I.
Military force declines.--How the army is recruited.--How
the soldier is treated.
Against universal sedition where is force?--The measures and
dispositions which govern the 150,000 men who maintain order are the
same as those ruling the 26 millions people subject to it. We find here
the same abuses, disaffection, and other causes for the dissolution of
the nation which, in their turn, will dissolve the army.
Of the 90 millions of pay[5401] which the army annually costs the
treasury, 46 millions are for officers and only 44 millions for
soldiers, and we are already aware that a new ordinance reserves ranks
of all kinds for verified nobles. In no direction is this inequality,
against which public opinion rebels so vigorously, more apparent. On
the one hand, authority, honors, money, leisure, good-living, social
enjoyments, and plays in private, for the minority. On the other hand,
for the majority, subjection, dejection, fatigue, a forced or betrayed
enlistment, no hope of promotion, pay at six sous a day,[5402] a narrow
cot for two, bread fit for dogs, and, for several years, kicks like
those bestowed on a dog.[5403] On the one hand, a nobility of high
estate, and, on the other, the lowest of the populace. One might
say that this was specially designed for contrast and to intensify
irritation. "The insignificant pay of the soldier," says an economist,
"the way in which he is dressed, lodged and fed, his utter dependence,
would render it cruelty to take any other than a man of the lower
class."[5404] Indeed, he is sought for only in the lowest layers
of society. Not only are nobles and the bourgeoisie exempt from
conscription, but again the employees of the administration, of the
fermes and of public works, "all gamekeepers and forest-rangers,
the hired domestics and valets of ecclesiastics, of communities, of
religious establishments, of the gentry and of nobles,"[5405] and even
of the bourgeoisie living in grand style, and still better, the sons
of cultivators in easy circumstances, and, in general, all possessing
influence or any species of protector. There remains, accordingly, for
the militia none but the poorest class, and they do not willingly
enter it. On the contrary, the service is hateful to them; they conceal
themselves in the forests where they have to be pursued by armed men:
in a certain canton which, three years later, furnishes in one day from
fifty to one hundred volunteers, the young men cut off their thumbs to
escape the draft.[5406] To this scum of society is added the sweepings
of the depots and of the jails. Among the vagabonds that fill these,
after winnowing out those able to make their families known or to obtain
sponsors, "there are none left," says an intendant, "but those who are
entirely unknown or dangerous, out of which those regarded as the
least vicious are selected and efforts are made to place these in
the army."[5407]--The last of its affluents is the half-forced,
half-voluntary enlistment by which the ranks are for the most part
filled, the human waste of large towns, like adventurers, discharged
apprentices, young reprobates turned out of doors, and people without
homes or steady occupation. The recruiting agent who is paid so much a
head for his recruits and so much an inch on their stature above five
feet, "holds his court in a tavern, treating everyone" promoting his
merchandise:
"Come, boys, soup, fish, meat and salad is what you get to eat in the
regiment;" nothing else, "I don't deceive you--pie and Arbois wine are
the extras."[5408]
He pours the wine, pays the bill and, if need be, yields his mistress.
"After a few days debauchery, the young libertine, with no money to pay
his debts, is obliged to sell himself, while the laborer, transformed
into soldier, begins to drill under the lash."--Strange recruits these,
for the protection of society, all selected from the class which will
attack it, down-trodden peasants, imprisoned vagabonds, social outcasts,
poor fellows in debt, disheartened, excited and easily tempted, who,
according to circumstances, become at one time rioters, and at another
soldiers.--Which lot is preferable? The bread the soldier eats is not
more abundant than that of the prisoner, while poorer in quality; for
the bran is taken out of the bread which the locked-up vagabond eats,
and left in the bread which is eaten by the soldier who locks him
up[5409]. In this state of things the soldier ought not to mediate on
his lot, and yet this is just what his officers incite him to do. They
also have become politicians and fault-finders. Some years before the
Revolution[5410] "disputes occurred" in the army, "discussions
and complaints, and, the new ideas fermenting in their heads,
a correspondence was established between two regiments. Written
information was obtained from Paris, authorized by the Minister of
War, which cost, I believe, twelve louis per annum. It soon took a
philosophic turn, embracing dissertations, criticisms of the ministry,
and of the government, desirable changes and, therefore, the more
diffused." Sergeants like Hoche, and fencing-masters like Augereau,
certainly often read this news, carelessly left lying on the tables, and
commented on it during the evening in their soldier quarters. Discontent
is of ancient date, and already, at the end of the late reign, grievous
words are heard. At a banquet given by a prince of the blood,[5411] with
a table set for a hundred guests under an immense tent and served by
grenadiers, the odor these diffused upset the prince's delicate nose.
