VERSAILLES
At the close of the 18th century France had more nearly reached her
growth than any of her great European rivals; she was far more like the
France of to-day, than might at first be supposed by an Englishman,
American or German, thinking of what his own country accomplished
during the 19th century. Her population of about 25,000,000 was three
times more numerous than that of England. Paris, with 600,000
inhabitants or more, was much nearer the present-day city in size than
any other capital of Europe, except Naples. Socially, economically,
politically, notwithstanding gross abuses, there was great development;
and the reformer who remodelled the institutions of France in 1800
declared that the administrative machine erected by the Bourbons was
the best yet devised by human ingenuity. Large manufacturing cities
and a number of active ports indicated the advent of a great economic
period.
{12} All this reposed, however, on a very incongruous foundation.
Feudalism, mediaevalism, autocracy, had built up a structure of caste
distinction and class privilege to which custom, age, stagnation and
ignorance, lent an air of preordained and indispensable stability. The
Church, most privileged of all corporations, turned her miracles and
her terrors, both present and future, into the most powerful buttress
of the fabric. The noblesse, supreme as a caste, almost divided
influence with the Church. The two, hand in hand, dominated France
outside the larger towns. Each village had its curé and its seigneur.
The curé collected his tithes and inculcated the precepts of religion,
precepts which at the close of the 18th century, preached Bourbonism as
one of the essential manifestations of Providence on earth. The
seigneur, generally owning the greater part of all freehold property,
not only weighed as a landlord but exercised many exclusive privileges,
and applied the most drastic of sanctions to the whole as the local
administrator of justice. There were hundreds of devout priests and of
humane seigneurs, but a proportion, conspicuous if small, were
otherwise; and the system gave such an opportunity for evil doing, that
opinion naturally, but unjustly, {13} converted the ill deeds of the
few into the characteristic of the whole class.
The culmination of this system, its visible and emphatic symbol,
fastened on Paris like a great bloated tumour eating into the heart of
France, was Versailles. But compared with class privilege, the Church,
and the seigneur, Versailles was a recent phenomenon, invented by Louis
XIV little more than one hundred years before the outbreak of the
Revolution. At the beginning of the 17th century the French monarchy
had somewhat suddenly emerged from the wars of religion immensely
strengthened. Able statesmen, Henry IV, Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin,
Louis XIV, had brought it out of its struggle with the feudal
aristocracy triumphant. Before the wars of religion began the French
noble was still mediaeval in that he belonged to a caste of military
specialists and that his provincial castle was both his residence and
his stronghold. The struggle itself was maintained largely by his
efforts, by the military and political power of great nobles, Guises,
Montmorencys and others. But when the struggle closes, both religion,
its cause, and the great noble its supporter, sink somewhat into the
background, while the king, the kingly power, fills the eye. And {14}
the new divine right monarchy, triumphant over the feudal soldier and
gladly accepted as the restorer of order by the middle class, sets to
work to consolidate this success; the result is Versailles.
The spectacular palace built by Louis XIV threw glamour and prestige
about the triumphant monarchy. It drew the great nobles from their
castles and peasantry, and converted them into courtiers, functionaries
and office holders. To catch a ray of royal favour was to secure the
gilt edging of distinction, and so even the literature, the theology,
the intellect of France, quickly learned to revolve about the dazzling
Sun King of Versailles, Louis XIV.
Versailles could not, however, long retain such elements of vitality as
it possessed. It rapidly accomplished its work on the feudal
aristocracy, but only at a great price. With Louis XIV gone, it began
to crumble from corruption within, from criticism without. Louis XV
converted the palace into the most gorgeous of brothels, and its
inmates into the most contemptible and degraded of harlots and pimps.
The policy of France, still royal under Louis XIV, was marked by the
greed, lewdness and incapacity of Richelieu and Dubois, of Pompadour
and du Barry. When {15} the effluvious corpse of Louis XV was hastily
smuggled from Versailles to the Cathedral of St. Denis in 1774, that
seemed to mark the final dissolution into rottenness of the
Bourbon-Versailles régime. That régime already stank in the nostrils
of public opinion, a new force which for half a century past had been
making rapid progress in France.
