DESPOTISM AND ITS FRUITS.
Assumptions of the Aristocracy.--Molière.--Decay of the
Nobility.--Decline of the Feudal System.--Difference between France
and the United States.--Mortification of Men of Letters.--Voltaire,
Montesquieu, Rousseau.--Corruption of the Church.--Diderot.--The
Encyclopedists.--Testimony of De Tocqueville.--Frederic II. of
Prussia.--Two Classes of Opponents of Christianity.--Enormity of
Taxation.--Misery of the People.--"Good old Times of the Monarchy!"
Having given a brief sketch of the character of Louis XV., let us now
contemplate the condition of France during his long reign. It has been
estimated that the privileged class in both Church and State consisted
of but one hundred and fifty thousand. It was their doctrine, enforced
by the most rigorous practice, that the remaining twenty-five millions
of France were created but to administer to their luxury; that this was
the function which Providence intended them to perform. Every office
which could confer honor and emolument in the Church, the army, the
State, or the Court, was filled by the members of an aristocracy who
looked with undisguised contempt upon all those who were not high-born,
however opulent or however distinguished for talents and literary
culture. Louis XV., surrounded by courtesans and debauched courtiers,
deemed it presumption in Voltaire to think of sitting at the same
table with the king. "I can give pensions to Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Fontinelle, and Maupertius," said the king, "but I can not dine and sup
with _these people_."[22]
The courtiers of Louis XIV. manifested in the most offensive manner
the mortification which they felt in being obliged to receive Molière,
the most distinguished comic dramatist of France, to their table.
No degree of genius could efface the ignominy of not being nobly
born.[23] But, notwithstanding the arrogance of the nobles, they, as a
class, had fallen into contempt. All who could support a metropolitan
establishment had abandoned their chateaux and repaired to Paris. The
rural castle was shut up, silence reigned in its halls, and grass waved
in its court-yard. The bailiff only was left behind to wring the last
farthing from the starving tenantry. Many of the noble families were in
decay. Their poverty rendered their pride only the more contemptible.
Several of the provinces contained large numbers of these impoverished
aristocratic families, who had gradually parted with their lands, and
who were living in a state of very shabby gentility. They were too
proud to work and too poor to live without working. Turgot testifies
that in the Province of Limousin there were several thousand noble
families, not fifteen of whom had an income of four thousand dollars a
year.[24] One of the crown officers wrote in 1750:
"The nobility of this section are of very high rank, but very poor,
and as proud as they are poor. The contrast between their former and
their present condition is humiliating. It is a very good plan to
keep them poor, in order that they shall need our aid and serve our
purposes. They have formed a society into which no one can obtain
admission unless he can prove four quarterings. It is not incorporated
by letters patent, but it is tolerated, as it meets but once a year and
in the presence of the intendant. These noblemen hear mass, after which
they return home, some on their Rosinantes, some on foot. You will
enjoy this comical assembly."
In days of feudal grandeur the noble was indeed the lord and master of
the peasantry. He was their government and their sole protector from
violence. There was then reason for feudal service. But now the noble
was a drone. He received, and yet gave nothing, absolutely nothing,
in return. The peasant despised as well as hated him, and derisively
called him the _vulture_.
The feudal system is adapted only to a state of semi-barbarism. It can
no more survive popular intelligence than darkness can exist after the
rising of the sun. When, in the progress of society, nobles cease to be
useful and become only drones; when rich men, vulgar in character, can
purchase titles of nobility, so that the nobles cease to be regarded
as a peculiar and heaven-appointed race; when men from the masses,
unennobled, acquire opulence, education, and that polish of manners
which place them on an equality with titled men; when men of genius
and letters, introduced into the saloons of the nobles, discover their
own vast superiority to their ignorant, frivolous, and yet haughty
entertainers; and when institutions of literature, science, and art
create an aristocracy of scholarship where opulence, refinement, and
the highest mental culture combine their charms, then an hereditary
aristocracy, which has no support but its hereditary renown, must die.
Its hour is tolled.
Such was the state of France at the close of the reign of Louis XV.
It is estimated that there were in France at that time five hundred
thousand well-informed citizens.[25] This fact explains both the
outbreak of the Revolution and its failure. They were too many to
submit to the arrogance of the nobles; hence the insurrection. They
were too few to guide and control the infuriated masses when the
pressure was taken from them, and hence the reign of terror, the
anarchy and blood. The United States, with a population about the same
as that of France in the morning of her Revolution, has four or five
millions of intelligent and well-educated men. These men support our
institutions. But for them, the republic would be swept away like chaff
before the wind.
