The Paris Salons

When Viotti arrived in Paris he was bearing a letter of introduction, which had been given to him at the court of Frederick the Great, to no less a personage than the philosopher Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, who was asked to help the young violinist ‘try to merit the approbation of a nation that has become the dispenser of reputations in every field’.Footnote ¹² In this Viotti was successful: his two seasons playing at the Concert spirituel were exhibitions of his superiority over his rivals.Footnote ¹³ But with fame comes controversy, and it is to this that Viotti probably referred when he told his old patron Cisterna that it was his ‘miserable talent’ that was the cause of his disgrace.Footnote ¹⁴ However, as we shall see, it was not fame alone that caused Viotti’s 1798 woes.

The letter to d’Alembert gave Viotti immediate entrée into the world of the Paris salons, where he was made welcome by royalists (Mme de Richelieu, Mme de Rochechouart, Mme de La Briche, Mme Vigée-Lebrun) and philosophers alike. As he said in his Précis, he was ‘received everywhere’. One of the earliest salons he attended was Mme Helvétius’s famous literary and philosophical salon, which was attended by d’Alembert (until October 1783), Diderot (until July 1784), and Benjamin Franklin (until July 1785). According to Pougin, Viotti ‘warmly embraced’ the ideas of these encyclopédistes.Footnote ¹⁵ Here he might have heard Franklin express the desire to ‘abolish monarchy, aristocracy, and hierarchy throughout the world’.Footnote ¹⁶

Another salon where he might have heard similar views was that of Abbé Morellet, the man of letters, philosophe, and member of Adrien Duport’s Constitutional Club. Morellet was fond of music and played the cello. Viotti, along with Piccini and his pianist friends Nicolas-Joseph Hüllmandel and Hélène de Montgeroult, were regulars, and it is likely the future British embassy secretary William Huskisson, whose unorthodox French education brought him into contact with these same liberal-minded men, also attended. Acceptance into this world had to be earned. According to one contemporary, ‘People wishing to take their place in polite society had to have enough general knowledge to enable them to discuss the political and social problems debated by the “enlightened” world’.Footnote ¹⁷ Clearly Viotti was accepted not only for his musical talent, but also because he was able to hold his own among these fine minds. More significant, however, is that such discussions were expected of the participants. By taking part in these debates Viotti would have believed that he was doing no more than any other person touched by the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment – in other words, that his actions were innocent.

Viotti may also have been admitted to the salon of the freethinking Mme de Staël, for she certainly knew him and had heard him play.Footnote ¹⁸ This salon had a strong political emphasis, and also welcomed musicians. The young librettist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly wrote of it (although he could have been writing of any of the salons Viotti frequented) that it contained the crème de la crème of Paris society, and that all attendees were celebrities in their own fields, and that there ‘one learned to judge men, not according to their rank, but according to their personal merit’.Footnote ¹⁹ Mme de Staël’s salon was the resort of constitutional monarchists, and by 1789–1790 (the dates of the salon) Viotti had made some good friends of this political persuasion. All were deputies in the Constituent National Assembly (Ange-Marie d’Eymar, Alexandre de Lameth, Adrien Duport, the Duc d’Aiguillon, Baron Menou). In his Précis Viotti refused to malign them, calling them ‘good and honest men’ (surely an implicit endorsement of their principles), whose acquaintance he had made in order to avert suspicion. This was not quite true, for according to his friend Edme Miel, Viotti shared their views. Like all generous-hearted men, Miel said, Viotti had applauded the early reform measures, and shared the reformers’ hopes for a better France. After all, a love of liberty went together with a love of the arts.Footnote ²⁰ One can imagine Viotti getting caught up in the excitement of the early years of the Revolution when, as Mme de Staël wrote, politics was still in the hands of the liberal aristocracy, and ‘one breathed more freely, there was more air in one’s lungs, and the nation was seized with hopes of boundless happiness’.Footnote ²¹

Viotti’s dearest friends of these years were the aristocratic amateur pianist Hélène de Montgeroult (herself a close friend of Mme de Staël),Footnote ²² who would go on to become a professeur in the newly founded Paris Conservatoire in 1795; her teacher Hüllmandel, who was the protégé of the philosophe Morellet; and her lover the constitutional monarchist (later Republican) and member of the Jacobin Club (until July 1791, when he helped found the breakaway Club des Feuillants), Hugues-Bernard Maret,Footnote ²³ who went daily to the National Assembly to report proceedings.Footnote ²⁴ Montgeroult and Viotti were close musical collaborators, and played together at the same Paris assemblies, as well as at the Montgeroult country estate, where they gave displays of their brilliant improvisational skills.Footnote ²⁵

It was not uncommon for artists and musicians to be close to prominent politicians in the early years of the Revolution.Footnote ²⁶ Many of the latter were fond of the arts. Maret came from a cultured Dijon family, his father was the author of a panegyric on Rameau,Footnote ²⁷ and he himself was a music connoisseur. In one of Montgeroult’s letters to him she speaks of Gluck’s Orfeo and of the castrato Guadagni, and reminds him feelingly of her favourite piano piece and of the correspondence between music and emotions.Footnote ²⁸ Maret’s own evidence, too, showed that he loved opera and enjoyed singing.Footnote ²⁹ The young Bertrand Barère, who became more radicalized as the Revolution went on, was, according to the amateur musician and political intriguer Mme de Genlis, passionate about the arts.Footnote ³⁰ Montgeroult was also on friendly terms with Barère, appealing to him for help at the time of her 1793 troubles (see below), when he was a member of the Committee of Public Safety.Footnote ³¹

At the same time Viotti had strong connections to the queen. After his retirement from public performing he had been invited to join the prestigious masonic lodge, the Société olympique, and was a sometime leader of its admired orchestra, which performed in full court dress to a private audience in one of the rooms of the Tuileries Palace under the patronage of the queen. If, as Viotti says in his Précis, he gave up public performing to devote himself to the queen, the following anecdote recounted by Eymar seems curious, though possible, given Viotti’s temperament, which was impetuous, and by his own admission, impatient.Footnote ³² Allegedly, the Comte d’Artois had rudely interrupted his playing at a concert in the queen’s apartments, and Viotti had put his violin under his arm, folded his music, and walked out. Whether or not the anecdote is true, Viotti’s reputation suffered by the telling of it. His behaviour was thought arrogant and disrespectful. Eymar described a second incident which he believed may have earned Viotti an anti-royalist reputation. Viotti was said to have refused to change the venue of a concert, which was to take place in a fifth-floor apartment (probably Eymar’s own), for the benefit of the nobles who intended to come. Viotti was supposed to have said, ‘For a long time we have stooped to them; now let them come up to us’.Footnote ³³ Whether he did indeed say these words or not (his friend Miel believed he did not),Footnote ³⁴ is immaterial. The point is, it was believed he said them.