"These worthy fellows," said he, a little too loud, "smell strong of the
stocking." One of the grenadiers bluntly responded, "Because we haven't
got any," which "was followed by profound silence." During the ensuring
years irritation smolders and augments; the soldiers of Rochambeau have
fought side by side with the free militia of America, and they keep this
in mind. In 1788,[5412] Marshal de Vaux, previous to the insurrection
in Dauphiny, writes to minister that "it is impossible to rely on the
troops," while four months after the opening of the States-General
16,000 deserters roaming around Paris leads the revolts instead of
suppressing them.[5413]
II.
The social organization is dissolved.--No central rallying
point.--Inertia of the provinces.--Ascendancy of Paris.
Once this barrier has disappeared, no other embankment remains and the
inundation spreads all over France like over an immense plain.
With other nations in like circumstances, some obstacles have
been encountered; elevations have existed, centers of refuge, old
constructions in which, in the universal fright, a portion of the
population could find shelter. Here, the first crisis sweeps away all
that remains, each individual of the twenty-six scattered millions
standing alone by himself. The administrations of Richelieu and Louis
XIV. had been a long time at work insensibly destroying the natural
groupings which, when suddenly dissolved, unite and form over again of
their own accord. Except in Vendée, I find no place, nor any class, in
which a good many men, having confidence in a few men, are able, in the
hour of danger, to rally around these and form a compact body. Neither
provincial nor municipal patriotism any longer exists. The inferior
clergy are hostile to the prelates, the gentry of the province to the
nobility of the court, the vassal to the seignior, the peasant to the
townsman, the urban population to the municipal oligarchy, corporation
to corporation, parish to parish, neighbor to neighbor. All are
separated by their privileges and their jealousies, by the consciousness
of having been imposed on, or frustrated, for the advantage of another.
The journeyman tailor is embittered against his foreman for preventing
him from doing a day's work in private houses, hairdressers against
their employers for the like reason, the pastry-cook against the baker
who prevents him from baking the pies of housekeepers, the village
spinner against the town spinners who wish to break him up, the rural
wine-growers against the bourgeois who, in the circle of seven leagues,
strives to have their vines pulled up,[5414] the village against the
neighboring village whose reduction of taxation has ruined it, the
overtaxed peasant against the under taxed peasant, one-half of a parish
against its collectors, who, to its detriment, have favored the other
half.
"The nation," says Turgot, mournfully,[5415] "is a society composed of
different orders badly united and of a people whose members have few
mutual liens, nobody, consequently, caring for any interest but his own.
Nowhere is there any sign of an interest in common. Towns and villages
maintain no more relation with each other than the districts to which
they are attached; they are even unable to agree together with a view to
carry out public improvements of great importance to them."
The central power for a hundred and fifty years rules through its
division of power. Men have been kept separate, prevented from acting
in concert, the work being so successful that they no longer understand
each other, each class ignoring the other class, each forming of the
other a chimerical picture, each bestowing on the other the hues of its
own imagination, one composing an idyll, the other framing a melodrama,
one imagining peasants as sentimental swains, the other convinced that
the nobles are horrible tyrants.--Through this mutual misconception
and this secular isolation, the French lose the habit, the art and the
faculty for acting in an entire body. They are no longer capable of
spontaneous agreement and collective action. No one, in the moment of
danger, dares rely on his neighbors or on his equals. No one knows where
to turn to obtain a guide. "A man willing to be responsible for the
smallest district cannot be found; and, more than this, one man able
to answer for another man[5416]." Utter and irremediable disorder is
at hand. The Utopia of the theorists has been accomplished, the savage
condition has recommenced. Individuals now stand in by themselves;
everyone reverting back to his original feebleness, while his
possessions and his life are at the mercy of the first band that comes
along. He has nothing within him to control him but the sheep-like
habit of being led, of awaiting an impulsion, of turning towards the
accustomed center, towards Paris, from which his orders have always
arrived. Arthur Young[5417] is struck with this mechanical movement.
