THE LABOURS OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY.
After its arrival in Paris, the Assembly continued, amid many
interruptions, the work of constructing the new constitution, and the
same blind attachment to captivating theories, which had wasted so many
weeks in barren discussion at Versailles, pervaded its debates and its
decrees in Paris. The great bulk of the members of the Assembly were
determined to carry into practice the idea of the sovereignty of the
people, and to observe, as far as logic could, the natural rights of
man. If facts or experience conflicted with these theories, facts and
experience must go to the wall. The circumstances, needs or traditions
of nations seemed to them to be of little importance in comparison
with the eternal principles which philosophy had laid down for the
government of the world. In pursuance of these views, the slaves in
the French colony of St. Domingo were immediately emancipated, without
regard to the difficulties involved in so summary a proceeding, or the
disaster certain to ensue. 'Let the colonies perish,' cried a member of
the Assembly, 'rather than sacrifice a principle.' In pursuance also of
these views, all titles of nobility were abolished, as being 'repugnant
to reason and to true liberty.' It became an offence and subsequently
a crime for a nobleman to sign his name in the old style. The Assembly
taught the people to regard rank as something wrong; and the people,
taking up the idea, and colouring it with their own fears and ancient
hatreds, soon came to look on all possessors of rank as evil-doers, who
had no right to fair treatment or protection from the law, and for whom
the proper destiny was the guillotine. On the same vague theories the
constitution was built up. The desire to place sovereignty in the hands
of the people led the Assembly to impose many complicated political
duties upon the great mass of citizens, who had never as yet exercised
any political functions at all. At the same time they curtailed as far
as possible, and hampered by a system of elaborate checks, the power
which they left to those at the head of affairs, who had long been
accustomed to political duties, and who had certainly fulfilled them
very ill. The result was a complete paralysis in the Government, and a
constitution foredoomed to fail.
The best hope for the Revolution lay in the speedy establishment
of a strong Government, composed of men thoroughly in harmony with
the majority in the Assembly, possessed of power sufficient to
ensure order, and of popularity sufficient to command support. The
establishment of such a Government was from the first Mirabeau's
object; but the Assembly soon proceeded to render it impossible. The
great majority of deputies, who had accepted the proposition that all
power ought to proceed from the people, regarded it as the corollary
of that proposition, that executive government, which nominally
proceeded from the King, was opposed to the people's interests, and
that all executive agents were inimical to freedom. To their minds,
naturally enough, executive power was associated with the old monarchy
and the Court, and the old monarchy and the Court they justly regarded
as antagonistic to the principles of liberty. The proper remedy was to
render the Executive thoroughly dependent on the popular will, and to
unite it with the Assembly so closely that the policy and interests
of both must be the same. Instead of that, the Assembly set a barrier
between itself and the Executive, which rendered cordial co-operation
impossible, and early in November, 1789, it passed a most unfortunate
decree, rendering all members of the House ineligible for places in the
Government.
It may or it may not be fair to attribute the decree of the 7th
November to the influence of Necker and Lafayette, and to their jealous
fear of Mirabeau's ambition. But of all the measures of the Assembly,
there was probably none which was more disastrous in its effects upon
the Revolution. Only a strong Government could have coped with the
rising anarchy in France; but from that day forward a strong Government
became impossible, until the legislature, to escape from the difficulty
which it had created, invested its own committees with dictatorial
powers. From that day forward, the breach between the Assembly and the
Crown inevitably widened. The members of the Assembly lost all chance
of learning from the responsibilities of office the experience and
stability which they so much required. Their jealousy and distrust of
the Executive deepened. As they did not choose or trust the Ministers,
they determined narrowly to circumscribe their powers, and limited and
embarrassed them at every turn. The King, the head of this dangerous
Executive, was as far as possible stripped of power. He was not allowed
to veto--except for a limited time--the measures of the Assembly. He
was not allowed to convoke, to adjourn or to dissolve it. It was only
after a determined struggle, and owing to the extraordinary influence
of Mirabeau, that the King and his Ministers were permitted to retain
the initiative upon questions of war and peace. They were deprived of
almost all authority over their own agents in the Government and the
law. They had no power to appoint, to control, to reward, or to punish
the official subordinates who nominally carried out their commands.