As we have before said, men of letters were patronized by the king and
the court, but it was a patronage which seemed almost an insult to
every honorable mind. The haughty duke would look down condescendingly,
and even admiringly, upon the distinguished scholar, and would admit
him into his saloon as a curiosity. High-born ladies would smile
upon him, and would condescend to take his arm and listen to his
remarks. But such mingling with society stung the soul with a sense
of degradation, and none inveighed with greater bitterness against
aristocratic assumption than those men of genius who had been most
freely admitted into the halls of the great. They were thus exasperated
to inquire into the origin of ranks, and their works were filled with
eulogiums of equality and fraternity.
It was this social degradation which was one of the strongest
incentives to revolution. This united all the industrial classes in
France, all who had attained wealth, and all men of intellectual
eminence, in the cry for reform. Equality of rights was the great
demand thus forced from the heart of the nation. _Fraternity_ became
the watch-word of the roused and rising masses.[26]
Thought was the great emancipator. Men of genius were the Titans who
uphove the mountains of prejudice and oppression. They simplified
political economy, and made it intelligible to the popular mind.
Voltaire assailed with keenest sarcasm and the most piercing invectives
the corruptions of the Church, unjustly, and most calamitously for the
interests of France, representing those corruptions as Christianity
itself. Montesquieu popularized and spread before the nation those
views of national policy which might render a people prosperous and
happy; and Rousseau, with a seductive eloquence which the world has
never seen surpassed, excited every glowing imagination with dreams of
fascinating but unattainable perfection. Nearly all the revolutionary
writers represented religion not merely as a useless superstition, but
as one of the worst scourges of the state. Thus they took from the
human heart the influence which alone can restrain passion and humanize
the soul.
They represented man but as a lamb, meek and innocent, dumb before
his shearers, and seeking only to live harmlessly and happily in the
outflowings of universal benevolence and love. This lamb-like man
needed no more religion than does the butterfly or the robin. He was to
live his joyous day, unrestrained by customs, or laws, or thoughts of
the future, and then was to pass away like the lily or the rose, having
fulfilled his function. Death an eternal sleep, was the corner-stone
of their shallow and degrading philosophy. The advocates of this
sentimentalism were amazed when they found the masses, brutalized by
ignorance and ages of oppression, and having been taught that there was
no God before whom they were to stand in judgment, come forth into the
arena of the nations, not as lambs, but as wolves, thirsting for blood
and reckless in devastation. Libertines in France are still infidels,
but they have seen the effect of their doctrines, and no longer dare
to proclaim them. "Where is the Frenchman of the present day," says
De Tocqueville, "who would write such books as those of Diderot or
Helvetius?"[27]
Unfortunately, fatally for the liberties of France, the leading
writers were infidels. Mistaking the corruptions of Christianity for
Christianity itself, they assailed religion furiously, and succeeded
in eradicating from men's souls all apprehensions of responsibility to
God. Nothing could more effectually brutalize and demonize the soul of
man. And yet the Papal Church, as a towering hierarchy, had become
so corrupt, such an instrument of oppression, and such a support of
despotism, that no reform could have been accomplished but by its
overthrow.[28] It was the monarch's right arm of strength; it was the
rampart which was first to be battered down.
The Church had no word of censure for vice in high places. It spread
its shield before the most enormous abuses, and, by its inquisitorial
censorship of the press, protected the most execrable institutions.
The Church, enervated by wealth and luxurious indulgence, had also
become so decrepit as to invite attack. No man could summon sufficient
effrontery to attempt her defense. The only reply which bloated and
debauched ecclesiastics could make to their assailants was persecution
and the dungeon. There were a few truly pious men in the Church; they
did, however, but exhibit in clearer contrast the general corruption
with which they were surrounded.
Diderot, though educated by the Jesuits--perhaps _because_ he was
educated by the Jesuits--commenced his career by an attack upon
Christianity in his _Pensées Philosophiques_. He was sent to prison,
and his book burned by the public executioner. Still, multitudes
read and so warmly applauded that he was incited to form the plan of
the celebrated Encyclopedia which was to contain a summary of all
human knowledge. In this grand enterprise he allied with him the
ablest scholars and writers of the day--Mably, Condillac, Mercier,
Raynal, Buffon, Helvetius, D'Alembert, and others. Nearly all these
men, despising the _Church_, were unbelievers in _Christianity_.
They consequently availed themselves of every opportunity to assail
religion. The court, alarmed, laid a prohibition upon the work, but did
not dare to punish the writers, as they were too numerous and powerful.