The great religious and military struggle of the 16th and 17th
centuries had in one direction resulted in enhancing the prestige and
crystallizing the power of the French monarchy. In another direction
it had resulted in establishing even more firmly the new intellectual
position of Europe, the spirit of enquiry, of criticism, of freedom of
thought. The Roman or supreme doctrine of authority had been
questioned, and questioned successfully. It could not be long before
the doctrine of Bourbon authority must also be questioned. Even if
French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the
throne of Louis XIV the closing years of the century were marked by the
names of Leibnitz, Bayle and Newton; the mercurial intelligence of
France could not long remain stagnant with such forces as these casting
their influence over European civilization. {16} The new century was
not long in, the Regent Philip of Orléans had not long been in power,
before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control her
literature. A new Rabelais with an 18th century lisp, Montesquieu, by
seasoning his _Lettres Persanes_ with a sauce piquante compounded of
indecency and style, succeeded in making the public swallow some
incendiary morsels. The King of France, he declared, drew his power
from the vanity of his subjects, while the Pope was "an old idol to
whom incense is offered from sheer habit"; nothing stronger has been
said to this day. A few years later, in his _Esprit des Lois_, he
produced a work of European reputation which eventually proved one of
the main channels for the conveyance of English constitutional ideas to
the thinking classes of France.
An even greater influence than Montesquieu was Voltaire. He exercised
an irresistible fascination on the intellectual class by the unrivalled
lucidity and logic of his powerful yet witty prose. He carried common
sense to the point of genius, threw the glamour of intellect over the
materialism of his century, and always seized his pen most eagerly when
a question of humanity and liberalism was at stake. He had weak sides,
was materialistic in living as {17} in thinking, and had nothing of the
martyr in his composition; yet, after his fashion, he battled against
obscurantism with all the zeal of a reformer. He was, in fact, the
successor of Calvin. But since Calvin's day Protestantism had been
almost extirpated in France, so that the gradual growth of the spirit
of enquiry, still proceeding below the surface, had brought it to a
point beyond Protestantism. It was atheism that Voltaire stood for,
and with the vast majority of the people of France from that day to
this the alternative lay between rigid Catholicism on one hand and
rigid atheism on the other. The innumerable shades of transition
between these extremes, in which English and German Protestantism
opened a pioneer track, remained a sealed book for them. In his
_Letters on the English_, published in 1734, Voltaire dwells less on
constitutional than on religious questions. Liberty of conscience is
what he struggles for, and he discerns not only that it is more prudent
to attack the Church than the State but that it is more essential;
religion is at the root of the monarchical system even if the 18th
century ruler is apt to forget it. And the Church gives Voltaire ample
opportunity for attack. The bishops and court abbés are often enough
{18} sceptics and libertines, though every once in a while they turn
and deal a furious blow to maintain the prestige and discipline of
their ancient corporation. And when, for a few blasphemous words, they
send a boy like the Chevalier de La Barre to the scaffold, to be
mutilated and killed, Voltaire's voice rings out with the full
reverberation of outraged humanity and civilization: _Ecrasez
l'infâme_! He believed that the Revolution, which he like so many others
foresaw, would begin by an attack on the priests. It was the natural
error of a thinker, a man of letters, concerned more with ideas than
facts, with theology than economics.
Above all things, Voltaire stood out as a realist, in the modern sense
of the word, and if he detested the Church it was largely because it
represented untruth. He did not deflect opinion to the same extent as
his great contemporary Rousseau, but he represented it more; and of the
men of the Revolution, it was Robespierre, who reigned less than four
months, who stood for Rousseau, while Bonaparte, who reigned fourteen
years, was the true Voltairian.
Just at the side of Voltaire stood the Encyclopedists, led by Diderot
and d'Alembert. The {19} great work of reference which they issued
penetrated into every intellectual circle, not only of France but of
Europe, and brought with it the doctrines of materialism and atheism.
However much they might be saturated with the ideas of Church and State
in the Roman-Bourbon form, many of its readers became unconsciously
shaken in their fundamental beliefs, and ready to question, to
criticize and, when the edifice began to tremble, to accept the
Revolution and the doctrine of the rights of the common man.
Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, were at heart essentially aristocrats;
for them the common man was an untrustworthy brute of low instincts,
and their revolution would have meant the displacement of an
aristocracy of the sword by an aristocracy of the intellect. Rousseau
stood for the opposite view. To him it was only despotism that
degraded man. Remove the evil conditions and the common man would
quickly display his inherent goodness and amiability; tenderness to our
fellows, or fraternity, was therefore the distinctive trait of manhood.
The irrepressible exuberance of Rousseau's kindliness overflowed from
his novels and essays into a great stream of fashionable sensibility.