The Assembly held them responsible for the safety of the country.
It watched them with jealous carefulness. It threatened them with
overwhelming penalties if they transgressed. It deliberately refused to
be associated with them, or to share their responsibilities in any way.
It treated them from the first as suspected persons, and reduced them
to mere figure-heads, at which to point the calumnies which its own
fears composed. One of the first steps taken by the Assembly towards
constructing its new constitution, was thus to make the business of
government an almost impossible task in France.
Hardly less mischievous than its dread of executive power was the
passion for electoral contrivances which possessed the Assembly. It
was to some extent this passion which had guided it in its rejection
of an Upper Chamber, but the depth of the feeling was more strongly
illustrated by the new system of local government, which it adopted
in the winter of 1789-1790. Under this system all existing divisions
and provincial distinctions were swept away, and the country was as
nearly as possible symmetrically divided into 83 departments. These
departments were further subdivided into 574 districts, into 4,730
cantons, and lastly into 44,000 communes or municipalities[6]. Of these
four divisions the cantons possessed no administrative importance,
being only invented for purposes of symmetry and to facilitate the
electoral operations. But each of the others, each department,
district, and municipality, had its own little constitution, based upon
popular election, but with many varieties and complexities of form.
Every department, district, and municipality had its own council or
deliberative body, and its own executive officers too. The officials
of the municipalities were elected directly by the citizens within
them. But the higher officials of the districts and departments were,
like the deputies to the National Assembly, elected by a double system
of election. The primary assemblies of the cantons--that is all the
'active' citizens in each department--chose first a body of electors,
and these electors then elected the officials of their own department,
the officials of the districts which lay within that department,
and lastly the deputies who were to represent the department in the
National Assembly at Paris. The right of voting for all these officials
was restricted to 'active' citizens, that is to all citizens over
twenty-five years of age, who paid in direct taxes to the State a sum
equal in amount to three days' wages. The right of standing for any
of the offices was further restricted to those who paid direct taxes
equal in amount to a mark of silver. All active citizens were required
to serve in the National Guard, of which each municipality had its own
battalion. The National Guards chose their own commanders, and were
under the direct control of the municipal authorities, with whom the
chief responsibility for the maintenance of order lay.
It would not have been easy to create a system more complicated or
difficult to work. The object of establishing these numerous bodies
with their innumerable officials was that they might balance and
control each other. The result was the paralysis of all. The immense
number of the new officials rendered impossible rapidity of work. The
cost of their salaries, though individually low, was cumulatively very
high. The strangeness of their functions, which were very numerous,
and which included the assessment and collection of the taxes, the
maintenance of religion, of education, and of public works, the control
of streets and highways, of sanitation, of the poor law, of prisons
and of police, would in any case have been embarrassing enough; but
it became far more so, when no one could tell where his own functions
ended and another man's began. Half of the new officials found the
other half from the first inclined to question their authority, to
dispute their commands, and to accuse them of over-stepping their
rights. The higher among them had no power of enforcing obedience from
their subordinates, who argued against orders which they disliked, and
acted on them or not, as they pleased. In the confusion of the time the
habits of discipline and obedience were naturally lax, and refractory
underlings could plead with some force that they were just as well
qualified as their superiors to interpret the principles of the Rights
of Man.
Accordingly, it soon became apparent that the real authority under
the new system lay not in the high officials of the departments, or
in the helpless Ministers at Paris, but in the forty-four thousand
communes, which in many respects were independent of their superiors,
and which managed their own affairs. To the communal authorities was
entrusted the task of repressing riots and disorder, and the control
for that purpose of military force. On them was thrown an immense
amount of executive work, and the duty of carrying out in detail
all the great social and political reforms, by which, month after
month, the decrees of the National Assembly were changing the face
of France. In many places the communal or municipal officials were
ignorant and uneducated men, for in the country parishes there were
often no bourgeois, the local priests were ineligible for office, and
the local gentry were fugitives or 'suspects.' In twenty thousand of
the new municipalities, it was stated in the Assembly, the officials
elected could not read or write. Men of this description--men indeed
of any description--overwhelmed with work, surrounded by novelties
and disorder, and perplexed by the multitude of their duties and
coadjutors, were certain to find their task beyond them, and speedily
to fall into confusion and arrears. No sooner had the new system
been established, than its servants began unwillingly to discover how
impossible it was to work it with success.
