The Revolution in France.
The French Aristocracy -- Priests, Lawyers, and Petty Nobles
-- Burghers, Artisans, and Laborers -- Intelligent Curiosity
of the Nation -- Exasperating Anachronisms -- Contrast of
Demand and Resources -- The Great Nobles a Barrier to Reform
-- Mistakes of the King -- The Estates Meet at Versailles --
The Court Party Provokes Violence -- Downfall of Feudal
Privilege.
[Sidenote: 1787-89.]
At last the ideas of the century had declared open war on its
institutions; their moral conquest was already coextensive with
central and western Europe, but the first efforts toward their
realization were to be made in France, for the reason that the line of
least resistance was to be found not through the most downtrodden, but
through the freest and the best instructed nation on the Continent.
Both the clergy and the nobility of France had become accustomed to
the absorption in the crown of their ancient feudal power. They were
content with the great offices in the church, in the army, and in the
civil administration, with exemption from the payment of taxes; they
were happy in the delights of literature and the fine arts, in the
joys of a polite, self-indulgent, and spendthrift society, so
artificial and conventional that for most of its members a sufficient
occupation was found in the study and exposition of its trivial but
complex customs. The conduct and maintenance of a salon, the stage,
gallantry; clothes, table manners, the use of the fan: these are
specimens of what were considered not the incidents but the essentials
of life.
The serious-minded among the upper classes were as enlightened as any
of their rank elsewhere. They were familiar with prevalent
philosophies, and full of compassion for miseries which, for lack of
power, they could not remedy, and which, to their dismay, they only
intensified in their attempts at alleviation. They were even ready for
considerable sacrifices. The gracious side of the character of Louis
XVI is but a reflection of the piety, moderation, and earnestness of
many of the nobles. His rule was mild; there were no excessive
indignities practised in the name of royal power except in cases like
that of the "Bargain of Famine," where he believed himself helpless.
The lower clergy, as a whole, were faithful in the performance of
their duties. This was not true of the hierarchy. They were great
landowners, and their interests coincided with those of the upper
nobility. The doubt of the country had not left them untouched, and
there were many without conviction or principle, time-serving and
irreverent. The lawyers and other professional men were to be found,
for the most part, in Paris and in the towns. They had their
livelihood in the irregularities of society, and, as a class, were
retentive of ancient custom and present social habits. Although by
birth they belonged in the main to the third estate, they were in
reality adjunct to the first, and consequently, being integral members
of neither, formed a strong independent class by themselves. The petty
nobles were in much the same condition with regard to the wealthy,
powerful families in their own estate and to the rich burghers; they
married the fortunes of the latter and accepted their hospitality, but
otherwise treated them with the same exclusive condescension as that
displayed to themselves by the great.
But if the estate of the clergy and the estate of the nobility were
alike divided in character and interests, this was still more true of
the burghers. In 1614, at the close of the middle ages, the third
estate had been little concerned with the agricultural laborer. For
various reasons this class had been gradually emancipated until now
there was less serfage in France than elsewhere; more than a quarter,
perhaps a third, of the land was in the hands of peasants and other
small proprietors. This, to be sure, was economically disastrous, for
over-division of land makes tillage unprofitable, and these very men
were the taxpayers. The change had been still more marked in the
denizens of towns. During the last two centuries the wealthy burgesses
had grown still more wealthy in the expansion of trade, commerce, and
manufactures; many had struggled and bought their way into the ranks
of the nobility. The small tradesmen had remained smug, hard to move,
and resentful of change. But there was a large body of men unknown to
previous constitutions, and growing ever larger with the increase in
population--intelligent and unintelligent artisans, half-educated
employees in workshops, mills, and trading-houses, ever recruited from
the country population, seeking such intermittent occupation as the
towns afforded. The very lowest stratum of this society was then, as
now, most dangerous; idle, dissipated, and unscrupulous, they were yet
sufficiently educated to discuss and disseminate perilous doctrines,
and were often most ready in speech and fertile in resource.
