"la base de la morale, dont le maintien est essentiel à la
tranquillité et au bonheur public. Ceux que auraient le malheur de
n'être pas convaincus des vérités qu'elle nous enseigne"
will be ineligible for public office; but no step shall be taken in the
direction of persecution or proscription.
Complete toleration shall be maintained in so far as it is compatible
with public order.
* * * * *
Such was the constitution projected by d'Argenson during the few years
before his death. Its real meaning is clear and unmistakable: yet it
has not escaped the evil fortune which has pursued so many of its
author's plans. It is true that to concede to thirty-two provincial
assemblies a virtually absolute power, while providing that the
authority of the Crown shall be in no way diminished, may appear
at first sight as strange an inconsequence as M. de Broglie[429] and
others have found it. Yet a patient reading of d'Argenson's scheme
is sufficient to show that with all its elaborate reservations, it
involved nothing more nor less than the provisional surrender of the
Sovereignty of France into the hands of the French people.
It is to be remembered that in the years which
succeeded the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, d'Argenson
had been watching with growing alarm the disaffection which was
beginning to ferment:[430] and at the same time his old belief in the
sovereign virtues of absolutism had been profoundly modified by a more
lengthened experience.[431] We have only to bear in mind this change
of opinion in considering his project of reform, to be alive to the
numerous hints which it contains and to detect the real significance of
its provisions. What d'Argenson proposed was virtually this: the whole
administration of the interior was to be ceded to the people of France,
organised in their parishes, districts, and provinces; the royal
bureaucracy, the entire system of intendancies and sub-delegacies was
to be swept away; and the Crown was to be represented in each Province
by four Royal Commissioners, who should open the Estates at the end
of November and explain to the deputies the wishes of the King, while
leaving the execution of them to the Provincial government. These Royal
Commissioners had power to appoint a flying squadron of subordinates,
who were attached to no particular place nor any defined duty, whose
principal business was to report to their superiors, and who were
strictly forbidden to act upon their own authority, or, except in cases
of the last emergency, to employ force against the people. Within
the province not only the whole administration, but the assessment,
collection and payment of the taxes, was entirely in the hands of the
Estates.
"_La guerre se faisait alors en nature, et actuellement elle se
fait, pour ainsi dire, en argent._"--"Considérations" (1784).
We cannot mistake the possible significance of these proposals,
however implicitly it be conveyed. The provision that the King alone
should make laws and impose taxes might be really little more than
a constitutional fiction, which, so long as the laws were prudently
made and the taxes equitably imposed, might pass as undisputed fact.
The proposition that the royal ordinances must always be accepted
might prove to be a fiction of the same kind. Indeed, in certain
eventualities the whole scheme might be one continued fiction in so far
as it relates to the Crown. The Provincial Estates shall not legislate,
but they shall have power to present bills for the royal ratification.
What will happen if their petitions are rejected is a question for time
and circumstance, and not for legislation, to decide. In the same way
the Estates must accept the contribution assessed upon them: but they
may present representations in regard to it. If those representations
are neglected the Estates will proceed as their power and wisdom may
dictate. In a word, the absolute power of the Crown in legislation was
conditioned only by the proper use of it.
D'Argenson had arrived at the conviction that the causes of the evil
from which the country was suffering were the practical nullity of the
Crown and the political nullity of the people; and he felt that the
remedy was to be found in the admission of the people to a share of
power. He knew not less than any of his critics, that where power is
divided differences will arise; but he saw no reason to doubt that if
King and people were guided by a common patriotism and mutual respect,
such differences need never issue in violent collision. At the same
time he knew that when the interests of the King were obstinately
opposed to those of the people, such collisions would occur; they were
calamitous, but they were the lesser of two calamities. He declares
that in the case of "a King who is worthy of the name," such divergence
of interest need never be feared. Should there be a King who was not
worthy of the name, he might be left to the discretion of an indignant
people, and of the most daring and determined man who happened at the
moment to possess their confidence. It was none of d'Argenson's concern.
It is true that we do not find him stating, in this uncompromising way,
the revolutionary aspect of his programme; he would have shrunk from
formulating it clearly even to himself. At the same time we know that
it was by no means distant from his mind. Notwithstanding, he cannot
have regarded it as of any immediate or direct importance; for he could
not but think that only by an access of inconceivable folly on the part
of the people or of inconceivable madness on the part of the Crown,
could such a revolutionary ferment be occasioned.
We cannot better appreciate the spirit and scope of d'Argenson's
proposal than by comparing it with the universally admired design
broached, about twenty years later, by the great minister Turgot.
