French Revolution: The First Growths in the firing line

By the time the French Revolution swept into Bordeaux, the First Growths were well established as serious forces guiding the local wine market, and their owners found much of the eighteenth century a profitable and enjoyable place to be. Their status as nobles, however, meant that inevitably they were directly in the firing line of the huge social changes that rocked France, and three of the five estates would find themselves minus their owners by the time the dust had settled.

Bordeaux suffered one of the harshest reprisals of any French city during the Revolution, mainly because of its association with the political faction known as Les Girondins, who had initially been enthusiastic supporters of the 1789 uprising, but who were seen as enemies of the revolutionary forces by the early 1790s. Even though most of the parliamentarians in the city had no connection to them at all, they were damned by association. Of the 800 families that comprised the Bordeaux nobility, around half were to disappear by the early nineteenth century. In total, 79 Bordeaux nobles, including 36 members of parliament, were beheaded. A further 408 people chose exile, most heading to Spain, and those who remained behind were stripped of their titles, and taxed so harshly as to threaten all remnants of their former existence.

The last years of the Ancien Régime, in contrast, were both prosperous and successful, and all five First Growths reaped the benefits. Over in England, the Pontac’s Head remained in business until 1780, by which time François-Auguste had long since passed away (nearly ninety years earlier, in 1694, with his job title in the National Dictionary of Biography given as “Tavern Keeper”). His reputation as a generous and flamboyant host held true to the end, perhaps indicating why he died with no shortage of debts but a distinct shortage of children. The renown of his Bordeaux château, however, was firmly established, and it continued to grow under the joint ownership of his niece Therèse de Pontac (and so the Lestonnac family at Château Margaux), and one of his nephews Louis-Arnaud le Comte.

Meanwhile at Lafite and Latour things were going from strength to strength. The only son of Alexandre and Marie-Thérèse, Nicolas-Alexandre de Ségur was born in Bordeaux on October 20, 1697. When his father died in 1716, he inherited at the tender age of nineteen not only his father’s post as Président à mortier of the Bordeaux parliament (it would take the Revolution to stop this handing down of titles through family), but also Lafite and Latour. Two years later things looked up for Mouton also, as the young marquis bought the Seigneurie de Mouton from the Foix-Candale family. Although he sold it two years later to Baron Joseph de Branne, it was at this point that Mouton’s future as a wine estate began in earnest, and its wines started to be taken seriously by the merchants of the Place de Bordeaux. Prices began to climb, and although still lagging behind the other Firsts, quickly equaled the best “second category” wines such as Pichon de Longueville.

A Planting Frenzy

Right from the start, Joseph de Branne—son of Bertrand de Branne, an adviser to the King—clearly had ambitions for his new acquisition, promptly changing its name to Brane-Mouton and constructing winemaking facilities. It seems certain that vines were already present (records attest to vines at the time of Nogaret’s marriage to Marguerite de Foix-Candale), but he began to greatly expand the plantings. In fact this period saw a frenzy of vine planting across Pauillac, suggesting that there was good money to be made from it, as the Bordélais have never been shy of earning a living.

Baron Joseph busied himself by buying up as much land as he could in the Baronnie de Mouton. His day job, as with so many of the leadings lights of the time, was as a councillor in the Bordeaux parliament, but he sank his wealth into the vineyard. By his death in 1769, the estate was making enough wine to be using barrels as payment for hunting rights and other arrangements that existed with neighbouring seigneurs. There were also wranglings going on over non-payment of rents, reaching a head after his death, when his widow Elisabeth Duval found to her dismay that the majority of tenants refused to pay rents in the absence of her husband. That same year, 1769, she paid a notaire called Moutardier for his assistance with the terroir of the Seigneurie de Mouton, and made an appeal directly to the king for her rights as the Seigneuse de Moton to be confirmed. The king did this on June 17, 1769, in a document headed ‘Louis par la Grace de Dieu, Roi de France et de Navarre,’ today tucked neatly away in the city’s archives.

