, pp. 123-144). So far as gambling went, some members of the new Revolutionary government were just as reckless and obsessed as the monarchs and aristocrats whom they had denounced and affected to despise. The deputy Antoine Barnave lost 30,000 francs in only one evening, and his colleague Henri Larivi~re lost 40,000 in another. The future foreign minister, Bishop Talleyrand (deeming it prudent to forego his aristocratic title), publicly accused of having won at the Palais Royal 600,000 francs, felt obliged to publish a letter insisting that his win
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there had been only 30,000. Perhaps the most ardent gamester of all was the Chevalier Bouju, who, when dying, had himself carried in the arms of his friends to a trente-et-quarante table, where, his hands clenching the green baize, he won enough to pay for a splendid funeral.
AFTER THE REVOLUTION
After the guillotining of Robespierre in 1794 and the end of the Reign of Terror, with young General Napoleon Bonaparte off fighting the armies of European powers intent on invading France to put down the Revolution, life in Paris became, relatively speaking, much quieter and less dramatic. To bring under control the excessive gambling at the Palais Royal, the five Revolutionary leaders of the Directorate reduced the 100 operations there to five, large, a u t h o r i z e d - b u t still not l e g a l gambling houses located at arcade numbers 9, 50, 129, 154, and 113. Number 113 was to become the most famous gambling house in Europe, celebrated in Alexander Dumas' novel, The Woman with the Velvet Collar (1850), and Number 9 was to be celebrated in Balzads novel, Father Goriot (1835). In both books, the heroes win substantially at roulette. But the Directors, headed by Count Paul Francois Nicolas Barras (who lived in the Luxembourg Palace, where one of his guests lost at faro an incredible 2,000,000 francs on the turn of a single card), were too short-sighted to grasp the social and governmental revenue benefits from legalized gambling, so illegal gambling dens continued to flourish all over Paris, to the despair of the police. In fact in the Gazette de France for June 8, 1801, the editors complained of there being in Paris more gambling houses than educational institutions (Aulard, 1903-1909, vol. 2, pp. 344-345). During the Revolution, one of the important political functions of Paris gambling houses was to provide sanctuaries where counterrevolutionaries, trying to restore the Bourbon monarchy, could meet and conspire without arousing suspicion. To forfend this, the Directors had their secret police infiltrate the gambling houses, pretending likewise to be players, to overhear conversations of gamblers, croupiers, and owners. From one of his secret policemen, who had been making the rounds, Count Barras received the following report on January 3,
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1799. It should be m e n t i o n e d that the English e n e m y was suspected of p r o v i d i n g secret financial backing to certain g a m b l i n g houses: "Such, citizen Minister, is the present condition of the Paris gambling houses and of the persons involved in them. You will perceive that there is not a single one of the latter who cannot rightly be suspected of being an enemy of our government. The gambling houses are, we make bold to say, the hotbed of all the counter-revolutionary intrigues. In them is to be found the treasury of all the factions. If the government is desirous of winning a bloodless yet signal victory over all its enemies, it has but to close these places, which are their havens. What is the use of closing our seaports to English merchandise if Prime Minister William Pitt is free to have in Paris gambling houses proprietors who win from [revolutionary] dupes money that goes to support the counter-revolutionaries themselves?" (Duruy, 1896, vol. 3, pp. 346-347) F r o m the standpoint of g a m b l i n g history, however, in the Directory period, an unusual e c o n o m i c event o c c u r r e d in one of the gambling houses of the Palais Royal: the n o w well-known game of roulette, with zero and double zeros, was i n t r o d u c e d for the first time. A l t h o u g h its i n v e n t o r remains u n k n o w n , the so-called roulette wheel itself was i n v e n t e d by an a n o n y m o u s E n g l i s h m a n in L o n d o n a r o u n d 1720, and the layout of 36 n u m b e r s most p r o b a b l y derives from the 17th c e n t u r y Italian game o f b i r i b i ; b u t it was in the Palais R o y a l , a r o u n d 1796, that a most ingenious F r e n c h m a n c o m b i n e d the two by putting, as it were, the English wheel at the head of the Italian layout; and there we have roulette, which soon b e c a m e sensationally popular, and to this day is the one g a m e most c o m m o n to g a m b l i n g casinos the world o v e r ( B a r n h a r t , 1988). R e t u r n i n g from abroad, N a p o l e o n got rid of the D i r e c t o r y in 1799, m a d e himself First Consul in 1802, and c