The artists who took part in this concert were Viotti’s soulmate Mme de Montgeroult, the queen’s pianist Johann David Hermann, violinists Pierre Rode (Viotti’s pupil) and Giuseppe Puppo, cellists Smerska and Bréval, pianist Daniel Steibelt, and the singers Garat, Mandini, Viganoni and Mme Morichelli. Their very participation shows the extent to which they had been touched by the spirit of the Revolution, and even perhaps, as Dorival suggests, that the concert was itself un acte engagé.Footnote ³⁵ Like Rousseau, whose bust adorned Eymar’s apartment, Viotti believed in the equality of men irrespective of any hierarchies imposed by society. He disliked of any form of constraint, was unwilling to compromise his principles, and was not shy in expressing his views. These beliefs led Viotti to behave in a way that was recklessly heedless of public opinion, but it should not necessarily condemn him, for, even if the concert were an acte engagé, it took place when men’s hopes for reform were still pure, and untainted by the bloody events that followed.

As far as the politicians were concerned, two incidents may be cited to show that they believed that musicians fell into distinct categories, those who did, and those who did not ‘meddle’ in politics. The first incident took place a couple of years after the fifth-floor-apartment concert. Hermann was arrested when he attended a session of the Revolutionary Tribunal (these began in April 1793) dressed in elegant attire. Barère came to his aid and had him released. Barère wrote in his 1842 Mémoires that Hermann ‘did not meddle in politics’,Footnote ³⁶ identical words to those written of Hüllmandel by Morellet in his letter introducing the pianist to Lord Lansdowne in 1786.Footnote ³⁷ Clearly politicians thought it better that musicians did not ‘meddle’. The fact that neither Hermann or Hüllmandel ever came to grief, shows that Viotti, who did, must have been perceived to be meddling. Unlike Viotti, Hüllmandel, who had also played at court for the queen, had managed to keep a low profile in revolutionary Paris, and his name was never to be found in the newspapers. He had much to lose from the Revolution, as he was married to the wealthy, now pregnant, niece of the Receiver General, and he quietly emigrated in 1790.

On the other hand, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a German violinist whom Viotti would have known,Footnote ³⁸ did, like Viotti, suffer for being seen to take a political stand. He was accused of having Jacobin sympathies, fell victim to the machinations of jealous musical colleagues, and lost his court post because of it. Reichardt had published a book on his travels in France, which was read as an apology for the French Revolution. According to the translator of the 1792/93 French edition, Reichardt had a cultured mind, that had [like Viotti’s?] been ‘seduced by Rousseau’.Footnote ³⁹

Théâtre Feydeau and the Opéra bid

It was during the early years of the Revolution that Viotti’s activities attracted most attention. In 1788, with unfortunate timing, Viotti decided to branch out into entrepreneurial activities. The queen desired a theatre for opera buffa. She obtained a privilège, which she awarded to Léonard Autié and Viotti, whom she must have forgiven for his previous breech of court protocol. A third person was named in the legal documents as a co-owner of the theatre. This was the wealthy manufacturer Bernard du Chailla des Arènes, who, quite possibly against his will, had been persuaded by ‘un personnage distingué de la cour’ (no doubt the queen) to provide financial backing to the new theatre. Although the queen was the real patron, the theatre was named for Monsieur, Comte de Provence, and housed in the Tuileries Palace.Footnote ⁴⁰

From the start the enterprise drew fear and distrust from the rival Paris theatres which operated under royal privilege (the Comédie-Italienne, the Comédie-Française, and the Académie royale de musique, or Opéra). As Darlow has pointed out, the governance of these theatres was already in a state of flux in the 1780s, with competing forces at work for their control.Footnote ⁴¹ Viotti’s theatre opened right when this jostling was most chaotic. The absolute state control of the Opéra was lessening, yet Viotti’s new privately run theatre enjoyed patent favouritism from the queen. The other theatres were resentful. In his study of the Italian opera at the Theatre de Monsieur from 1789 to 1792, Di Profio sets out their grievances.Footnote ⁴² One was that it was allowed to flout the time-honoured tradition then obtaining in royal theatres that no two theatres may present the same genre. Viotti presented four different genres (opera buffa, French opéra comique, French spoken plays and vaudeville). All except the opera buffa encroached on the territory of the other theatres. The Opéra was the theatre which stood to lose most from the new competition, for the Theatre de Monsieur presented its popular Italian opera on Tuesdays and Fridays, the same days as the Opéra’s own French opera.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, generous funding allowed the theatre to outperform its rivals, both in public favour and in critical acclaim. The advantages enjoyed by Autié and Viotti were so injurious to the interests of the other theatres that it was inevitable enemies would be made.