Thus infidelity soon became a fashion. Notwithstanding the prohibition,
the work was soon resumed, and became one of the most powerful agents
in ushering in the Revolution.
"Christianity was hated by these philosophers," writes De Tocqueville,
"less as a religious doctrine than as a political institution; not
because the ecclesiastics assumed to regulate the concerns of the other
world, but because they were landlords, seigneurs, tithe-holders,
administrators in this; not because the Church could not find a place
in the new society which was being established, but because she then
occupied a place of honor, privilege, and might in the society which
was to be overthrown."
Christianity is the corner-stone of a true democracy. It is the
unrelenting foe of despotism, and therefore despotism has invariably
urged its most unrelenting warfare against the Bible. When papacy
became the great spiritual despotism which darkened the world, the
Bible was the book which it hated and feared above all others. With
caution this corrupt hierarchy selected a few passages upon submission
and obedience, which it allowed to be read to the people, while the
majestic principles of fraternity, upon which its whole moral code is
reared, were vigilantly excluded from the public mind. The peasant
detected with a Bible was deemed as guilty as if caught with the tools
of a burglar or the dies of a counterfeiter.
It was impossible, however, to conceal the fact that the Bible was the
advocate of purity of heart and life. Its teachings created a sense
of guilt in the human soul which could not be effaced. Corrupt men
were consequently eager to reject the Bible, that they might appease
reproachful conscience. Frederick II., of Prussia, an atheist and a
despiser of mankind, became the friend and patron of Voltaire in his
envenomed assaults upon Christianity. Louis XV., anxious to maintain
friendly political relations with Prussia, hesitated to persecute the
recognized friend of the Prussian king. The courtiers, generally with
joy, listened to those teachings of unbelief which relieved them from
the restraints of Christian morality. Thus Christianity had two classes
of vigorous assailants. The first were those who knew not how to
discriminate between Christianity and its corruptions. They considered
Christianity and the Papal Church as one, and endeavored to batter the
hateful structure down as a bastille of woe. Another class understood
Christianity as a system frowning upon all impurity, and pressing ever
upon the mind a final judgment. They were restive under its restraints,
and labored for its overthrow that guilt might find repose in unbelief.
Astonishment is often expressed at the blindness with which the upper
classes of the Old Régime allowed their institutions to be assailed.
"But where," asks De Tocqueville, "could they have learned better.
Ruling classes can no more acquire a knowledge of the dangers they have
to avoid, without free institutions, than their inferiors can discern
the rights they ought to preserve in the same circumstances."[29]
The measureless extravagance of the court had plunged the nation into
a state of inextricable pecuniary embarrassment. The whole burden of
the taxes, in myriad forms, for the support of the throne in Oriental
luxury, for the support of the nobles, who were perhaps the most
profligate race of men the world has ever known; for the support of the
Church, whose towering ecclesiastics, performing no useful functions,
did not even affect the concealment of their vices, and who often vied
with the monarch himself in haughtiness and grandeur; for the support
of the army, ever engaged in extravagant wars, and employed to keep the
people in servitude--all these taxes so enormous as to sink the mass of
the people in the lowest state of poverty, debasement, and misery, fell
upon the unprivileged class alone.
Taxes ran into every thing. The minister who could invent a new tax was
applauded as a man of genius. All the offices of the magistracy were
sold. Judges would pay an enormous sum for their office, and remunerate
themselves a hundred-fold by selling their decisions. Thus justice
became a farce. Titles of nobility were sold, which, introducing the
purchaser into the ranks of the privileged class, threw the heavier
burden upon the unprivileged. All the trades and professions were put
up for sale. Even the humble callings of making wigs, of weighing coal,
of selling pork, were esteemed privileges, and were sold at a high
price. There was hardly any thing which a man could do, which he was
not compelled to buy the privilege of doing. A person who undertook to
count the number of these offices or trades for which a license was
sold, growing weary of his task, estimated them at over three hundred
thousand.[30]
An army of two hundred thousand tax-gatherers devoured every thing. To
extort substance from the starving people the most cruel expedients
were adopted. All the energies of galleys, gibbets, dungeons, and racks
were called into requisition. When the corn was all absorbed, the
cattle were taken. The ground, exhausted for want of manure, became
sterile. Men, women, and children yoked themselves to the plow. Deserts
extended, the population died off, and beautiful France was becoming
but a place of graves.
The people thus taxed owned but one third of the soil, the clergy and
the nobles owning the other two thirds. From this one third the people
paid taxes and feudal service to the nobles, tithes to the clergy, and
imposts to the king. They enjoyed no political rights, could take no
share in the administration, and were ineligible to any post of honor
or profit. No man could obtain an office in the army unless he brought
a certificate, signed by four nobles, that he was of noble blood.