This comparative well-being of a nation, devoted like the ancient
Greeks to novelty, avid of great ideas and great deeds, holding
opinions not merely for the pleasure of intellectual gymnastics but
logically and with a view to their realization, sensitive to
influences like the deep impressions made on their thinkers by the
English and American revolutions--such relative comfort with its
attendant opportunities for discussion was not the least of many
causes which made France the vanguard in the great revolution which
had already triumphed in theory throughout the continent and was
eventually to transform the social order of all Europe.
Discussion is not only a safety-valve, it is absolutely essential in
governments where the religion, morals, opinions, and occupations of
the people give form and character to institutions and legislation.
The centralized and despotic Bourbon monarchy of France was an
anachronism among an intelligent people. So was every institution
emanating from and dependent upon it. It was impossible for the
structure to stand indefinitely, however tenderly it was treated,
however cleverly it was propped and repaired. As in the case of
England in 1688 and of her colonies in 1772, the immediate and direct
agency in the crash was a matter of money. But the analogy holds good
no further, for in France the questions of property and taxation were
vastly more complex than in England, where the march of events had so
largely destroyed feudalism, or in America, where feudalism had never
existed. On the great French estates the laborers had first to support
the proprietor and his representatives, then the Church and the King;
the minute remainder of their gains was scarcely sufficient to keep
the wolf from the door. The small proprietors were so hampered in
their operations by the tiny size of their holdings that they were
still restricted to ancient and wretched methods of cultivation; but
they too were so burdened with contributions direct and indirect that
famine was always imminent with them as well. Under whatever name the
tax was known, license (octroi), bridge and ferry toll, road-work,
salt-tax, or whatever it may have been, it was chiefly distasteful not
because of its form but because it was oppressive. Some of it was
paid to the proprietors, some to the state. The former was more
hateful because the gainer was near and more tangible; the hatred of
the country people for the feudal privileges and those who held them
was therefore concrete and quite as intense as the more doctrinaire
dislike of the poor in the towns to the rich. Such was the alienation
of classes from each other throughout the beginning and middle of the
century that the disasters which French arms suffered at the hands of
Marlborough and Frederick, so far from humiliating the nation, gave
pleasure and not pain to the masses because they were, as they
thought, defeats not of France, but of the nobility and of the crown.
Feudal dues had arisen when those imposing them had the physical force
to compel their payment and were also the proprietors of the land on
which they were exacted. Now the nobility were entirely stripped of
power and in many instances of land as well. How empty and bottomless
the oppressive institutions and how burdensome the taxes which rested
on nothing but a paper grant, musty with age and backed only by royal
complaisance! Want too was always looking in at the doors of the many,
while the few were enjoying the national substance. This year there
was a crisis, for before the previous harvest time devastating
hail-storms had swept the fields, in 1788; during the winter there had
been pinching want and many had perished from destitution and cold;
the advancing seasons had brought warmth, but sufficient time had not
even yet elapsed for fields and herds to bring forth their increase,
and by the myriad firesides of the people hunger was still an
unwelcome guest.
With wholesome economy such crises may be surmounted in a rich and
fertile country. But economy had not been practised for fifty years by
the governing classes. As early as 1739 there had been a deficiency
in the French finances. From small beginnings the annual loans had
grown until, in 1787, the sum to be raised over and above the regular
income was no less than thirty-two millions of dollars. This was all
due to the extravagance of the court and the aristocracy, who spent,
for the most part, far more than the amount they actually collected
and which they honestly believed to be their income. Such a course was
vastly more disastrous than it appeared, being ruinous not only to
personal but to national well-being, inasmuch as what the nobles, even
the earnest and honest ones, believed to be their legitimate income
was not really such. Two thirds of the land was in their hands; the
other third paid the entire land-tax. They were therefore regarding as
their own two thirds of what was in reality taken altogether from the
pockets of the small proprietors. Small sacrifices the ruling class
professed itself ready to make, but such a one as to pay their share
of the land-tax--never. It had been proposed also to destroy the
monopoly of the grain trade, and to abolish the road-work, a task more
hateful to the people than any tax, because it brought them into
direct contact with the exasperating superciliousness of petty
officials. But in all these proposed reforms, Necker, Calonne, and
Loménie de Brienne, each approaching the nobles from a separate
standpoint, had alike failed. The nobility could see in such
retrenchment and change nothing but ruin for themselves. An assembly
of notables, called in 1781, would not listen to propositions which
seemed suicidal. The King began to alienate the affection of his
natural allies, the people, by yielding to the clamor of the court
party. From the nobility he could wring nothing. The royal treasury
was therefore actually bankrupt, the nobles believed that they were
threatened with bankruptcy, and the people knew that they themselves
were not only bankrupt, but also hungry and oppressed.