Viotti was undaunted by the ill will borne him by the directors and personnel of the rival theatres, and seemed to want to press home his advantage. He set his sights on the Académie royale de musique, which he knew to be beset with financial difficulties. Within a few months of opening his Théâtre de Monsieur, Viotti had gathered together a group of investors and attempted to take control of the Opéra. It was an opportunistic bid by which he hoped to do away with the competition altogether. The bid was unsuccessful. Viotti’s conduct during this brief episode (March–May 1789) has been criticized for being aggressive and tactless, and indeed he made enemies not only of the Opéra management, but also of the singers themselves. Moreover, at Viotti’s own instigation, the whole affair was made public in his Memorandum to the King, which he published on 29 April 1789, along with his correspondence with the king’s ministers.Footnote ⁴⁴

This seems to be yet another example of Viotti’s lofty disregard for the harm his actions would do him. His assault on the Opéra caused outrage among the principals of the Opéra, who, in making their own submission to the committee of the Académie royale de musique, stated that Viotti’s ‘pretensions and projects’ had caused them surprise and pain. In an invidious comparison with the hated tax farmers of the ancien régime, the principals, who affixed their signatures to the five-page Réclamation, wrote

By his exploitative methods, they implied, Viotti was an enemy of French musical artists.

After this ignominious episode Viotti concentrated on the running of his theatre. But animosity towards him continued. Michael McClellan describes how the controversy that swirled around his production of the Italian opera Nina was harnessed to the revolutionary struggle.Footnote ⁴⁶ His theatre had become the object of criticism in the press for being under the queen’s protection, and for being ‘the rendez-vous of aristocrats’.Footnote ⁴⁷ When Viotti was forced to move out of the Tuileries Palace to the rue Feydeau, he renamed his theatre, but not soon enough for some. The Chronique de Paris had already called on him to change the theatre’s ‘ridiculous’ name.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Chronique had also criticized the theatre for being elitist, and for acting against the spirit of liberty by forbidding its Italian singers to perform in the Concert spirituel. Footnote ⁴⁹ Viotti had to steer a difficult course between pleasing the public and toeing the political line. To appease he Revolutionaries he put on plays by such radical playwrights as Fabre d’Eglantine and Collot d’Herbois.Footnote ⁵⁰

Gautier de Syonnet, the editor of an infamous anti-Jacobin newspaper, took exception to Viotti’s perceived change of allegiance, attacking on the one hand Viotti’s professional conduct, and on the other his personal life. He called Viotti a Jacobin violinist who did not appreciate the generosity of the queen.Footnote ⁵¹ Calling Viotti a ‘Jacobin’ was a calculated insult, for, far from being the simple descriptor it was when the first Jacobin Club was founded, the word had by now acquired pejorative overtones. The ‘Jacobin’ stigma would prove hard to shift, and the scurrilous piece would be remembered by a future Viotti doubter.

Another person who influenced Viotti’s future fate was Antoinette Saint-Huberty, a principal singer at the Opéra in 1788–89. Described by the Opéra director Dauvergne as ‘the most vicious woman in the Opera company’, she was often mixed up in revolts and intrigues.Footnote ⁵² She was at the height of her popularity with audiences in 1782–83, at exactly the same time that Viotti was playing at the Concert spirituel. Indeed, the two performed on the same stage on five different occasions in this concert series.Footnote ⁵³ The violinist and the singer thus certainly knew each other, and when Viotti chose to place his opera buffa in direct competition with the Opéra, Saint-Huberty would, like the other singers, have felt threatened. The only reason she was not one of the signatories to the Opéra principals’ 1789 Réclamation was because she was out of Paris on tour at the time, or because she was by then planning to quit the Opéra and France. In 1790 she emigrated to Switzerland to join her lover, the ex-député Comte d’Antraigues, who had in 1789 changed his political colours from Revolutionary radical to ultraroyalist.Footnote ⁵⁴ Before that Antraigues had moved in philosophic circles, and had also kept company with the actors of the Comédie-Française. He was in Paris in the spring of 1789, at the time of Viotti’s very public takeover bid for the Opéra.

Unwilling to lose all that he had invested in his theatrical enterprise, Viotti remained in Paris until mid-1792. In January 1792 he decided to sell his theatreFootnote ⁵⁵ and, six months later, to ‘abandon a land where an honest man could no longer live in peace’. What he does not reveal in his Précis is that he emigrated under the protection of the Montgeroult couple. Hélène says in a 1793 letter that she departed for England in July 1792,Footnote ⁵⁶ and a letter written a year later by a revolutionary called Aigoin denouncing the Marquis and Marquise de Montgeroult claims that they were given false ambassadorial papers.Footnote ⁵⁷ When Viotti and the Montgeroults arrived in London they were lodged by their old friend the pianist Hüllmandel at his house in Brompton.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hüllmandel had by then ceased performing, and led an independent life supported by his wife. He was already well connected (and no doubt protected) in British society by his oldest acquaintance in England, the former Whig prime minister Lord Shelburne, now 1st Marquess Lansdowne, who was a good friend of Hüllmandel’s old patron Morellet. It was at Hüllmandel’s that Viotti met the Chinnerys, who became his benefactors and lifelong friends.

A month after Viotti’s emigration the French monarchy was overthrown, the first French Republic was created, and the Legislative Assembly was replaced by a much more extreme body, the National Convention. Viotti may have protested in his Précis that he did not know a single member of ‘that second Assembly’, but he certainly had a close friend in the Convention in Hugues-Bernard Maret, who, in August 1792, was appointed Chief of the First Division in the Department of Foreign Affairs under the new foreign minister Lebrun-Tondu.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was Viotti’s association with this Jacobin official that would do him far more harm than his innocuous flirtation with early revolutionary ideals, which appears to have ended when the first National Assembly ended, in 1791.

W.A. MilesFootnote ⁶⁰

One of the men who was influential in securing Viotti’s 1798 exile order was the eccentric Englishman W.A. Miles, who in 1792 was employed by the British prime minister Pitt as a hired pen to help combat the spread of revolutionary doctrines in Britain.Footnote ⁶¹ Miles’s prose was powerful and persuasive, and as a government writer he was extremely useful.Footnote ⁶² He was also Pitt’s unofficial informant on French affairs, having been sent to France by Pitt in 1790–91. While there he had made some good friends, including some who would hold office in the most extreme revolutionary government. Yet Miles was untrustworthy, and Pitt steadfastly refused to give him official status.