The principle of the two policies was practically the same. Turgot
proposed, like d'Argenson, to entrust to the people and popular
organisations the whole administration of the interior, while retaining
the entire legislative authority in the hands of the Crown.[432] The
people, as in d'Argenson's scheme, had merely the power of suggesting
legislation, though the actual law must proceed from the King.
Between the two plans, however, there was one great difference of
detail. D'Argenson had surrounded the authority of the Crown with a
sacred barrier; behind that barrier the people might exercise all the
effective powers of popular control: beyond it they were forbidden to
pass. In the proposal of Turgot that barrier was destroyed. Above the
circle of Provincial Estates he desired to constitute a Municipality
of the Whole Realm; by doing so he would have brought the sphere of
popular action into direct juxtaposition with that of the Crown, and
have surrounded the very palace gates with the acclamations or with the
clamour of the people.
Perhaps both policies, at their several periods, had equally little
prospect of realisation; but if it were necessary to choose between
them with regard to the state of feeling existing and likely to exist
in France, the preference might be given to the earlier plan. For a
time of disturbance and strain, it can claim one signal excellence,
in attempting to provide for the maximum of
exasperation with the minimum of indecency and danger. It is the great
vice of central, but not sovereign assemblies that they can never come
into collision with the Crown without inflicting a grievous blow upon
the prestige and authority of the Crown. The veil which shroud it from
the vulgar gaze, which surrounds it with an air of sacramental mystery,
is torn into a thousand disreputable pieces, and the solemn difference
between King and citizen is seen to fade guiltily away. D'Argenson
feared, and had always feared, that blighting closeness of contact; and
he endeavoured to preserve the influence of the Crown while placing the
people in a position from which, in cases of the last emergency, they
would be able to control the Crown. It is easy to see how the King at
Versailles and a number of Estates in the provincial cities might have
quarrelled to the verge of revolution, and yet how the King, by timely
concession, might have retained his authority unimpaired.
Nor is it hard to answer the question which some have found it
necessary to ask, and to sketch the progress of a revolution proceeding
from the basis of d'Argenson's scheme. Had the Government become
utterly despicable and bad, and had the King shown himself unable or
unwilling to undertake reform, the Provincial Estates might have waited
in patience until popular feeling was at fever height, and then they
might have offered the King his choice between a national insurrection
"_Les jalousies réciproques des Princes Chrétiens sont peut-être
aujourd'hui son appui le plus solide._"--"Considérations" (1784).
[Of the Turkish Empire.]
and the acceptance of a certain demand. That demand would have been
that the hundred and twenty-eight deputies who represented the several
Estates at the Court,[433] should be combined in a single assembly in
order to concert measures for the future of the Kingdom. If the King
had yielded, the deputies would have met, and have offered him the
choice between a national insurrection and the acceptance of their
advice. If he chose the latter alternative and endeavoured loyally to
fulfil it, the assembly would disperse, matters would revert to their
normal condition, and a politic effort would be made by all parties
to forget the past. If, on the other hand, he remained contumacious,
the people would resort to that last of political resources employed
by England with such signal success a century and a half before. Such
a state of things was never for a moment likely to arise. In 1755
the tradition of the French Monarchy remained unshaken.[434] A popular
constitution would have been accepted as an act of grace; and the
people would have been engaged too busily in remedying abuses to spend
their strength in factious opposition. Only by suicidal folly on the
part of the Crown could any danger have arisen. A moderate endowment
of public spirit and common sense would have sufficed to protect the
Government; and a monarch with one-half of the ability even of
Louis XVI., or one tithe of the devotion maintained for generations
in the House of Hohenzollern, would have been able to maintain his
position with ease.
As a general constitutional proposition d'Argenson's plan is admirable
enough; but when considered in relation to the paramount need of
France at that particular moment it becomes a very master-work of
statesmanship and sagacity. He alone could diagnose the conditions of
the disease and discern the only remedy it was possible to apply. It is
scarcely half the truth to say that the French Revolution was induced
by bad government; there were times when the Government had been
infinitely worse. The cause lay deeper. It lay in a social revolution
which was already complete, and which the Crown refused to recognise.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the institutions of France
had drifted into a condition of which history perhaps can afford no
parallel. The aristocratic corporations of the Church, the law, and
the land, whose influence the Crown for its own purposes had so often
used and abused, were losing every particle of vital force; and the
Monarchy found itself burdened and overborne by the weight of the great
classes upon whom in times past it had leaned for support. The history
of its last forty years is the history of a series of spasmodic efforts
to rise to the grandeur of its great position: and the continual
frustration of those efforts through the stolid egotism of the
privileged orders.