During the years of {20} terrific stress that followed, during the
butcheries of the guillotine and of the Grande Armée, it was the vogue
to be soft-hearted, and even such a fire eater as Murat would pour
libations of tears over his friends' waistcoats at the slightest
provocation. In his _Contrat Social_ Rousseau postulated the essential
equality of the governor and the governed. But his sentimental
attitude towards man involved a corresponding one towards the Deity;
unable to accept Catholicism or even Christianity, he sought refuge
from atheism in the arms of the _Etre Suprême_. It was this Supreme
Being of Rousseau that was to become the official deity of France
during the last days of the Reign of Terror.
An influence of a slightly different sort to that exercised by these
writers was that of the theatre. The century had seen the rise of the
middle-class man, and his attempts at self expression. The
coffee-house and the Freemason's lodge gave facilities for
conversation, discussion, opinion; and the increasing number of
gazettes supplied these circles with information as to the course of
political events. But the gazettes themselves might not venture into
the danger-marked field of opinion, and for the fast growing public,
especially in the {21} city of Paris, there was no opportunity for
comment or criticism on the events of the day. In a tentative way the
theatre proved itself a possible medium. In 1730, Voltaire produced
his tragedy Brutus. It fell flat because of the lines
. . . et je porte en mon coeur
La liberté gravée et les rois en horreur.
The audience was too loyal to Bourbonism to accept these sentiments;
there were loud murmurs; and _Brutus_ had to be withdrawn. As late as
1766, a play on the subject of William Tell was given to an empty
house; no one would go to see a republican hero. But from the sixties
matters changed rapidly. Audiences show great enthusiasm over
rivalries of art, of actors, of authors, of opinions, and every once in
a while applaud or boo a sentiment that touches the sacred foundations
of the social and political order. At last an author appears on the
scene, keen, witty, unscrupulous, resourceful, to seize on this growing
mood of the public and to play on it for his own glory and profit.
Beaumarchais, Mirabeau, Dumouriez, Bonaparte, these are the types of
the adventurers of the Revolution, and the first only belongs {22} to
the period of incubation and also to the domain of letters. Thrown
into the war of American independence by his double vocation of secret
diplomatic agent and speculator in war supplies, he had espoused the
cause of the American people with an enthusiasm that always blazed most
brightly when a personal interest was at stake. His enthusiasm for
American liberty was easily converted into enthusiasm for the liberty
of his own class, and to vindicate that, he put Figaro on the stage.
The first public performance of the _Noces de Figaro_, in 1784, was the
culmination of a three years' struggle. Louis XVI had declared the
play subversive, and the author had raised a storm of protest in its
behalf. A special performance was conceded for the Court; and the
Parisian public, irritated at being thus excluded, then raised for the
first time the cry of tyranny and oppression. When at last the
Government in its weakness made the final concession, and permitted a
public performance, the demand for seats was greater than had ever
previously been known. The theatre was packed. Great lords and ladies
sat elbow to elbow with bourgeois and fashionable women; and when
Figaro came on and declaimed against social injustice, the opposite
parties in {23} the house stormed approval or disfavour. Figaro is
Beaumarchais, is the lower or middle class man, with nothing but his
wits with which to force his way through the barriers which privilege
has erected across every path along which he attempts to advance. As
the valet of Count Almaviva he has seen the man of privilege at close
quarters and has sounded his rottenness and incapacity. Because you
are a grand seigneur, he says, you think yourself a great genius; but,
Monsieur le Comte, to what do you really owe your great privileges? To
having put yourself to the inconvenience of being born, nothing more.
I, with all my ability and force, I who can work for myself, for
others, for my country, I am driven away from every occupation.
That was what the pushing adventurer and witty dramatist had to say,
but all through the country thousands of plain, inconspicuous men,
doctors, lawyers, merchants, farmers, even here and there a peasant or
a noble, the best representatives of the deep-rooted civilization of
France, of her keen intelligence, of her uprightness, of her humanity,
revolted inwardly at the ineptitude and injustice of her government.
As they saw it, the whole system seemed to revolve about Versailles,
the abode {24} of the Bourbon King, the happy hunting ground of the
privileged courtier, the glittering abode of vice and debauchery, the
sink through which countless millions were constantly drained while the
poor starved, the badge of dishonour and incapacity which had too
frequently been attached to the conduct of France both in war and in
peace. The twenty-five millions without the gates gazed at the hundred
thousand within, and the more they gazed the louder and more bitter
became their comment, the dimmer and the more tawdry did the glitter of
it all appear to them, and the weaker and more half-hearted became the
attitude of the one hundred thousand as they attempted by insolence and
superciliousness to maintain the pose of their inherited superiority.
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