When Maret – who had already proven his diplomatic skills in Belgium, where he had twice acted as a revolutionary agentFootnote ⁶³ – was sent to London by Lebrun at the end of 1792 on a secret mission to try to prevent hostilities between France and England, his channel to Pitt was through Miles, who found him ‘extremely affable, frank, and communicative’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Maret was in London from 3 to 18 December,Footnote ⁶⁵ and sometime during that period he visited Hélène de Montgeroult and Viotti at Hüllmandel’s at 34 Curzon Street, Mayfair (his town house). The new laws regarding emigration that had recently been passed in France, forced Hélène, if she did not wish to become a proscrite, to return to France. She was chaperoned by Maret.Footnote ⁶⁶

Viotti’s straitened circumstances obliged him to resume public performing in London, and on 1 January 1793 it was announced that he had been engaged for Salomon’s concerts at Hanover Square.Footnote ⁶⁷ The flood of emigrants from France had by now swollen to a degree that alarmed the Home Office secretary, the Duke of Portland, who was persuaded they would spread unrest in Britain. On 7 January parliament passed the Aliens Bill, designed to control immigration and the movement and activities of aliens already resident in Britain. Soon after, William Huskisson, who had returned to England in September 1792, was made the first ‘Superintendent of Aliens’, that is, head of the Alien Office, the innermost section of the secret service within the Home Office, created specifically to deal with the threat posed by undesirable foreigners.Footnote ⁶⁸

On 21 January 1793 Louis XVI was guillotined. Maret might have been a Republican but he did not vote for the death of the king. In a last-ditch attempt at diplomacy Lebrun sent Maret to replace Chauvelin as French ambassador in London, with Jean-François Noël as his first secretary.Footnote ⁶⁹ But events moved faster than the diplomatic communications, and Maret arrived in London to find that Chauvelin had already been expelled. On 1 February France declared war on Britain, and on the 5th Maret himself was expelled, to taunts of ‘Jacobin spy’ from the British press.Footnote ⁷⁰

Unable to see Viotti on this visit, Maret wrote to him, addressing his packet to Miles. Miles summoned Viotti to his house to collect it. Miles had not met the violinist before, but he would have remembered him from Paris in 1790–91, as the owner of a theatre which put on Jacobin plays, and as the object of Gautier’s libel. In his view, Viotti had been a Jacobin in Paris, and probably still was in London. Indeed, he seems to suggest in his letter to Maret that Viotti may have been a French agent:

Miles refused to accept any further under-cover letters from Maret, but Viotti would have learned from the London newspapers that the radical Montagnards had gained control of the Convention, and that the purge of the Girondins (of which Maret was one) had begun. In his letter to Margaret Chinnery of 30 MayFootnote ⁷² Viotti speaks of having ‘a heavy heart’, of being ‘tormented’, and of wishing to send an urgent letter to his friends. Clearly, although Maret was working for the Jacobin-controlled French Convention, Viotti remained attached to him on a personal level. When the tables turned on Maret in May 1793, Viotti’s antipathy for the radical Jacobins increased. The events which took place in Switzerland in 1793 portray Viotti in a pro-revolutionary light. But appearances are deceptive. Viotti may have been against the excesses of the Revolution, but he retained his strong instinct for basic human rights, and therefore deplored the violent attack of the Austrians on the French Jacobin diplomats described below.

Viotti in Switzerland

Just before Deforgues replaced Lebrun as French foreign minister on 21 June 1793, Lebrun appointed Maret ambassador to Naples and Noël ambassador to Venice.Footnote ⁷³ Viotti claimed that this was Maret’s ‘one and only chance to obtain a passport and flee France, that land full of carnage and horror, a land where death is forever hovering over one’s head, and from which one can escape only by a miracle’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Hélène de Montgeroult and her husband were able to accompany him, for, according to Viotti, a fictitious post at the Naples legation had been created for the marquis.Footnote ⁷⁵

Maret was instructed to rendezvous in Geneva with another French diplomat, Charles-Louis Huguet de Sémonville, who, together with his family and a large retinue, was leaving his Genoan post for the Ottoman Porte, but who had had his sea route cut off by the Allied blockade of Toulon. In the event neither diplomat made it to his new post, for their caravan was ambushed by Austrian soldiers – in blatant contempt of Swiss neutrality – on 25 July at the village of Novate in Valtellina, an alpine valley that was strategically important to both France and Austria because of its mountain passes. Valtellina was situated in an area of Switzerland called the Three Leagues (les Grisons, or Graue Bünde), which were nominally independent but in fact were by then under Austrian control.

Viotti too was on the Continent that summer. He claimed in his Précis that he was visiting his hometown of Fontanetto (then in Austrian Lombardy) to settle family affairs after the death of his stepmother. Whether this was true we may never know, for his stepmother’s death records have been lost.Footnote ⁷⁶ He certainly did not go to nearby Turin, where his old master Pugnani waited in vain to embrace him.Footnote ⁷⁷ The route he took through the Tyrol (as stated in his Précis) was not the most direct way of reaching Piedmont, which was on the extreme western side of Austrian Lombardy. It led him over the Alps by the Brenner Pass into the Republic of Venice, where he learned of the attack on his friends from the French ambassador Noël (see below). It is likely that Viotti had from the outset intended to meet Maret and Montgeroult in Venice before proceeding to Fontanetto.Footnote ⁷⁸

The Austrian attack on the French diplomats has been well documented,Footnote ⁷⁹ but is barely remembered today, although it caused a sensation in Europe at the time. The richest source of information comes from the correspondence of the French ambassador in Switzerland, François Barthélemy, with the French foreign minister Deforgues, published by Kaulek in 1886.Footnote ⁸⁰ Barthélemy’s correspondence seems to give the lie to Viotti’s protests of innocence of any Jacobin sympathies, and reveals that his activities in Venice and Switzerland were compromising to say the least.