One of the most prominent features of the new order was the demand
which it made upon people's time. Under it, it was estimated, one out
of every thirty-four men in the country held office. But even for those
who escaped the troubles of office, no small burden of citizenship
remained. Every active citizen was an elector and a member of the
National Guard. As riots were perpetual, his service in the National
Guard soon became burdensome. As elections multiplied, as every place
in the municipality, in the district, in the department, in the
legislature, and before long in the various branches of the law and of
the Church was filled by election, and as each election presupposed
meetings, committees, canvassing, and a large expenditure of time,
his duties as an elector gradually became intolerable. The history of
the innumerable elections held in France after the outbreak of the
Revolution shows clearly that busy, working people found it impossible,
after a time, to perform all the duties imposed on them by the State,
and, immersed in the calls of business, drew away from politics, when
their first enthusiasm had worn off, and gave up coming to the polls.
Politics steadily fell more and more into the hands of those who were
prepared to make their living out of them. Only the unoccupied and
the ambitious were willing to give the time required to speeches,
to meetings, to party organising, to all the arts of many different
shades, by which minute democracies are won, and which are essential to
political success, where every office in the service in the State is
made the prize of the electioneer.
It is curious, however, to notice in the new constitution two points,
on which the devotion of the Assembly to theoretic rights gave way to
its devotion to other considerations. The two decrees, which limited
the franchise, and which imposed a property qualification for office,
were clearly incompatible with the high doctrines of the Rights of
Man. The importance of them was specially felt in Paris, where they
affected a large number of energetic politicians, including a great
many journalists and workmen in irregular employment. They were at
once made the subject of strong protest in the democratic Press, and
the more advanced leaders seized the opportunity to point out with
unanswerable force the disposition which the Assembly showed to promote
the interests and influence of the bourgeois at the expense of the
working-class. Nothing probably among the earlier measures of the
Assembly did so much as these two decrees to give colour to that idea,
and to deepen the feeling of antagonism towards the middle class, which
was already perceptible among the working people in the towns.
The same prepossession for electoral devices appeared in the Assembly's
judicial reforms. No part of its work was better conceived or, thanks
to the influence of the great lawyers in the House, carried out in a
better spirit than this. The old courts and Parlements, with their
abuses and delays, and their objectionable system of payment by fees,
were swept away. The power of arbitrary imprisonment, the practice
of torture, the prosecutions for heresy, the inequalities in the
administration of justice, and the disproportionate punishments for
trivial offences, which then disgraced the penal codes of nearly
every European country, were exchanged for a new and more equitable
system. Trial by jury was made the rule in criminal cases. Counsel
were permitted to be employed for the defence of the accused. Complete
publicity was introduced into the proceedings of the law courts. A
simple system was established for the administration of justice. A
civil court was created in each district, a criminal court in each
department, a final court of appeal at Paris; and, besides these
tribunals, small courts of summary jurisdiction, under Juges de Paix,
all over the country, and a special High Court at Orleans to try cases
of treason against the nation. But, admirable in many respects as the
new system was, and brightly as it contrasts with the dark practices
of the Ancien Régime, there ran through it all one grave defect, which
went far to diminish its value. With few exceptions, the judges and
officers of the law courts were appointed by popular election for short
periods of time, and were thus liable to be deprived of their posts, if
their sentences and conduct did not coincide with popular feeling. Such
a provision has been wisely held to be a serious danger to justice,
even among a tranquil and reasonable people. It was infinitely more
dangerous in a time of revolution, when reason was far less potent than
suspicion, and political passion ran exceptionally high.
The Assembly carried even into military matters its dread of authority
and its fondness for abstract theories and electoral schemes. Both
army and navy were in a thoroughly unsatisfactory condition. The spirit
of political insubordination had spread far in both services, and had
produced mutiny and disaffection. The state of the army, especially,
had for some time past given cause for alarm. Nowhere was the system
of class distinction more jealously kept up. All the higher offices in
the army were open to men of rank alone, and even in the reign of Louis
XVI fresh regulations had been imposed to guard and enforce this class
distinction. The pay of the upper officers was sometimes very high,
and the number of generals was ridiculously large. On the other hand,
the pay of the men was extremely low, and it was notorious that even
the allowances made to them by the State were often curtailed by the
officers through whose hands they passed. The barracks, the beds, and
the food supplied for the men were, as a rule, bad and insufficient.