Political ignorance and docility are everywhere complete. He, a
foreigner, conveys the news of Alsace into Burgundy: the insurrection
there had been terrible, the populace having sacked the city-hall at
Strasbourg, of which not a word was known at Dijon; "yet it is nine days
since it happened; had it been nineteen I question if they would more
than have received the intelligence." There are no newspapers in the
cafés; no local centers of information, of resolution, of action. The
province submits to events at the capital; "people dare not move;
they dare not even form an opinion before Paris speaks."--This is what
Monarchical centralization leads to. It has deprived the groups of their
cohesion and the individual of his motivational drive. Only human dust
remains, and this, whirling about and gathered together in massive
force, is blindly driven along by the wind.[5418]
III.
Direction of the current.--The people led by lawyers.--
Theories and piques the sole surviving forces.--Suicide of
the Ancient regime.
We are all well aware from which side the gale comes, and, to assure
ourselves, we have merely to see how the reports of the Third-Estate are
made up. The peasant is led by the man of the law, the petty attorney
of the rural districts, the envious advocate and theorist. This one
insists, in the report, on a statement being made in writing and at
length of his local and personal grievances, his protest against taxes
and deductions, his request to have his dog free of the clog, and his
desire to own a gun to use against the wolves[5419]. Another one, who
suggests and directs, envelopes all this in the language of the Rights
of Man and that of the circular of Sieyès.
"For two months," writes a commandant in the South,[5420] "inferior
judges and lawyers, with which both town and country swarm, with a view
to their election to the States-General, have been racing after the
members of the Third-Estate, under the pretext of standing by them and
of giving them information. . . They have striven to make them believe
that, in the States-General, they alone would be masters and regulate
all the affairs of the kingdom; that the Third-Estate, in selecting its
deputies among men of the robe, would secure the might and the right
to take the lead, to abolish nobility and to cancel all its rights
and privileges; that nobility would no longer be hereditary; that all
citizens, in deserving it, would be entitled to claim it; that, if
the people elected them, they would have accorded to the Third-Estate
whatever it desired, because the curates, belonging to the Third-Estate,
having agreed to separate from the higher clergy and unite with them,
the nobles and the clergy, united together, would have but one vote
against two of the Third-Estate. . . . If the third--Estate had chosen
sensible townspeople or merchants they would have combined without
difficulty with the other two orders. But the assemblies of the
bailiwicks and other districts were stuffed with men of the robe who
had absorbed all opinions and striven to take precedence of the others,
each, in his own behalf, intriguing and conspiring to be appointed a
deputy."
"In Touraine," writes the intendant,[5421] "most of the votes have been
bespoken or begged for. Trusty agents, at the moment of voting, placed
filled-in ballots in the hands of the voters, and put in their way, on
reaching the taverns, every document and suggestion calculated to excite
their imaginations and determine their choice for the gentry of the
bar."
"In the sénéchausée of Lectoure, a number of parishes have not been
designated or notified to send their reports or deputies to the district
assembly. In those which were notified the lawyers, attorneys and
notaries of the small neighboring towns have made up the list of
grievances themselves without summoning the community. . . Exact copies
of this single rough draft were made and sold at a high price to the
councils of each country parish".--
This is an alarming symptom, one marking out in advance the road the
Revolution is to take: The man of the people is indoctrinated by the
advocate, the pikeman allowing himself to be led by the spokesman.[5422]
The effect of their combination is apparent the first year. In
Franche-Comté[5423] after consultation with a person named Rouget, the
peasants of the Marquis de Chaila "determine to make no further
payments to him, and to divide amongst themselves the product of the
wood-cuttings." In his paper "the lawyer states that all the communities
of the province have decided to do the same thing. . . His consultation
is diffused to such an extent around the country that many of the
communities are satisfied that they owe nothing more to the king nor to
the seigniors. M. de Marnésia, deputy to the (National) Assembly, has
arrived (here) to pass a few days at home on account of his health. He
has been treated in the rudest and most scandalous manner; it was even
proposed to conduct him back to Paris under guard. After his departure
his chateau was attacked, the doors burst open and the walls of his
garden pulled down. (And yet) no gentleman has done more for the people
on his domain the M. le Marquis de Marnésia. . . Excesses of every kind
are on the increase; I have constant complaints of the abuse which
the national militia make of their arms, and which I cannot remedy."