On 24 August Barthélemy writes to Deforgues in Paris,

So here we see Viotti in the guise of an outraged spectator, reporting to the Jacobin representative of the National Convention! The August correspondence of the British consul in Venice, John Watson, with foreign minister Grenville confirms all that Viotti says.Footnote ⁸³ But the most striking part of the above extract is Viotti’s supposed friendship with Noël, who is said to have been a friend of Robespierre.Footnote ⁸⁴

It is not entirely surprising that Viotti knew Noël, since the latter had been Maret’s friend and colleague (Chief of the Second Bureau) in 1792 in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Paris. Both Maret and Noël had founded daily newspapers in 1789.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ironically, it was Noël’s Chronique de Paris ‘which started as a constitutionalist newspaper, became democratic at the time of the Varennes flight, and Girondin after that’Footnote ⁸⁶ (exactly mirroring Maret’s career), that had printed the insinuating criticism of Viotti’s theatre in 1790 and 1791. Presumably Viotti had made Noël’s acquaintance after that. If he renewed contact with him – even innocently – in the brief period Noël was in London (August 1792–January 1793) at the French embassy, where he was a known secret agent,Footnote ⁸⁷ the charge of Viotti also being a secret agent is thrown into an entirely new light.

There was another person who must have been a member of this circle of friends. This was a French merchant in Genoa by the name of André, who had previously been imprisoned for his democratic views. Hélène wrote to him at the time of Maret’s arrest by the Austrians asking if he had any news of Viotti, from whom she had not heard for three months.Footnote ⁸⁸ A certain Dominique André was later (March 1798) granted a permit to reside in Paris for the purpose of liquidating his trading company. He is described in the police document as being born French in Genoa, as holding a passport from the commune of Nîmes, and as having lived in Genoa for the previous 14 years, but he had clearly been in contact with Viotti, Maret and Montgeroult more recently than that.Footnote ⁸⁹

The French diplomats were imprisoned in the Austrian-held citadel of Mantua, where Viotti tried unsuccessfully to visit them.Footnote ⁹⁰ Aware of the Venetian authorities’ distrust of Noël, as well as of the hostility of the other ambassadors towards France, he stayed away from the British embassy and did not meet the British minister Francis Drake, who had, in any case, already departed for his new post in Genoa.Footnote ⁹¹ Consul John Watson, who was keeping foreign secretary Grenville supplied with intelligence until Drake’s replacement arrived, did not mention Viotti in his correspondence.

At this point Viotti seems to have abandoned his plans to go to Fontanetto, opting instead to assist Hélène de Montgeroult.Footnote ⁹² He therefore left Venice and pursued her into the mountains, finding her in the small spa town of Baden-im-Aargau (on the road between Zurich and Basel), where the French embassy was located, and where she had sought asylum from the French ambassador.Footnote ⁹³ According to the historian Alfred Rufer, Viotti joined Mme de Sémonville’s public protest on his way to Baden, declaring that he had seen the people of the cantons through which he had passed ready to rise up in revolt against the Austrian violation of their neutrality.Footnote ⁹⁴ Once again Viotti exhibited a careless disregard for how his outspokenness might be interpreted.

Viotti was in Baden for almost three months (24 August–15 November). Under normal circumstances he would then have been in summer recess in London, preparing for the start of the 1794 Hanover Square concerts, for which he had already been engaged by Salomon. Instead, he spent most of that time with Hélène: the two took lodgings just out of Baden, between the town and the baths.Footnote ⁹⁵ Both remained in regular contact with Barthélemy – Viotti because he had asked the Chinnerys to send his bank draft under cover to him,Footnote ⁹⁶ and Mme de Montgeroult in order to show the ambassador the letters she received from the prisoners. On 18 September Hélène learned from Barthélemy of the death of her husband in prison.Footnote ⁹⁷ Presumably Viotti was with her at the time, and heard the ambassador express his growing dissatisfaction with the Three Leagues, which did not recognize the new French Republic, which took no action over the affront to the French nation, and whose Diet, supposedly independent, was intimidated by the Austrian minister.Footnote ⁹⁸ Viotti would have also been aware that Barthélemy had applied to Deforgues for funds with which to pay for the repatriation of the two women to France.Footnote ⁹⁹

Viotti remained at Hélène’s side until she left for France on 22 October,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ after which he lived in solitude, ‘not seeing another living soul’ (see Appendix). A sufficient number of letters from Hélène had reached Maret for him to know of Viotti’s presence in Baden. Maret had heard of Viotti’s rapturous reception in London the previous winter, and was confident that the praise would be just as fulsome in the coming concert season:

When Viotti finally left Baden he lamented, ‘Poor Viotti, now he too has departed. I shall not be able to write to him, nor he to me. For how long shall we remain strangers to each other?’Footnote ¹⁰²

Viotti remained in Baden until 15 November in order to wait for a second bank draft, and also to forward Maret’s mail to Hélène. He waited in vain. Before setting off for England he wrote to the Milanese Capitano di Giustizia (Chief Justice) Don Francesco Bazetta, complaining that there had been no word from the prisoner for more than three weeks, and pleading for the return of Mme de Montgeroult’s papers – the last will of her husband and the titles to her fortune.Footnote ¹⁰³ (The French prisoners were allowed to send and receive letters through Bazetta, who intercepted most of them and handed them over to the Austrian authorities, as can be seen from the large number of them still in the Vienna State Archives today.)

Viotti’s actions during this time might have been rash, and were certainly compromising, but they were motivated by friendship, not politics. We must believe Viotti when, in apologizing to the Chinnerys for the trouble caused by the lost bank draft, he said, ‘You know that I live, that I exist, only for my friends. It is impossible for me to have a moment’s peace knowing that my friends are suffering’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Viotti’s friend Miel vouched for the truth of this, saying that loyalty in friendship was ‘one of the distinguishing features of his character’,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and there is ample evidence of it in the Chinnery correspondence. Where friends were concerned Viotti was without self-interest. For example, the £200 – intended for his friends – that he asked William to send was money he could ill afford to lose: ‘In my life I have been persecuted by so much misfortune, that I need to economise the little money I have left, so that in any future time of need I will have enough for the bare essentials’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Moreover, the time he spent in Baden was time lost to him for the writing of the new concertos which would be needed for Salomon’s concerts, due to begin in early February 1794. Haydn had been invited to London, and Viotti was to share the stage with him as a featured soloist.