Recruits were drawn from the lowest class in the country. The prestige
and tone of the service had suffered during recent years, and the
attempt made under Louis XVI to introduce a more rigid and harassing
system of drills had widely increased the spirit of discontent. On an
army already disaffected the doctrines of the Rights of Man, and the
expectations of universal change and relief from oppression, which
accompanied the Revolution, had their natural effect. On all sides
signs of mutiny appeared. The men refused to obey their officers,
formed committees and held meetings of their own, sent up petitions
to the National Assembly, and demanded more pay and the management
of their regimental chests. Desertions rapidly increased. Men and
officers alike disregarded the rules of discipline, and set their
superiors at defiance. On all sides the rank and file of the army
showed an inclination to fraternise with the people, and refused to
serve in putting down disorder. At last, in August, 1790, a serious
mutiny at Nancy opened the eyes of the Assembly to the danger of the
situation; and the great majority of its members concurred in the
vigorous and exemplary severity, by which Bouillé, with the support of
the National Guards of the district, reduced the mutinous regiments to
order.
No dangers, however, could make the majority of the Assembly understand
that, if an army and navy were to be maintained at all, soldiers and
sailors must be subjected to stringent discipline and governed by
exceptional laws, without regard to the abstract Rights of Man. They
set to work, it is true, to re-organise both services. They abolished
the hated militia. They refused to sanction conscription in the army,
although they permitted it within certain limits for the navy. They
raised the pay of the men. They threw open promotion in both services
to all ranks and conditions alike. They abolished the superfluity of
highly paid offices, and laid down some other reasonable regulations
for both departments. They abstained, in spite of their proclivities,
from making all military and naval offices elective. But they jealously
restricted the King's power of appointing officers. They could not
be brought to see the necessity of enforcing discipline at any cost,
and endeavoured to limit, by such provisions as they could invent,
the authority of the officers over their men. They gave the soldiers
the right of appealing to the nearest civil magistrate against their
own commander. They placed the control of the military chest in the
hands of a board elected by the regiment. They permitted the men to
form clubs and associations, and to petition the Assembly for the
protection of their rights. They insisted on regarding the soldier as a
citizen still; and although for purely military offences they left him
subject to the jurisdiction of the military courts, they took special
steps even in those courts to assert the rights of the accused, and to
diminish the influence of the military authorities. The result of all
these regulations was that the Government could no longer rely upon
its forces, and that discipline in both services remained thoroughly
relaxed, until the approach of national disaster taught Frenchmen the
necessity which no theories could avert, and until the rigid discipline
of danger drilled these disorderly and mutinous battalions into the
most magnificent army which the world had seen.
But graver than its errors in regard to judicial and military reform
were the Assembly's errors in regard to the Church. The attack upon the
Church has been viewed in many quarters as the most conspicuous example
of its unwisdom. The lower ranks of the French clergy had shared to a
very large extent the enthusiasm of Frenchmen for the Revolution. Some
of them were among the most enlightened members of the Assembly, and
were prepared to co-operate heartily in the work of reform. But the
financial difficulties of the State were never absent from the minds of
the Assembly, and the great possessions of the Church seemed to offer
a way out of those difficulties too tempting to be overlooked. It was
on this side that the attack began. As early as the 4th August, 1789,
tithes had been summarily abolished, and a portion of the income of
the Church had thus been cut away, without, as Sieyès vainly pointed
out, relieving anyone except the proprietors of land. In the following
autumn, Mirabeau carried through the Assembly a decree declaring
the possessions of the Church to be the property of the nation, and
early in the new year the work of reconstitution began. In February,
1790, the monasteries and religious houses were suppressed, and their
property appropriated. In April it was proposed to vote a budget for
the maintenance of the clergy. In June, going further still, the
Assembly undertook to re-organise the whole ecclesiastical system, and
after long and animated debates the Civil Constitution of the clergy
was adopted in the month of July. In August the Assembly formally took
over the management of the property of the Church.