A rash of receipts from notaries during the following years attests to the fact that Elizabeth Duval and her son Hector were not only receiving rents, but also paying their own, in full, to various other seigneuries and to Moutardier’s widow. Almost invariably the payments included barrels of wine (in both old and new barrels), as well as cash, most usually paid in silver coins.

Prince of Vines

Back at Lafite and Latour, having sold off Mouton, the Marquis de Ségur was determined to have his remaining estates celebrated not just in the taverns of London, but in his home country.

France was late to the Bordeaux party. Not only because of the perceived “Englishness” of the wine, but also because, geographically, it was a long way from Paris, in a country that was really a patchwork of often-warring mini-kingdoms. In the early eighteenth century, Burgundy (in a constant jostling for position with Champagne) was known as the favored wine of the kings of France, due in large part to its close proximity to the French capital, and the links that many Paris merchants had with the region.

Undeterred by this, Nicolas-Alexandre found a way to put both wines before King Louis XV in the early 1720s, where they became favorites of Madame de Pompadour in the same way that Haut-Brion had become a favorite of Charles II of England sixty years earlier. By all accounts this personal charm offensive won’t have been too difficult. The Marquis de Ségur was right at home in the extravagant court of Louis XV, as he was known to be the wealthiest man in Bordeaux, and was more than happy to show off that wealth. He had a mansion house in Paris, was frequently present at the Court of Versailles (often enough to have been crowned “Prince of the Vines” by King Louis), and began to invest heavily in his vineyards back in the Médoc.

The owners of all the estates would have enjoyed extravagant lives at the time. All titled nobility—we had the marquis at Lafite and Latour, the baron at Mouton and the count at Haut-Brion and Margaux—drew serious wealth from their lands (it is estimated that 86 percent of de Ségur’s capital came from his two wine properties). So it is hardly surprising that they would have spent lavishly on decorating their homes and entertaining within them. It is again a local Bordelais historian, this time Michel Figeac, who has uncovered some of the most fascinating information about their daily lives. Simply looking at the numbers of beds in their houses proves enormously revealing, as these were among the most expensive household items before the Revolution—around three hundred livres for a master’s bed (around 20 percent more than the yearly average salary for a priest at the time), and around fifty livres for the most simple bed for the servants.

With fireplaces being the only source of heating in houses (or wood burners for the truly wealthy), beds were of enormous importance, and the owners of the First Growths would have enjoyed the most extravagantly carved wooden four-posters, covered with two mattresses, feather pillows, woollen sheets and blankets, extra thick foot-covers, with taffeta and satin decorations. The Count de Fumel had three hundred sheets and blankets at Haut-Brion, but although pillows were recent inventions in the eighteenth century, no mention is made of them at the estate.

Up in Pauillac, de Ségur was known for his lavish feasts, and the inventories of kitchen equipment are just as revealing as that of the bedroom. Owners of these estates would have had huge kitchens full of several hundred cooking pots and pans, ranging from soup cauldrons to fish kettles to meat spits. Poultry was a particular favorite, as were ortolon, the tiny songbirds that were captured alive, force-fed, drowned in Armagnac, plucked, then stripped of their feet. The remainder was roasted and eaten whole, bones and all. Ortolon would be netted in huge numbers, fed with oats and millet in darkened rooms till their livers became engorged, when they were considered ready for the eighteenth century table. This delicacy was at its height before the Revolution, but even today it is not illegal to eat ortolon, just to kill them. And they are clearly still of interest in modern France; President Mitterand caused a minor posthumous scandal by enjoying a plate of them for his last meal in 1996.

Splitting Lafite and Latour

Despite de Ségur’s clear enjoyment of the two properties, his joint ownership of Lafite and Latour was not to make it quite to the Revolution. Nicolas-Alexandre had four daughters, and when he died in 1755, the ownership of the two was split between different parts of the family. His grandson, Nicolas de Ségur, became sole owner of Lafite (thus taking care of the eldest of Nicolas-Alexandre’s four daughters, Marie-Therese) while his other three daughters retained their ownership of Château Latour.