Viotti arrived at Ghent on 6 December, and landed at Dover a few days later without arousing the suspicion of the port authorities. Hüllmandel and the Chinnerys were the only people in England who knew what he had been doing during his five-month absence. Viotti was well aware of how the British would view his activities in Switzerland, telling Margaret Chinnery ‘I have written to Salomon, but have not told him where I am or what I am doing. All I have told him is that I will soon see him again in England – and that is true. Oh, would that I could bring my poor friends back with me!’Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The Comte d’Antraigues’s accusation

The Comte d’Antraigues was the second person who helped condemn Viotti in the eyes of the British government in 1798. After emigrating, he and Mme Saint-Huberty had settled in Switzerland in the same canton where the Austrian attack had occurred, and so were well situated to follow events. Antraigues was at the time employed by Spain to spy on France,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ but he was soon offering his services to any enemy of the French Republic who wanted information. Britain, whose legation personnel were already watching the French from the republics of Venice and Genoa,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ accepted his overtures. Drake swallowed Antraigues’s assurances that his reports, or bulletins, were reliable. In fact, they were an amalgam of fact and fiction, as, after deciphering the letters he received from his Paris agents, Antraigues reworked them to suit his own purposes.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Antraigues no doubt learned from his wife, who happened to be in Venice at the same time,Footnote ¹¹¹ of Viotti’s visit to Noël, and of his protests on behalf of the French diplomats. He therefore composed an entirely fabricated bulletin, which he sent to Drake, who enclosed it in a letter to Grenville, dated Genoa, 28 October 1793.

The dates given in the above bulletin are misleadingly precise and deliberately ambiguous, since the bulletin itself is not dated. The accusations are preposterous, but the charge that Viotti was a Jacobin spy in London is uncannily similar to Miles’s insinuations to Maret of February 1793 (see above). Strangely, Antraigues had composed at least two previous bulletins describing a similar plot, which had not mentioned Viotti. In the first, dated 2 September, it was an Englishman called Baldwyn who was prepared to assassinate the king and Pitt.Footnote ¹¹³ In his covering letter Drake underlines the name, continuing ‘I hope Mr Aust [British undersecretary of foreign affairs] has communicated to your Lordship the letter I wrote to him by Captain Cook [the one which accused Viotti]’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The underlining of the name was presumably because, only 12 days before, Viotti’s name had been given as the would-be assassin. Drake appears to have noticed the anomaly. The second version of the same ‘intelligence’ was sent by Consul Watson, who had got it too indirectly from Antraigues.Footnote ¹¹⁵

I would argue that Antraigues’s motives for accusing Viotti went back to 1789, when Viotti’s Opéra ambitions impinged on the interests of Mme Saint-Huberty. Antraigues’s friends in the Comédie-Française might have complained of Viotti’s disregard for their interests, too. Antraigues would also have known of the controversy surrounding Viotti’s Feydeau theatre. Viotti drew attention to himself by letting it be known that the French diplomats attacked by the Austrians were his friends. Yet in his bulletin Antraigues did not mention this fact, which would surely have counted against him. Perhaps it was contained in the ‘new information’ that Antraigues was to have offered on Viotti, and which either has not survived or never existed. Antraigues continued to send bulletins to Drake until 1796,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and since many are lost, it is possible that he mentioned Viotti again.

Two things may have saved Viotti in 1793. The first was the inefficiency of British intelligence gathering in the first 12 months of the war against France. The earliest bulletins from Drake were received before a centralized agency had been created.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Aliens Entry Books, which recorded the comings and goings of aliens in Britain, began to be kept only in 1794, after Viotti had re-entered England (December 1793). The second was the fact that Huskisson was then head of the Alien Office. Huskisson may have been sceptical of Antraigues’s accusations, especially if he noticed the contradictory name given to the would-be assassin in the other bulletins, and more especially if he was personally acquainted with Viotti, as seems likely.

W.A. Miles’s influence on the exile order

After his return to England Viotti had barely seven weeks to compose the expected new violin concerto for the first of Salomon’s concerts, advertised for 3 February. He performed it on 10 February, and both the composition and his playing were praised.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It was a creditable feat, for in the five months that he had been away he had not touched his violin: the high notes of the instrument affected his nerves, he told Margaret Chinnery.Footnote ¹¹⁹ He was still anxious about the fate of his friends, and may have dined at Lansdowne House on 3 April 1794, hoping to hear further news.Footnote ¹²⁰ But he did not try to make further contact with Mme de Montgeroult.

Miles, on the other hand, with the full knowledge of the British Foreign Office, did remain in contact with his French acquaintances. On 26 December 1795, when Maret and Sémonville were freed in a prisoner exchange with the French Princess Royal, Miles heard the news from Maret himself, who told him that one of the first people he wrote to on gaining his freedom was Viotti.Footnote ¹²¹ Since Miles showed all his French correspondence to George Aust in the Foreign Office, Grenville would have taken note of Viotti’s close friendship with Maret, who returned to France a hero.