The new constitution of the clergy was simplicity itself. Monasteries,
chapters, canons, dioceses, all impediments to uniformity, were
abolished. One bishop was appointed for each department, and one
priest for every parish. Incomes, ranging from about fifty thousand
francs for the wealthiest bishops to about six thousand francs for
the poorest priests--incomes in themselves thoroughly equitable and a
marked improvement upon the mingled poverty and extravagance of the
older system--were voted for the maintenance of the new hierarchy.
The fondness of the Assembly for deliberative bodies was satisfied
by giving the bishops ecclesiastical councils to advise them, and
its attachment to elective principles was shown by the astonishing
decree, which declared that in future both bishops and priests were
to be elected by the votes of their flocks. It was inevitable that so
sweeping a change should excite opposition and result in failure. Even
on the financial side, which on paper showed a very large saving to
the State, difficulties speedily arose. The Assembly, fully intending
to act fairly, undertook to pension the numerous ecclesiastics whose
interests suffered vitally from the reforms. But money was scarce, and
the charges undertaken by the State were very heavy. The dispossessed
ecclesiastics, the monks and nuns, soon began to feel the meaning
of the change, and their history soon began to exhibit many pitiful
cases of want and distress. With the disestablishment of the monastic
foundations, the institutions which they had maintained declined, and
their schools and asylums languished. The destruction of so ancient
and widespread a system could not, however necessary it might be,
be carried through, in a time of revolution, without a good deal of
suffering and injustice. But the methods of the Assembly aggravated the
violence of the change. They had the power, and probably the right,
to disestablish and to disendow the old Church. But they had neither
the right nor the power to force men's consciences to accept their
substitute for it, whether they would or not. Moreover, they did not
understand that the new constitution of the clergy was absolutely
repugnant to the spirit of Roman Catholicism, and involved ideas
which that spirit could not possibly accept. They believed that all
authority and government ought to begin with the people, to come from
below; and in accordance with that view they framed the new system of
their Church. But if there was one principle which the Roman Church
held dear, and which it had clung to even more closely than to its
dogmas, ever since it established its ascendency in Europe, it was the
principle that all authority in the Church proceeded from above. To
every faithful Catholic the Pope held a spiritual power derived from
Heaven; without the Pope's consent no share of that spiritual power
could pass to bishop or to priest; and without such sanctions and
authority from above, no man, whatever civil force might lie behind
him, could administer with God's approval the services and sacraments
of the Church. Beliefs of that kind, founded on conscience, and fixed
in immemorial habit, could not be uprooted by any decrees. Even had
the Assembly secured the Pope's consent, it seems doubtful whether its
scheme would have been finally accepted in the country. Instead of
that, it took no steps to conciliate the Papacy, but ostentatiously
held itself aloof from Rome, and by various provocative measures showed
its intention to set the Pope's authority at defiance.
The consequences were immediate and disastrous. The clergy as a whole
fought the new scheme at every stage. The Assembly, conscious of the
strength of their resistance, endeavoured to overcome it by compelling
them all to take an oath to observe the new Civil Constitution. When
the clergy procrastinated and refused, the Assembly found itself driven
into more stringent measures, and at the end of 1790, obliged either
to abandon its position or to take a more aggressive line, it demanded
the King's consent to a decree enforcing compliance under penalties
of dismissal and prosecution. From that time forward, the Revolution
declared war upon the Church, and upon all the devout Catholics who
adopted the cause of their pastors. From that time forward, the King,
though he yielded to the pressure of the Assembly, gave up all hope of
reconciling himself with the principles of the Revolution. From that
time forward the Church in France was divided into two camps, the one
consisting of those who took the oath and accepted the new system, and
including, among a very few prelates and a large number of dispossessed
monks, perhaps half of the old clergy of France, the other consisting
of those who refused it, and including nearly all the prelates, all the
most distinguished names, and most of the secular clergy of the ancient
Church. On the one side were the sanctions of the law, the support
of the State, and the assistance of all the new civil authorities.
On the other side were the commands of the Pope, the sympathies of
the great majority of pious Catholics, and the strength derived from
conscientious opposition to severity and persecution. Both sides
inevitably had their partisans in many towns and villages in France;
and the virulence of religious partisanship before long produced,
in the South and West, trouble, rebellions and civil war, and still
further embittered the divisions, and aggravated the general confusion,
which accompanied the Assembly's endeavours to reform and regenerate
France.