r o w n e d himself emp e r o r in 1804. After a t t e n d i n g carefully to l e n g t h y m o r a l a r g u m e n t s b y his Prefect o f Police, Pasquier, against legalized gambling, and to shorter but m o r e cogent financial a r g u m e n t s for it b y his M i n i s t e r of Police, Fouch~, N a p o l e o n sided with the latter, and on J u n e 24, 1806, the e m p e r o r signed the historic decree which for the first time legalized g a m b l i n g houses in F r a n c e - - b u t only at specific locations, the first being the city of P a r i s - m e a n i n g the five m a i n gambling houses in the Palais R o y a l (plus six within a few blocks) -- the second being those towns like Spa and Aix-les-Bains with mineral springs that qualified t h e m as health resorts. T o d a y these vacation resorts have grown from
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the half dozen in Napoleon's time to as m a n y as 142, and gambling in France is now a multi-billion-franc industry, well regulated, well supervised, and contributing substantial revenues to the public purse. And what of the Palais Royal? Its five gambling houses were not, of course, its only attraction though they were certainly its principal one. In 1804, around its enchanting garden pulsated fifteen restaurants, 29 cafes, seventeen billiard parlors, eighteen jewelers, six watchmakers, four booksellers, sixteen portrait painters, eight milliners, twelve tailors, six wigmakers, eleven pawnbrokers, two shoeblacks, a manufacturer of pictures in hair, and a silhouette cutter (Robiquet, 1963, p. 134). And in addition to innumerable high-class (at least they thought so) ladies of prostitution in the garret and third-floor apartments, as well as those that strolled the garden and the galleries, visitors could appreciate, behind and beneath the arcades, the performances of actors, dwarfs, giants, ventriloquists, dancing dogs, puppets, quack doctors, mountebanks, pornographers, and an orchestra of blind musicians (Lemaistre, 1803, pp. 98-102). Cynics declared that to appreciate fully the pleasures of the Palais Royal one should begin by making a clean breast of matters to a priest living in the garret; then one succumbs to a prostitute on the third floor; then one descends to the gambling houses on the second floor offering roulette, trente-et-quarante, passe-dix, creps, hazard, and biribi; then one pawns one's watch, rings, and other valuables in the entresol (mezzanine); and finally after another go at the gambling upstairs, if fortune hasn't smiled, one returns to the entresol and further pawns one's hat, coat, cane, shoebuckles, or sword, and from there goes to the armorer's shop in the ground-floor arcade to purchase a pistol with which to end one's career. Be that as it may, amid all the hubbub, the gambling houses were unquestionably the main economic engine that propelled the Palais Royal, and as the chief attraction, they opened at noon and went full blast until midnight. Napoleon himself never gambled at the Palais Royal (though as a young lieutenant, he did lose his virginity there to a young provincial prostitute). His sole gaming interest was to play for small stakes at twenty-one, when stranded on board ships or at boring evening parties. But Napoleon's younger brother, Senator Lucien Bonaparte, employed a cook who absolutely outdid everyone. Having no money, in August, 1802, the cook strolled into the famous gambling house Num-
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ber 113 and idly watched the players, while munching an orange from a handful he had brought with him. For one of the oranges, a thirsty player gave him six sous. The cook threw the six sous onto the biribi layout and won six francs, which he then increased to 200 via a roulette wheel. Taking the 200 francs to the trente-et-quarante table, he parlayed the sum into 24,000 francs. By the end of two years, he had won 200,000 francs, invested them in government securities, and retired forever (Nevill, 1909, p. 262; Aulard, 1903-1909, vol. 1, p. 341). It is ironic that the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the defeat of the very man who had authorized legal gambling in France, resulted for the Palais Royal in the most sensational financial year it ever enjoyed. After Waterloo, tens of thousands of English, Prussian, Austrian, and Russian troops descended on the conquered French capital and, after bivouacking in the Bois de Boulogne and along the Champs-Elys6es, went out for a wild time on the town-whose center was the Palais Royal (Prudhomme, 1814, vol. 2, pp. 103-114). The Prussian, Marshal Blucher, sharing victory with the Duke of Wellington, discovered gambling house N u m b e r 154 (considered the most elegant), and pounded on its trente-et-quarante table for service. He got it. In only one night there, he managed to lose an incredible 1,500,000 francs, and to pay the sum, had to mortgage his estates in Prussia. Just the same, Blucher continued spending days and nights playing trente-et-quarante, and between disastrous