Why was it, it may be asked, that what had once been an inexhaustible
source of strength had become a fatal element of weakness? The
cause is to be found in a social revolution which had been silently
proceeding for nearly a century. Ever since the time of Colbert, the
middle classes, the class of tax-farmers, merchants and manufacturers,
had been increasing rapidly in wealth and importance. It was not
the mere growth of a bourgeoisie; it was the rise of a new society,
whose leaders were ready to sow their wealth in the garden of art
and letters. So it was that while lordly ineptitude upon the field
of battle made the French Government a byword in Europe, the name of
France was rendered illustrious by bourgeois triumphs in literature and
the arts.
Coincident with the rise of the middle class was the declining
influence of the Church and the Nobility. For fifty years the Church
had been engaged in one of the most despicable party fights which
history records; its most successful men were witty libertines, who
officiated at the unhallowed sacrament of the "petit souper," and
whose only belief in heaven or earth was in the redeeming virtues of a
cardinal's hat. The nobles were despised by the best among them. They
were hopelessly sunk in debt; and those whose magnificence paid no
interest were subsisting on pensions dispensed by favourites and wrung
from wretches who fed on grass and had no stomach for resistance. The
nobles were outshone by the farmers-general; the Church had ceded her
empire to the "Philosophes"; while financier and "philosophe" were the
social and intellectual leaders of a great society whose growth was
transforming the aspect of France.
Had Fortune dealt as kindly with the Bourbon House as she had lately
done with the failing Hapsburgs: could she have given to France in
Louis XV. the latest and greatest of her kings, the Revolution might
have been undreamed of, and the Bourbons absolute to this day. Such a
man would have discerned the tendency of events: he would have thrown
himself into line with it.[435] He would have sent his nobles beyond the
Rhine, with a mission to die or to justify their existence; he would
have crushed with an iron hand the pretensions of the Church; and
turning Versailles into a national museum, he would have transferred
his Court to the Louvre or the Tuileries, nor would he have allowed it
to be surpassed in brilliance by the salons of the farmers-general.
By putting himself at the head of the new France, he might have
renewed the tradition of the French Monarchy. Such might have been the
work of a great King; but the Great King reviewed his squadrons on
the plain of Potsdam, and devoted to France but a passing jest; and
she was left to the guidance of one of the most pitiable and mean of
men, who could do no more than watch
"_C'est la déportation qui constitue principalement l'esclavage; nul
n'est facilement esclave dans son pays._"--"Considérations" (1784).
the clouds and predict the bursting of "Le Déluge."
Effort to avert it there was none. Versailles displayed perhaps as
strange a combination of pomp and vanity as was ever known in the
history of the world. It retained the profusion, without the dignity,
of the Grand Age; and public affairs went as they could while incapable
nobles and dissolute Churchmen exchanged the shuttle of an endless
intrigue. In tradition and spirit it was utterly alien from the new
society. But one representative of the rising classes won her way
into the charmed circle; she entered the Court as Madame d'Etioles;
but before long the wife of the farmer-general was lost in Madame la
Marquise de Pompadour. In public affairs the blindness was equally
insensate. The King consented to trail his ermine in the slush of
ecclesiastical quarrels; and such men as Tencin were the rulers of
France, while Voltaire was reduced to crave the favour of some obscure
lieutenant of police. When at last a man arises who will not take
Madame's gifts, but will consent to copy her music, and who will not
accept a hundred louis for work worth a dozen francs, he is spoken
of as some strange kind of wild animal, "un original d'une nouvelle
espèce," in Madame's own words.[436] And meanwhile the silver-tongued
"bourreau" went on correcting his proofs--of the "Contrat Social"--and
inditing the charter of those great classes which the French Monarchy
continued to ignore.
No man had cherished more fondly than d'Argenson his hopes of Louis
XV., and none had been more cruelly disappointed. He acknowledged at
last that the Monarchy could not save itself; he would have tried to
save it in spite of itself. His method was the only possible one.
Flinging aside, like a damaged tool, the decrepit organisation of the
privileged orders, he would have called in the assistance of that
great people who held the future in the hollow of their hand. He would
have given them power by their own efforts to redeem the vices of the
Government, and to free that Government from the vesture of privilege
and tradition which clung to it like the shirt of Nessus. For the
two-fold evil from which France was suffering, his scheme provided
a double remedy. The people had no power to demand good government;
the Crown, burdened as it was by the privileged orders, had scarcely
the power to afford it. D'Argenson would have given the people the
necessary power: he would have given the Crown the necessary freedom:
and he would have left it to the patriotism of the nation and the good
sense of the King to restore prosperity to their common country.
D'Argenson's constitution died with him, and he who will may call it a
dream.
It is a pity that such dreams are not more frequent.