Closely connected with the attack upon the Church was the embarrassing
question of finance. No man, on the outbreak of the Revolution,
enjoyed so high a reputation for finance as Necker, and no man probably
misused that reputation more. Everyone knew that the financial
embarrassments of the country were the real cause of the summoning of
the States-General. Everyone knew that there was, first, an enormous
annual deficit amounting to at least 120 or 130 million francs, and
rising for the year 1789 to a much higher figure, and, secondly, a
very heavy floating debt. The natural course, and the only wise one,
would have been for the Minister to have laid bare at once all the
embarrassments of the State, and to have used his great popularity and
credit for facing the difficulty boldly, and for setting matters on a
satisfactory footing for the future. Instead of that, Necker, either
for mistaken political reasons, or for more personal and less worthy
causes, from the first minimised the financial difficulty, represented
the deficit as much less than it was, described the work of restoring
order in the finances as 'mere child's play,' and concealed the worst
features of the situation from the public to whom he appealed for
support. Necker's system of finance had been to proceed by raising
loans on favourable terms--a system for which his financial reputation
and connections gave him peculiar facilities. During the summer of
1789, he continued to carry on this system, and the State lived, for
a time, upon the money which Necker raised by loan or borrowed from
the Caisse d'Escompte, and upon the patriotic contributions which
enthusiastic ladies and gentlemen poured into the Exchequer. But by the
autumn, it had become clear, even to Necker, that this system would
not do for ever, that the credit of the State was not improving, that
loans could no longer be raised with success, and that the condition
of the finances generally was far worse than it had been five months
before. Thereupon, at the end of September, Necker came forward with
a heroic remedy, and thanks to the support of Mirabeau, he induced
the Assembly to consent to an extraordinary tax of one quarter of all
incomes in the country, to be paid within the next three years.
But even this drastic expedient failed. The method of assessing
the tax, and the time over which the period of payment was spread,
contributed to frustrate its results. The embarrassments of the State
increased. The debt steadily mounted; for, after the outbreak of
the Revolution, people on all sides refused to pay taxes, and the
Government was compelled to use for current purposes any money on
which it could lay hands. Then too, the extraordinary expenses of
the year, occasioned by the circumstances of the Revolution, were
exceptionally heavy, and the cost of keeping Paris quiet was heavier
still. In two months alone of the winter of 1789-90, the State paid
over to the Parisian authorities seventeen million francs for the
purchase of corn, and it is estimated that in the year which followed,
it advanced to the various municipalities in the departments no less
than sixteen hundred millions, in order to cheapen the price of bread.
Besides that, it was soon called on by the Parisian authorities--and
the calls of Paris were rarely refused--to pay over many millions more,
for keeping up relief-works for the unemployed workmen of the capital,
for maintaining and equipping its National Guard, for defraying the
expenses of destroying the Bastille, and even for lighting and paving
its streets. Under these circumstances matters grew steadily worse, and
Mirabeau fell back on the idea of appropriating the property of the
Church, and of using the credit and resources so obtained in order to
issue paper money to pay the pressing creditors of the State. By that
means he hoped to gain a breathing-space, until a strong Government
could be formed to grapple thoroughly with the whole question. The
idea, once formed, was soon put into execution. Early in November,
1789, the Assembly declared that the lands and property of the Church
were at the disposal of the State. In December, it directed a part of
this property, to the value of four hundred millions of francs, to be
sold for the national benefit. In the following March, as the land did
not sell quickly, it was determined to make it over to the various
municipalities, to sell at a handsome profit to themselves, and in
the meantime to issue paper money, also to the extent of four hundred
millions, to increase the currency and to act as bank notes. Thus, in
April, 1790, there came into existence the Assignats.
It is worth while to follow for a little the history of the Assignats,
for they afterwards became one of the most characteristic and
disastrous features of Revolutionary finance. The intention of their
authors had been to use the Assignats as a temporary convenience, to
tide over the many pressing difficulties of the moment, until the State
could find time to face and to settle the question of its finances.
In that idea, had it been rigidly adhered to, there was nothing
economically wrong. But from the first, the plan proved disappointing.