bouts would recuperate on a couch in a special room there called The Chamber of the Wounded, in which players could meditate, catnap, complain loudly to one another, and eat and drink. As for the Russian contingent, it was headed by the Grand Duke Constantine, who in only one month managed at the Palais Royal to gamble and spend on other entertainments 4,000,000 francs. The King of Prussia managed to spend considerably less, but then he wandered the galleries incognito. Even simple caf6 owners were enriched by the invaders. Falling ill in 1814, Monsieur Angelbert, proprietor in the Palais Royal of the Caf~ Rotonde, returned cured eighteen months later, only to discover that his caf6 had taken in 400,000 francs. Hearing of the wild times in Paris enjoyed by their fairly wellbehaved army, headed by the sober Duke of Wellington, English civilians streamed over from London not to miss out. One of them was
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Sir Walter Scott, who denounced in the Palais Royal "its accursed brothels and gambling houses . . . There was no distinction of persons . . . on the long tables, which were covered with gold, an artizan was at liberty to hazard his week's wages, or a noble his whole estate." (Littlewood, 1988, p. 6 2 ) J u s t the same, the Scottish baronet every day visited there the Car6 of the Thousand Columns in order to gaze, along with all the other male patrons, on the visage of its proprietress, M a d a m e Romain, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Paris. The Prince Regent, later George IV, heard that one of the gambling-house proprietors, the Marquis de Livry, bore a striking resemblance to him. Unable to cross the Channel himself, the Prince Regent sent over Lord Fife "to ascertain that momentous fact." English visitors well deserved their reputation for decorum, and one of them, J o h n S. Jessopp, was shocked when he witnessed a losing gambler actually snatch a croupier's rake and begin thrashing the man. Then the furious gambler "hit out at a huge chandelier with scores of wax candles in it and frantically smashed it. Panic and confusion . . . a company of gendarmes was called . . . [who] arrested everyone." (de Polnay, 1968, pp. 215-218; Alger, 1904, pp. 138-139; Boutet de Monvel, 1911, p. 101) After the conquering Allied armies withdrew to their homelands, Paris became its civilized self again. Louis X V I I I was restored to the throne, and the gambling houses of the Palais Royal became noted for the quieter but quaint characters who frequented their tables. Later director of the Paris Opera and then editor of Le Constitutionnel, in 1816 Dr. Louis-D6sir~ V6ron was a poor medical student (V6ron, 1856, vol. 1, pp. 21-36). Thinking it a wonderful idea to pay for his internship through gambling, he obtained his first stake money by selling "a fine skeleton." Using the martingale or doubling-up system, he won 100 francs a day for three months, in consequence of which, he was soon the magnet of losing players who wanted to sponge money. "I often met at gambling house N u m b e r 129," he wrote in his memoirs, "a literary man with powdered hair and advanced in years, who in his lucky bets would rejoice over his winnings in Latin. He was a poor wretch whom the least loss would make penniless. One day he touched me confidentially on the shoulder and led me into the anteroom. 'Look here,' he said, 'take this Persius and this Juvenal and give me forty sous.' As I refused to pay less than five francs for these two Latin poets, his joy was excessive. But in half an hour he returned to me, putting his hand into his pocket. 'Look here,' he said, 'take this pair
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of black silk stockings and give me what you please.' I had consented to diminish his library, but I could not agree to wear his clothes. Another day I had 40 louis d'or on the black at trente-et-quarante. I left it there to double. An old frequenter of the house came up to me. 'Do you want to win?' he confided secretively. 'I have a disease--promise me ten francs so I may buy a bandage.' I won, and he soon lost his bandage at roulette . . . . " But all good things come to an end, and in only one day, Dr. V~ron lost back to N u m b e r 129 all the money he had won in three months with his martingale. "By six o'clock that night I had scarcely enough money left to pay for the dinner I had ordered. In the morning, rich with nine or ten thousand francs and lots of castles in the air, by evening I had neither a single sou nor an illusion . . . . Ah, behold--to what great lengths the sale of a skeleton had led me!" (V~ron, 1856, vol. 1, pp. 21-36) As Napoleon had foreseen, the legalization of the gambling houses in Paris would bring the government enormous tax revenues. Indeed the gross profit, in which the government shared heavily, of the eleven legal Paris gambling houses was annually anywhere from six to nine million francs. From 1819 to 1837, the eleven casinos grossed the huge sum of 137,313,403 francs (Calvet, 1978, pp. 186-187).