The imposition of the tax was entirely arbitrary. No man could tell
one year what his tax would be the next. There was no principle in the
assessment except to extort as much as possible. The tax-gatherers
would be sent into a district to collect one year one million of
francs, perhaps the next year it would be two millions. No language
can describe the dismay in the humble homes of the peasants when these
cormorants, armed with despotic power, darkened their doors. The
seed-corn was taken, the cow was driven off, the pig was taken from
the pen. Mothers plead with tears that food might be left for their
children, but the sheriff, inured to scenes of misery, had a heart of
rock. He always went surrounded by a band of bailiffs to protect him
from violence. Fearful was the vengeance he could wreak upon any one
who displeased him.
The peasant, to avoid exorbitant taxation, assumed the garb of poverty,
dressed his children in rags, and carefully promoted the ruin and
dilapidation of his dwelling. "Fear," writes de Tocqueville, "often
made the collector pitiless. In some parishes he did not show his face
without a band of bailiffs and followers at his back. 'Unless he is
sustained by bailiffs,' writes an intendant in 1764, 'the taxables will
not pay. At Villefranche alone six hundred bailiffs and followers are
always kept on foot.'"[31]
Indeed, the government seemed to desire to keep the people poor.
Savages will lop off the leg or the arm of a prisoner that he may
be more helplessly in their power. Thus those despotic kings would
desolate their realms with taxation, and would excite wars which
would exhaust energy and paralyze industry, that the people thus
impoverished and kept in ignorance might bow more submissively to
the yoke. The wars which in endless monotony are inscribed upon the
monuments of history were mostly waged by princes to engross the
attention of their subjects. When a despot sees that public attention
is directed, or is likely to be directed, to any of his oppressive
acts, he immediately embarks in some war, to divert the thoughts of
the nation. This is the unvarying resource of despotism. After a few
hundred thousand of the people have been slaughtered, and millions of
money squandered in the senseless war, peace is then made. But peace
brings but little repose to the people. They must now toil and starve
that they may raise money to pay for the expenses of the war. Such, in
general, has been the history of Europe for a thousand years. Despots
are willing that billows of blood should surge over the land, that the
cries of the oppressed may thus be drowned.
So excessive was the burden of taxation, that it has been estimated
by a very accurate computation that, if the produce of an acre of
land amounted to sixteen dollars, the king took ten, the duke, as
proprietor, five, leaving one for the cultivator.[32] Thus, if we
suppose a peasant with his wife and children to have cultivated forty
acres of land, the proceeds of which, at sixteen dollars per acre,
amounted to six hundred and forty dollars, the king and the duke and
the Church took six hundred of this, leaving but forty dollars for the
support of the laborers.
Let us suppose a township in the United States containing twenty square
miles, with five thousand inhabitants. Nearly all these are cultivators
of the soil, and so robbed by taxes that they can only live in mud
hovels and upon the coarsest food. Clothed in rags, they toil in the
fields with their bareheaded and barefooted wives and daughters.
The huts of these farmers are huddled together in a miserable dirty
village. In the village there are a few shop-keepers, who have acquired
a little property, and have become somewhat intelligent. There is
also a physician, and a surgeon, and a poor, dispirited, half-starved
parish priest. Upon one of the eminences of the town there is a lordly
castle of stone, with its turrets and towers, its park and fish-pond.
This massive structure belongs to the duke. Weary of the solitude of
the country, he has withdrawn from the castle, and is living with his
family in the metropolis, indulging in all its expensive dissipations.
His purse can only be replenished by the money which he can extort from
the cultivators of the land who surround his castle; and his expenses
are so enormous that he is ever harassed by an exhausted purse.
For a few weeks in the summer he comes down to his castle, from the
metropolis, with his city companions, to engage in rural sports. Wild
boars, deer, rabbits, and partridges abound in his park. The boars and
the deer range the fields of the farmers, trampling down and devouring
their crops; but the farmer must not harm them, lest he incur the
terrible displeasure of the duke. The rabbits and the partridges infest
the fields of grain; but the duke has issued a special injunction that
the weeds _even_ must not be disturbed, lest the brooding partridges
should be frightened away, to the injury of his summer shooting.