The sale of the Church lands brought in comparatively little. The
municipalities naturally considered their own interests first, and
did not always sell the lands in the manner most profitable to the
State. They permitted the buyer to take possession on payment of a
very small instalment of the price; and in many cases speculators,
taking advantage of this system, bought Church land largely, then cut
down the timber and pulled down the houses on it, and having made what
profit they could, decamped before the second instalment became due.
In the existing state of the administration, it was not difficult to
play tricks with the law. Moreover, purchasers of these lands were
permitted to pay for them in Assignats, the idea being that all the
paper money issued would thus return into the Exchequer, and pass out
of circulation as the Church lands were sold off. The fact, however,
that the Assignats were accepted by the municipalities at their nominal
value made it the object of speculators to depreciate them, and thus
from the first a powerful motive was at work to depreciate the new
currency. The consequence was, that within a few months of the first
issue of Assignats, the embarrassments of the State were as pressing as
ever. The Assignats already issued had been spent, and the Assembly,
as far as ever from financial order, could only suggest the issuing
of more. Then again Mirabeau, aware of the dangers of his course,
but still struggling to avert bankruptcy, and hoping for a change of
Ministry which might ultimately set matters right, threw his influence
into the same scale. In September, 1790, he induced the Assembly to
sanction a final issue of eight hundred millions more, towards the
liquidation of the National Debt; to enact that more than twelve
hundred millions should never be put into circulation, and to provide
that all Assignats paid into the Treasury thenceforward should be
burned.
But once the Assembly had entered on the downward course, it found
it impossible to stop. The strong Government and the financial
readjustment, which Mirabeau had hoped for, never came. The eight
hundred millions went, as the four hundred millions had gone before
them, and still there seemed to be no prospect of the debt ever being
redeemed, or of a balance ever being established between the income
and the expenditure of the State. Again and again the Government found
that it must either face bankruptcy, or else get over its difficulties
for the moment by fresh issues of paper money, and again and again,
when the alternative had to be faced, it naturally chose the latter
course. By June, 1791, the issue of the previous September had been
exhausted, and casting its own prudent limitations to the winds, the
Assembly issued six hundred millions more. From that time forward the
depreciation of the paper money steadily and rapidly advanced. The
Treasury, departing from the original proposal, had already begun to
issue Assignats of quite small value. Paper money soon became the
regular currency in which wages were paid; and even the poorest classes
thus learned to feel the effects of its variations, and to make such
profit out of those variations as they could. With the depreciation
of the Assignats and the disappearance of specie, the rage for
speculation, naturally stimulated by the rapidity of political change,
took hold of the public mind, and the spirit of gambling increased in
all classes the unrest and fever of the time.
The Assembly, it is true, did at length endeavour to face the whole
financial position, and to establish at any rate its current finances
on a firm and permanent footing. But the manner in which it made the
attempt was sufficient to ensure its failure. The expenses of the
Revolution had necessarily been very large. The Assembly had, no
doubt, cut down the expenses of the Court, of the army, and of the
Church; but it had at the same time undertaken new and very heavy
burdens. The cost of the new system of local government and of the
new system of administering justice involved a large increase in the
annual expenditure. The cost of compensating the officers suppressed
in the Law, the Church, and the public services, of pensioning off the
dispossessed ecclesiastics, and of buying out the innumerable vested
interests at which the reforms of the Assembly had struck, alone
amounted to an enormous sum. There were all the debts of the Ancien
Régime to be taken over, and besides that all the deficits in the
current accounts, which steadily accumulated, month after month, down
to the end of 1790. The property of the Church, which was at first
regarded as an inexhaustible treasure, and estimated at much beyond
its real value, disappointed the expectations of its new possessors,
as they saw it frittered away in issues of Assignats. The abolition
of tithes, though a great benefit to the proprietors of land, had in
no way enriched the Exchequer. The abolition of feudal dues, though
a heavy loss to their old possessors and an infinite gain to the
nation at large, had brought nothing into the coffers of the State.
The cessation of the hated Gabelle and of many other indirect taxes,
which the people had refused any longer to pay, and which the Assembly,
making a virtue of necessity, had accordingly abolished, had cut
away one large source of revenue. It remained to find the means of
making good the deficiency and of providing for the charges which the
Revolution had imposed.