So far Viotti had avoided any public criticism in Britain, but at the end of 1794 he found himself a subject of controversy when he became artistic director of Kings Theatre, and replaced Wilhelm Cramer as leader and musical director of the orchestra in the Opera Concert. It was rumoured that the lead singer at the Opera, Brigida Banti, had orchestrated the replacement. However, Viotti was deemed an innocent party, and he was able to continue in this role with no further trouble until 1798.Footnote ¹²²

In early 1798 the British Government was on high alert in expectation of a French invasion and a simultaneous Irish insurrection,Footnote ¹²³ so Viotti’s announcement that he intended to go to Dublin to participate in Mrs Second’s musical concertsFootnote ¹²⁴ was badly timed. The operations of the Home Office had been streamlined, and stringent measures put in place to prevent undesirable aliens from entering the country, and to search suspicious persons leaving. In March 1797 the Home Secretary had distributed a circular designed to ascertain the number of foreigners who had come into Britain since May 1792.Footnote ¹²⁵ Printed registration forms had to be filled in by aliens. Some of the forms filled in by acquaintances of Viotti survive in the London Metropolitan Archives,Footnote ¹²⁶ but Viotti’s is not among them. In December 1797 there was a further circular from the Home Secretary to his agents on the coast: ‘Aliens not making themselves known and obtaining their passport within 14 days will in all cases be required to depart by the first opportunity’.Footnote ¹²⁷

It happened that Viotti’s pupil, the gifted young French violinist Pierre Rode, was washed ashore on the English coast at this time, while returning to Bordeaux from a performing tour in Hamburg,Footnote ¹²⁸ and so was without a passport. He nevertheless made his way to London to visit his old master. Rode’s untimely arrival gave rise to an acrimonious exchange of letters in the press, which lasted from beginning of January to end February 1798. Miles, writing anonymously in the Tory mouthpiece the True Briton, spread the rumour that Rode had served in the Republican armies:

A certain Antemidas wrote in Rode’s defence, asking sarcastically if the writer believed that they should be ‘infected with Jacobinism by melody and sweet sounds’ and suggesting that ‘a scraper near the throne’ was responsible for the rumours.Footnote ¹³⁰

Miles persisted: ‘As a Performer, Viotti is justly a subject of the highest admiration in his profession: as a Politician it is to be hoped that he will never think of coming forward’. His remarks about Rode, he said, arose

The extravagant language of the above diatribe was typical of that of Government hirelings, but here the prejudices against foreign émigrés were Miles’s own.Footnote ¹³² In eighteenth-century Europe the press was an open forum for those with a cause to champion. Rousseau, who spoke from bitter experience, believed that public prosecution by the press was much worse in England than in Paris.Footnote ¹³³ Handel’s operas were used as political footballs in the partisan politics of his day,Footnote ¹³⁴ and Haydn experienced a ‘sudden outburst of musical hostilities’ during his 1791 visit to London, when ‘even a temper as equable as his found it hard to tolerate the machinations of the musical factions at work in the concert world’.Footnote ¹³⁵ The rivalry between two concert series, Salomon’s and the Professional Concert, caused Haydn and his pupil Ignaz Pleyel to be pitted against each other in a hurtful comparison in the press. In Paris the same thing happened to Rameau in 1752, when the so-called querelle des Bouffons broke out between partisans of the French and Italian opera, and a few years later to Gluck and Piccini during a similar public squabble. None of these musicians – except Rousseau, who suffered for it – risked his livelihood by objecting publicly to his treatment.

Miles’s attack on Rode and Viotti carried on through the whole month of February. Antemidas’s last rejoinder, ‘Some disappointed Fiddlers have been endeavouring to screw the Duke of Portland up to concert pitch with their design to banish Viotti from this country under the false insinuation that he is Jacobinistically inclined’,Footnote ¹³⁶ makes it clear that rumours about Viotti were rife in musical circles. Viotti’s two contemporary biographers, while dismissing the idea of his guilt out of hand, throw some light on why. The first, Miel, writes vaguely that Viotti was a victim of a mistake, and that some jealous musician(s) took advantage of this.Footnote ¹³⁷ The second, Fétis, reveals what this ‘misunderstanding’ was. ‘There was a rumour circulated among the émigrés, of whom there were large numbers in London, that the French Executive Council had employed him [Viotti] as a secret agent on several occasions’.Footnote ¹³⁸ This was the third time that such a thing had been suggested, and while the assertions of two untrustworthy characters and those of a cabal of musicians is hardly proof of guilt, it presents too much of a coincidence for it to be ignored. It is unlikely that the émigré musicians would have known of Antraigues’s accusation. What is more likely is that Viotti’s friendship with Maret, and possibly with Noël, had been noticed.

Rode’s attempt to combat the campaign against him in the press by giving a charity concert on 22 February failed. The concert got only a lukewarm reception.Footnote ¹³⁹ By the end of February the Duke of Portland had drawn up a banishment order against Rode and Viotti. The Opera Concert had opened on 5 February 1798 at the King’s Theatre, with Viotti still leader of the band. He had given only three performances, when Thomas Carter of the Alien Office wrote to Taylor, the manager of the theatre, on 26 February:

It is clear from the first two sentences of the above that Taylor had tried to defend the musicians accused, but in the case of Viotti, had failed.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Viotti’s and Rode’s banishment order was first reported in the Mirror of the Times, 24 February–3 March. The True Briton and the Sun triumphantly announced themselves vindicated. ‘We are happy to see the vigilance and energy of the Government properly exerted’.Footnote ¹⁴² The Morning Herald continued to believe that a musical cabal was to blame. Viotti was supposed to have made a Jacobinical declaration in the Orange Coffee House, when in fact he had never set foot in that place. Some of the most zealous friends of the Government were prepared to come to his defence.Footnote ¹⁴³ Among them were the Chinnerys.

On about 5 March Viotti left London escorted by a king’s messenger. On the same day Thomas Carter wrote to his agent at Yarmouth, to expect M. Bellamy a Swiss gentleman, and M. Viotti an Italian, who were ordered out of the kingdom, and who would arrive the following day or the day after, to take the first packet to Hamburg. Carter was to be informed as soon as they had sailed.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Rode’s case had merited a much longer letter three days earlier. Carter wrote that if Rode had not sailed by the time Walsh received this letter, his baggage and papers were to be strictly searched, and if any suspicious items were found, he was to be detained until the Alien Office had inspected them. ‘You will be particularly careful to examine whether there is any false bottom, or false sides to his trunk’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ So Rode was their principal suspect. Viotti was apparently guilty by association.