Perhaps one half of the land in the township belongs to the duke, and
the farmers are mere tenants at will. During past ages, about half of
the land has been sold and is owned by those who till it. But even
they have to pay a heavy ground-rent annually to the duke for the land
which they have bought. If a farmer wishes to purchase a few acres
from his neighbor, he must first pay a sum to the duke for permission
to make the purchase. For three or four days in the week the farmer
is compelled, as feudal service, to work in the fields of the duke,
without remuneration. When he has gathered in the harvest on his own
land, a large portion of it he must cart to the granaries of the duke
as a tax. If he has any grain to be ground, or grapes to press, or
bread to bake, he must go to the mill, the wine-press, and the oven of
the duke, and pay whatever toll he may see fit to extort. Often even
the use of hand-mills was prohibited, and the peasant had to purchase
the privilege of bruising his grain between two stones. He could not
even dip a bowl of water from the sea, and allow it to evaporate to
get some salt, lest he should interfere with the monopoly of the king.
If he wishes to take any of his produce to market, he must pay the
duke for permission to travel on the highway. Thus robbed under the
name of custom and law, the farmer toils joylessly from the cradle
to the grave, with barely sufficient food and shelter to keep him in
respectable working order; and when he dies, he leaves his children to
the same miserable doom. Such was the condition of the great mass of
the French people during the long reign of Louis XV.
This intolerable bondage spread all through the minutiæ of social
life. It was, of course, impossible but that the masses of the people
should be in the lowest state of ignorance and indigence. Their huts,
destitute of all the necessities of civilized life, were dark and
comfortless, and even the merriment with which they endeavored at times
to beguile their misery was heartless, spasmodic, and melancholy.[33]
In the year 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to Mrs. Trist, of
Philadelphia, "Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France,
I am of opinion that there are nineteen millions more wretched, more
accursed in every circumstance of human existence, than the most
conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States."[34]
Again he writes, in the same year, to M. Bellini, a Florentine
gentleman who was professor in William and Mary College, "I find the
general state of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire's
observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be
either the hammer or the anvil."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 22: Madame Campan's Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, vol. i., p.
388.]
[Footnote 23: Ib.]
[Footnote 24: "Men of rank sold their land piecemeal to the peasantry,
reserving nothing but seigneurial rents, which furnished a nominal but
not a substantial competency."--_The Old Régime, De Tocqueville_, p.
103.]
[Footnote 25: History of the French Revolution, by M. Rabaud de St.
Etienne, p. 188.]
[Footnote 26: "A lord," writes Montesquieu, bitterly, "is a man who
sees the king, speaks to the minister, has ancestors, debts, and
pensions."]
[Footnote 27: The Old Régime, by De Tocqueville, p. 18.
"It is a singularity worth remarking that the Gospel is nothing but a
declaration of rights. Its mysteries were a long time hidden, because
they attacked the priests and the great."--_M. Rabaud de St. Etienne_,
p. 174.]
[Footnote 28: "Shall we say, then, Woe to Philosophism that
it destroyed Religion, what it called 'extinguishing the
abomination'--_écraser l'infâme_? Woe rather to those that made the
Holy an abomination and extinguishable."--_Carlyle, French Revolution_,
i., 56.]
[Footnote 29: Old Régime, p. 175.
Count Segur, a peer of France, in his Memoirs, has very frankly
described the feelings with which he and the young nobles who were his
companions regarded the writings of the philosophers:
"We felt disposed to adopt with enthusiasm the philosophical doctrines
professed by literary men, remarkable for their boldness and their wit.
Voltaire seduced our imagination. Rousseau touched our hearts. We felt
a secret pleasure in seeing that their attacks were directed against an
old fabric which presented to us a Gothic and ridiculous appearance.
We were pleased with this petty war, although it was undermining our
own ranks and privileges and the remains of our ancient power. But we
felt not these attacks personally. It was, as yet, but a war of words
and paper, which did not appear to us to threaten the superiority
of existence which we enjoyed, consolidated as we thought it by a
possession of many centuries."]
[Footnote 30: History of the Revolution of France, by M. Rabaud de St.
Etienne.]
[Footnote 31: For appalling proof of the sufferings of the tax-payers,
turn to the pages of Michelet, of De Tocqueville, of any writer upon
the _Old Régime_.]
[Footnote 32: Arthur Young, vol. i., p. 574; Marshall's Travels, vol.
iv., p. 322.]
[Footnote 33: "Care must be taken not to misunderstand the gayety which
the French have often exhibited in the greatest affliction. It is a
mere attempt to divert the mind from the contemplation of misfortune
which seems inevitable."--_The Old Régime, by De Tocqueville_, p. 167.]
[Footnote 34: Life of Jefferson, by Henry T. Randall, vol. i., p. 432.]