The split at this point marked a change not only in the way they were run, but also their commercial strategy. Both had previously been looked after by a local notary, Maître Suisse, and sold to Bordeaux merchants at the same price. You just have to head back into the archives of the Lawton brokerage family to confirm this, with Abraham Lawton’s ledger of December 16, 1757, noting he bought Suisse-Latour and Suisse-Lafite both for 1,300 livres per tonneaux. Decades pass when both are sold again for the exact same price.

Maître Suisse continued to run things at Latour until 1774, while a Mr. Domanger took over at Lafite—to the great benefit of Latour, because the Ségur family, before the split, put most of their energies into developing Lafite, producing around one-third more wine there (in the 1750s, the average was 107 tonneaux at Lafite compared to 70 tonneaux at Latour). All this was to change, and Latour’s vines grew from 38 hectares of vines in 1759 to 47 hectares in 1794.

The split was to prove beneficial for Latour in other ways, as only one of the many owners, the Comte de Ségur-Cabanac, was directly affected by wider political events. The others—essentially the Comte de la Pallu and the Marquis de Beaumont—avoided the guillotine. Ségur-Cabanac’s part (27.06%) was sold to Jean Courregeolles-Toulon, the widow of a noted Bordeaux doctor, but the running of the estate remained in the hands of the manager, and out of the hands of the state, as it was never declared a bien nationaux.

It didn’t, however, escape hardship entirely, and the new manager Poitevin, who took on his role in 1797, wrote widely about the difficulties he was facing in restoring the vines to their former health, as well as his—largely successful—battles to keep the prices of Latour as high as he believed it deserved.

By 1842, the number of inheritors was once again creeping upward, and the decision was taken to form a Société Civile du Vignoble de Château Latour (a nontrading company, and the first such vineyard entity in France) which remained in place, with only family members, until 1962, nearly 250 years after Alexandre de Ségur married Marie-Thérèse de Clausel in 1695.

Mouton joined Latour in escaping the worst traumas, mainly because there was no majestic house for the state to take over. Owner Hector de Branne was spared his life but was financially ruined, as all remaining nobles were taxed in punishingly high amounts. Records of the Revolutionary Year XI (1802) show that, of 170 of the 600 most highly taxed people in the Gironde department were “nobles” (the others being mainly négociants, property owners, doctors or other professionals). And right up there, the second most highly taxed on the list, is Hector de Branne, who was taxed on his land at 8,792 francs (the currency of livres having been jettisoned in 1795).

Lafite meanwhile managed to lose two owners in the space of eight years. First Nicolas de Ségur, who proved to have a gambling habit that meant in 1786, three years before the Revolution, he was forced to sell the estate for eight hundred and eighty thousand livres to his cousin Nicolas Pierre de Pichard.

Pichard was a magistrate and a lawyer and had been president of the Bordeaux parliament since 1760. He clearly put his legal brain to good use, as his purchase was the result of overturning another one carried out in 1784, using complicated laws surrounding lineage. He was also one of the richest men in the region. Besides his wine properties in Pauillac and Sauternes, he owned a polyculture farm in Les Landes, where he had 143 sheep, twenty-four cows, and eight pairs of oxen, plus one of the largest and most luxurious houses in the city of Bordeaux, on Rue de Marail. If we head back to inventories of kitchens, bedrooms, and general household goods, he was clearly an ostentatious and generous host. His Bordeaux town house, for example, had thirteen serving platters and 314 plates, and his wine cellar contained—besides Bordeaux—bottles of Champagne, Muscat, Port, Sherry, and Marsala.

End Game

None of which helped him much, of course, when the Revolution came. Even before that a series of disastrous harvests met Pichard at Lafite (the ones that whipped up enough resentment around France to kick off the Revolution, no less) but before he had found the time to recover from these, he was arrested by the revolutionary forces, his lands and goods confiscated (estimated at the time to be worth more than one million livres). Pichard was guillotined in Paris, along with his wife, on June 30, 1794, at the height of the Terror. Lafite became the property of France.