THE AFTERMATH But by 1836, the anti-gambling forces in the capital had finally regained the day, and on J u n e 17th the C h a m b e r of Deputies extended the legality of the Palais Royal gambling houses to only December 31, 1837. O n that date, at the stroke of midnight, the most famous gambling houses in Europe, which at that time meant the world, would have to close their doors forever. According to the issues of J a n u a r y 1st and 2nd, 1837, of the Gazette des Tribunaux, the final closing of the gambling clubs caused riotous disorders. During the last days of December, 1837, the eleven clubs were so packed with impassioned gamblers, that the official farmer of the games, Jacques Benazet, had to call for reinforcements of police and National Guards to maintain order, and to expel every night at closing
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time, more than 500 gamblers "who absolutely insisted on ruining themselves." O n December 31, 1837, the eleven gambling houses opened at 3:00 P.M. to an impatient mob. Fearing a possible robbery attempt at the cashier's cage, Benazet ordered the guards doubled. W h e n 6:00 P.M. arrived, he ordered N u m b e r 113, the most popular casino in the Palais Royal, closed down, after a workman had openly committed suicide, and despite a crowd of 800 gamblers shouting under its windows to be let inside. Benazet's own gambling house, not far from the Palais Royal, was called Frascati. W h e n 10:00 P.M. arrived, Frascati had been invaded by thousands of gamblers: its forecourt, stairways, and gaming rooms overflowed with a bobbing mass struggling to place their last bets at roulette, creps, and trente-et-quarante. Another gambler, unhappy because now he could never win back his losses, shot himself outside Frascati in full public view. Fearing a riot, Benazet ordered a strong detachment of police to clear all the rooms of Frascati, a feat they achieved with great difficulty. Finally, midnight arrived, and the casinos in the Palais Royal shut their doors tight. When the thousands of gamblers, prostitutes, and hangers-on were ejected into Richelieu Street, "the public greeted them with hoots, catcalls, and jubilant hollerings" (Barnhart, 1983, pp. 101102). The shutting down of the legal gambling houses had soon enough a disastrous effect, for within only a few years, the Palais Royal became a moribund place. As the throngs of gamblers no longer came to patronize its caffis and elegant restaurants, one by one they all closed down, leaving today only the Restaurant Grand V~four. The shops in the galleries, once so crowded, soon became bereft of even a single customer, so that most of the shopkeepers gave up and moved out to the Boulevard des Italiens and the livelier avenues of the city. Now in the arcades, only a few shops remain, selling slow-moving items like military decorations, rare books, antiques, stamps, and coins. By 1889, the Palais Royal, once the undisputed goal of every visitor and pleasure seeker to Paris, had become as quiet and forlorn as a cathedral close, and has remained so to this day. A few footfalls in the arcades, the flutter of pigeons, the cries of a handful of toddlers watched by as m a n y dozing governesses on a sunny a f t e r n o o n - s u c h are the ghostly remnants of the enthusiastic throngs of yesteryear.
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Today, the upper floors of the great palace are inhabited largely by government office workers busily weaving the webs of the Council of State and the Ministry of Culture. So while sitting outside in the garden, instead of the happy or outraged shouts of gamblers, from the second-floor windows one hears only the silence of bureaucrats thinking. Yet no hush of today can erase from memory, both nostalgic and otherwise, the entrancing hubbub of the old Palais Royal, from the Revolution of 1789 to the year 1838, when it was the most intriguing, picturesque, and exciting gambling mecca of E u r o p e - a n d probably the world.
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Marquiset, A. (1929). Jeux etjoueurs d'autrefois, 1789-1837, Paris: Emile-Paul Fr~res. Michel, J. (1983). La police des jeux, Du Paris de Louis X V g~ la marine de Louis XVI: l'oeuvre de Monsieur de Sartine, Paris: Editions de l'Erudit. Mont6mont, A. (1847). Guide universel de lgtranger dans Paris, Paris: Garnier Fr~res. Nevill, R. (1909). Light come, light go, London: MacMillan and Co, Prudhomme, L.H. (1814). Voyage descriptif et philosophique de l'ancien et du nouveau Paris, Paris: Chez rauteur. Rice, H.C., Jr. (1976). Thomas Jefferson's Paris, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Robiquet, J. (1963). Daily life in France under Napoleon, New York: Macmillan. Sweig, S. (1933). Marie-Antoinette, New York: The Viking Press. Tuetey, A. ( 1890-1914). Rdpertoire ggngral des sources rnanuscrites de l'histoire de Paris pendant la r~volution franfaise, Paris: Imprimerie nouvelle. V6ron, L. (1856). Les maisons de jeu de Paris, Mgmoires d'un bourgeois de Paris, Paris: Librairie nouvelle.