According to an utterance in the National Assembly the police imagines
that it is to be disbanded and has therefore no desire to make enemies
for itself. "The baillages are as timid as the police-forces; I send
them business constantly, but no culprit is punished."--"No nation
enjoys liberty so indefinite and so disastrous to honest people; it is
absolutely against the rights of man to see oneself constantly liable
to have his throat cut by the scoundrels who daily confound liberty with
license."--In other words, the passions utilize the theory to justify
themselves, and the theory appeal to passion to be carried out. For
example, near Liancourt, the Duc de Larochefoucauld possessed
an uncultivated area of ground; "at the commencement of the
revolution,[5424] the poor of the town declare that, as they form a part
of the nation, untilled lands being national property, this belongs to
them," and "with no other formality" they take possession of it, divide
it up, plant hedges and clear it off. "This, says Arthur Young, shows
the general disposition. . . . Pushed a little farther the consequences
would not be slight for properties in this kingdom." Already, in the
preceding year, near Rouen, the marauders, who cut down and sell the
forests, declare, that "the people have the right to take whatever they
require for their necessities." They have had the doctrine preached to
them that they are sovereign, and they act as sovereigns. The condition
of their intellects being given, nothing is more natural than their
conduct. Several millions of savages are thus let loose by a few
thousand windbags, the politics of the café finding an interpreter and
ministrants in the mob of the streets. On the one hand brute force is at
the service of the radical dogma. On the other hand radical dogma is at
the service of brute force. And here, in disintegrated France, these are
the only two valid powers remaining erect on the debris of the others.
*****
NOTES:
[Footnote 5401: Necker, "De l'Administration des Finances," II. 422,
435.]
[Footnote 5402: The wages have in 1789 been estimated to be 7 sous 4
deniers of which 2 sous and 6 deniers would have to be paid for the
bread. (Mercure de France, May 7, 1791.)]
[Footnote 5403: Aubertin, 345. Letter to the Comte de St. Germain
(during the Seven Years War). "The soldier's hardships make one's heart
bleed; he passes his days in a state of abject misery, despised and
living like a chained dog to be used for combat."]
[Footnote 5404: De Tocqueville, 190, 191.]
[Footnote 5405: Archives nationales, H, 1591.]
[Footnote 5406: De Rochambeau, "Mémoires," I. 427.--D'Argenson, December
24, 1752. "30,000 men have been punished for desertion since the peace
of 1748; this extensive desertion is attributed to the new drill
which fatigues and disheartens the soldier, and especially the
veterans."--Voltaire, "Dict. Phil.," article "Punishments." "I was
amazed one day on seeing the list of deserters, for eight years
amounting to 60,000."]
[Footnote 5407: Archives nationales, H, 554. (Letter of M. de Bertrand,
intendant of Rennes, August 17, 1785).]
[Footnote 5408: Mercier, XI, 121.]
[Footnote 5409: Now we know better. The most healthy bread is the one
in which some bran is left, such bran is not only good for the digestion
but contains vitamins and minerals as well. (SR).]
[Footnote 5410: De Vaublanc, 149.]
[Footnote 5411: De Ségur, I, 20 (1767).]
[Footnote 5412: Augeard, "Mémoires," 165.]
[Footnote 5413: Horace Walpole, September 5, 1789.]
[Footnote 5414: Laboulaye, "De l'Administration française sous Louis
XVI." (Revue des Cours littéraires, IV, 743).--Albert Babeau, I, 111.
(Doléances et veux des corporations de Troyes).]
[Footnote 5415: De Tocqueville, 158.]
[Footnote 5416: Ibid. 304. (The words of Burke.)]
[Footnote 5417: Travels in France, I. 240, 263.]
[Footnote 5418: What an impression this view must have made on Lenin who
sought, between 1906 and 1909 in Paris, the means and ways with which to
re-create the French revolution in Russia. (SR.)]
[Footnote 5419: Beugnot, I. 115, 116.]
[Footnote 5420: Archives nationales, procès-verbaux and cahiers of the
States-General, vol. XIII, p. 405. (Letter of the Marquis de Fodoas,
commandant of Armagnac, to M. Necker, may 29, 1789.)]
[Footnote 5421: Ibid. Vol. CL, p. 174. ( Letter from the intendant of
Tours of March 25, 1789.)]
[Footnote 5422: "Lenin deviated from Marx not in preaching the necessity
for violent proletarian revolution, but by advocating the creation of an
elite party of professional revolutionaries to hasten this end, and by
arguing for the dictatorship of this party rather than the working class
as a whole." The Guinness Encyclopedia page 269. (SR.)]
[Footnote 5423: Archives nationales, H, 784. (Letters of M. de
Langeron, military commandant at Besançon, October 16 and 18, 1789). The
consultation is annexed.]
[Footnote 5424: Arthur Young, I, 344.]