Equally unlucky were the Fumels at Haut-Brion and Margaux. Joseph de Fumel had owned both estates since 1749. He was a descendant of the Lestonnacs and a military commander who was ennobled as a result of his successful career. In 1773, Fumel became governor of Château Trompette, a fortress that had been built on the site of today’s Place des Quinconces in central Bordeaux after the Hundred Years’ War. Its initial purpose was to display the might of the French, who had newly regained ownership of Bordeaux, and to ensure the English didn’t try their luck again. By the eighteenth century, it was still an important military site, intended to protect the increasingly busy and wealthy port—although it, too, didn’t survive long after the Revolution, being torn down definitively in 1818.

In 1781, Fumel was awarded the Grand Croix of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis, and it was during his period of ownership that Thomas Jefferson undertook his celebrated visits to Bordeaux and Château Haut-Brion. The first of these took place on May 25, 1787, just two years before the Revolution, after which Jefferson famously sent a few bottles of the 1784 vintage of “the very best Bourdeaux wine…of the vineyard of Obrion” to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes (it is worth noting that all original First Growths attracted his attention, with him both writing favourably about their wines, and sending examples back to the fortunate Eppes).

Fumel also displayed a passion for both estates that led to him writing one of the leading eighteenth-century tracts about viticulture. Putting his strategic background to good use, he formalized the state of affairs with the Le Comte side of the family, assigning the “Chai Neuf” part of Haut-Brion to them, which included a building and vines. He promptly set about making his part even more impressive with the addition of several new wings to the château, and re-landscaping the parks and gardens.

His loyalty to King Louis XV, however, was storing up trouble, not only for him but also for his daughter. As the king’s health ailed, his mistress Madame de Barry began looking for protection after he died, and she alighted on the idea of marrying her youngest brother, Jean-Baptiste-Guillaume-Nicolas, to Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Fumel. His future father-in-law dutifully played ball to a certain extent, by making him governor of Château Trompette, but he was less keen to give his daughter’s hand until Louis himself intervened and forced the marriage through. The Fumels still refused to let Jean-Baptiste take their family name, even after the king died from smallpox in 1774, so he resorted to taking his mother-in-law’s family name—Hargicourt.

Despite this link with royalty, at the start of the Revolution Fumel remained popular with the people of Bordeaux. At the Fall of the Bastille, he sided with the commoners, relinquishing control of Château Trompette and melting down all his gold to give to those in need. In recognition of this, he was elected mayor of the city on February 19, 1790, but he retired from the role in 1791, as the mood against the nobility turned darker.

He retired to Haut-Brion until 1793, when the Terror swept down from Paris. The revolutionary committee, headed up the bloodthirsty Jean-François de Lacombe, arrested and imprisoned him and confiscated Haut-Brion (only for Lacombe to install his mistress in it immediately afterward).

Fumel was officially arrested for harbouring refractory priests, members of the clergy who had refused to take the Revolutionary Oath. But he had also been denounced by eighty-two of his peasant tenants, not in Pessac but from his lands farther south, near today’s town of Agen. On July 27, 1794, Fumel was guillotined in front of large and enthusiastic crowds in Place Gambetta in Bordeaux (then called Place Dauphine, or briefly Place de la Revolution), three days after his daughter Marie-Louise suffered the same fate. He left behind a poignant set of instructions to the bailiff of the Haut-Brion estate, Sieur Giraud, on how to look after his vines, what dates to harvest, how many workers to employ, what rates to pay them, when to prune, and how to look after the château and its outbuildings “during my absense.”

Meanwhile Mary-Louise Fumel’s husband Jean-Baptiste—by now Monsieur le Comte d’Hargicourt—had shown a distinct lack of gratitude for his skin-saving marriage. He emigrated early on in the troubles, leaving the château to be sequestered by the revolutionary forces, and his wife and father-in-law to meet their fate. The day after Fumel’s death, Robespierre was overthrown in Paris, and four days later members of Bordeaux’s revolutionary council were themselves arrested and guillotined—but just too late for the Count of Haut-Brion.

 

First published in Bordeaux Legends, Jane Anson 2012, now re-released as a limited edition NFT ebook.