It is in the steps taken to balance the accounts of the nation that one
sees perhaps most clearly the fatal optimism of the Assembly, and its
rooted and culpable unwillingness to face disagreeable facts. There was
no doubt that the Revolution had been extremely costly. Its advantages,
the reforms which it had instituted, and the facilities for attaining
prosperity which it had opened up to Frenchmen, were obvious and clear.
It was equally obvious that those advantages and reforms must entail
considerable expenditure, and must be paid for by those who enjoyed
them. Instead, however, of taking that line, as in duty it was bound
to do, the Assembly seems to have determined that, whatever its needs
and difficulties might be, it would so frame its budget, that no one
should be able to say that the Revolution had increased the taxation of
the people. Accordingly it proceeded to draw up a list of its expenses,
which was from beginning to end fallacious. The financiers of the
Assembly fixed the votes for each department at a figure which could
not possibly cover the expenses, and set down the total expenditure at
many millions below its real cost. They then proceeded to reckon up the
revenue, over-estimating each item here, as they had under-estimated
each item on the other side. They set down as a part of the revenue
two or three large items of a purely temporary and exceptional kind.
They made no allowance whatever for extraordinary expenses, which
they had already estimated at seventy-six millions of francs. They
sacrificed to democratic feeling many of those indirect taxes which
democracies always resent,--the taxes on salt, tobacco, wine and
spirits, and other commodities of less importance. They remodelled
the whole system of internal tariffs and swept away its objectionable
features. They took some steps in the direction of free trade, and
abolished the guilds and the restrictions upon labour. But they by no
means entirely abandoned the protective system, and they maintained
all indirect taxes which escaped notice, and against which no popular
outcry was raised. It is significant of the overwhelming influence
which Paris exercised on the deliberations of the Assembly, that the
octrois of the city of Paris remained undiminished and untouched, in
spite of the general attack made upon the system of indirect taxation.
The reason was that the municipality of Paris could not afford to
dispense with these duties, and the Assembly dared not abolish what the
municipality of Paris wished to maintain. It was not until the working
classes of Paris compelled the municipality to suggest the abolition of
the impost, that the octrois of Paris were swept away.
Having thus lost a great deal of the revenue raised by indirect
taxation, the Assembly proceeded to make up the deficit by imposing
two direct taxes, a Poll-tax which was inconsiderable and light, and
a tax upon land which was overwhelmingly heavy. The burden of the
new land-tax was in itself disproportionate and probably unjust; it
was aggravated by a perverse system of rating; and the ignorance of
the new civil authorities, who were entrusted with the assessment and
collection of the taxes, tended further to defeat the expectations
of the Exchequer. As the political fever increased, the system of
taxation became an engine by which the party in power in any locality
could annoy and oppress its political opponents; and there is no
doubt that it led in many cases to partiality and wrong. For this
result the circumstances of the times rather than the financiers of
the Assembly were to blame. But the Assembly cannot avoid censure
for the weakness and unwisdom which it displayed, for its refusal
to recognise clearly the liabilities which it had incurred, for its
determination to make a show of economy, however delusive that economy
might prove, and for the moral cowardice which made it shut its eyes
to facts involving unpopularity for those who faced them. Its attempts
to redeem or diminish the national debt by loans, by confiscation,
and by issuing paper money, failed completely. Its attempt to balance
its receipts and expenses for the future ensured failure as complete,
from the manner in which it was undertaken. Even if the new taxes had
been regularly paid--and they never were--the Assembly's policy could
only have resulted in still further increasing the debt, in forcing
the Government into fresh issues of Assignats or into other equally
desperate expedients, and in destroying the national credit. No doubt
allowances, many and ample, should be made for the difficulties of
the National Assembly, for its inevitable inexperience, and for its
generally excellent intentions. But still it is as practical reformers
that the members of that Assembly must be judged; and the record of
their labours, though in many respects deserving of sympathy and
praise, still goes far to vindicate the maxim, that high-pitched
theories and philanthropic aims are after all only as dust in the
balance, compared with the many sober qualities of wisdom required for
the effective administration of a State.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: Different authorities give different figures. But these
seem to be the most correct.]