It was in Hamburg that Viotti wrote his justificatory Précis. The piece began with a plea to those who had condemned him: ‘The idea of having been misunderstood and misjudged weighs too heavily on my heart for me not to attempt, by all possible means, to clear myself of the sinister interpretation that a stroke of bad luck gave to my actions’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Which actions? Is he referring to his impetuous behaviour at court in Paris, his protests on behalf of his Jacobin friends in Switzerland, or his long association with Maret, and perhaps also with Noël?

C.W. Flint’s reversal of the exile order

For Viotti to be permitted to return to England he had to provide the Government with compelling proof of his innocence. The only evidence that carried any weight for the Duke of Portland, however, was from his own Home Office. Four months later he had it. One of the Chinnerys’ closest friends, Charles William Flint (1777–1834),Footnote ¹⁴⁷ who had been serving as secretary to the British legation at Berne in Switzerland with William Wickham, the government’s chief intelligence adviser until the mission ended in December 1797, returned to England with Wickham to occupy a position in the Alien Office. In February 1798 Wickham was appointed undersecretary of state in the Home Department.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Five months later Flint was made Superintendent of Aliens.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ He began signing letters issuing instructions to the port authorities on behalf of the Alien Office on 1 September 1798.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ He had more than enough power to overturn the order against Viotti. But since there is no official letter from Flint, or anyone else from the Alien Office, in the Aliens Entry Books or in the correspondence of the British minister in Hamburg with Grenville, the instruction to overturn his exile order must have been given quietly and no official record kept.Footnote ¹⁵¹

To assure his security as a British resident Viotti decided 12 years later to apply for British denizenship. But his application, supported by William Chinnery, was knocked back on 15 June 1811. The secretary of the Home Office Richard Ryder replied through his undersecretary, John Beckett, that he did not consider ‘the grounds upon which Mr Viotti solicits the privilege of denizenship as sufficient to entitle him to that indulgence’.Footnote ¹⁵²

But by 1811 Viotti had powerful friends. He was known and liked by the prince regent, having played at his Pavilion concerts in Brighton in the autumn of 1803, 1804 and 1805, and had given violin lessons to the prince’s brother, the Duke of Cambridge, for the previous four years.Footnote ¹⁵³ So Viotti addressed a petition to the prince regent, which he gave to the Duke of Cambridge to deliver to his brother. The prince acted quickly to overturn the Home Office’s decision. On 25 July Viotti was informed by the Duke of Cambridge that his request had been granted. ‘Knowing the prince’s kindly sentiments towards you I am sure that he gave the order for your denizenship with great pleasure, and I am delighted to have been given the charge of being the bearer of your petition’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Viotti was required to travel up to London to take the oath, and on 12 August a formal report was filed by the attorney-general, Sir Vicary Gibbs. Gibbs wrote that the petitioner’s reasons for applying for denizenship were ‘for his greater encouragement to settle here and to enable him to purchase and enjoy such estates and privileges as denization may have by law’. Viotti’s attached affidavit added that he had resided in the United Kingdom for more than 18 years, and that he was ‘well affected to Your Majesty’s person and Government’. Gibbs saw no objection to the granting of the petitioned Letters Patent.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

On 14 September 1811 denizenship was formally bestowed.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ On the same day Viotti wrote to Flint to tell him of it. In mid-October Viotti received his patent, and wrote letters of acknowledgement to the prince regent and the Duke of Cambridge.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ On 24 September Flint, in an unambiguous reference to the events of 1798, wrote to congratulate his friend:

The ‘prejudice and obstinacy’ mentioned by Flint no doubt refers to the Home Office’s willingness to believe the rumour-mongering of Antraigues and Miles. Both these men were prone to exaggeration and to wild flights of fancy, and both harboured illogical aversions. The Comte de Provence (future Louis XVIII), whose emissary Antraigues sought to be, did not trust him, and neither did Pitt trust Miles. Yet both Miles and Antraigues wielded great influence on the governments they acted for, and both certainly contributed to Viotti’s guilty verdict.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Viotti was close to men who were regarded by Britain as the worst kind of Jacobins. He was a very dear friend of Maret, at the very least an acquaintance of Noël, and, because of his friendship for Maret, was thrown into a dangerous association with Barthélemy. Although all three of these men may have been moderate in their personal views, they did, to all intents and purposes, serve the most extreme revolutionary government during the period of the Terror. Barthélemy was deemed a person of bad character and denied entry when he attempted to come to Britain in July 1799. ‘It would be shocking’, Windham wrote to Pitt, ‘if the volunteer servant of Robespierre, during the time that Robespierre was travelling with his guillotine through all the highest and most respectable orders in France, should be received here’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

As has been shown above, Viotti was a man of strongly held principles, who abhorred injustice, and who made his views known. But his defining character trait was loyalty in friendship, and in the end it was this that harmed him most. His assertion in his Précis that he had ‘never meddled in revolution or politics, either directly or indirectly’ is patently not true. It is clear from his Swiss adventure that Viotti did meddle in politics, although he may not have viewed it as such.

In spite of this I do not believe, any more than Flint or the Chinnerys or the prince regent believed, that Viotti was a Jacobin or was in favour of revolution: as Miel says, he had nothing to gain by it.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ He lived quite happily under a constitutional monarchy in Britain, was on friendly terms with some members of the royal family, and was well treated by them. But he had been a controversial figure in revolutionary Paris, had associated with French secret agents, and had also been a vociferous protester against the wrongs suffered by two Jacobin diplomats in 1793. To cap off his apparent guilt, he had welcomed a (wrongly) suspected Jacobin (Rode) in London in 1798. The Home Office’s order against Viotti took place in an atmosphere bordering on paranoia, based on the all-consuming fear that the French Revolution would spill over into England. Its suspicion of Viotti is therefore understandable. But to the question of whether Viotti was a threat to British security, and deserved to be deported, the answer is most certainly no.