At last the King, aware of the nation's extremity, began to undertake
reforms without reference to class prejudice, and on his own
authority. He decreed a stamp-tax, and the equal distribution of the
land-tax. He strove to compel the unwilling parliament of Paris, a
court of justice which, though ancient, he himself had but recently
reconstituted, to register his decrees, and then banished it from the
capital because it would not. That court had been the last remaining
check on absolutism in the country, and, as such, an ally of the
people; so that although the motives and the measures of Louis were
just, the high-handed means to which he resorted in order to carry
them alienated him still further from the affections of the nation.
The parliament, in justifying its opposition, had declared that taxes
in France could be laid only by the Estates-General. The people had
almost forgotten the very name, and were entirely ignorant of what
that body was, vaguely supposing that, like the English Parliament or
the American Congress, it was in some sense a legislative assembly.
They therefore made their voice heard in no uncertain sound, demanding
that the Estates should meet. Louis abandoned his attitude of
independence, and recalled the Paris parliament from Troyes, but only
to exasperate its members still further by insisting on a huge loan,
on the restoration of civil rights to the Protestants, and on
restricting, not only its powers, but those of all similar courts
throughout the realm. The parliament then declared that France was a
limited monarchy with constitutional checks on the power of the crown,
and exasperated men flocked to the city to remonstrate against the
menace to their liberties in the degradation of all the parliaments by
the King's action in regard to that of Paris. Those from Brittany
formed an association, which soon admitted other members, and
developed into the notorious Jacobin Club, so called from its
meeting-place, a convent on the Rue St. Honoré, once occupied by
Dominican monks who had moved thither from the Rue St. Jacques.
To summon the Estates was a virtual confession that absolutism in
France was at an end. In the seventeenth century the three estates
deliberated separately. Such matters came before them as were
submitted by the crown, chiefly demands for revenue. A decision was
reached by the agreement of any two of the three, and whatever
proposition the crown submitted was either accepted or rejected.
There was no real legislation. Louis no doubt hoped that the
eighteenth-century assembly would be like that of the seventeenth. He
could then, by the coalition of the nobles and the clergy against the
burghers, or by any other arrangement of two to one, secure
authorization either for his loans or for his reforms, as the case
might be, and so carry both. But the France of 1789 was not the France
of 1614. As soon as the call for the meeting was issued, and the
decisive steps were taken, the whole country was flooded with
pamphlets. Most of them were ephemeral; one was epochal. In it the
Abbé Sieyès asked the question, "What is the third estate?" and
answered so as to strengthen the already spreading conviction that the
people of France were really the nation. The King was so far convinced
as to agree that the third estate should be represented by delegates
equal in number to those of the clergy and nobles combined. The
elections passed quietly, and on May fifth, 1789, the Estates met at
Versailles, under the shadow of the court. It was immediately evident
that the hands of the clock could not be put back two centuries, and
that here was gathered an assembly unlike any that had ever met in
the country, determined to express the sentiments, and to be the
executive, of the masses who in their opinion constituted the nation.
On June seventeenth, therefore, after long talk and much hesitation,
the representatives of the third estate declared themselves the
representatives of the whole nation, and invited their colleagues of
the clergy and nobles to join them. Their meeting-place having been
closed in consequence of this decision, they gathered without
authorization in the royal tennis-court on June twentieth, and bound
themselves by oath not to disperse until they had introduced a new
order. Louis was nevertheless nearly successful in his plan of keeping
the sittings of the three estates separate. He was thwarted by the
eloquence and courage of Mirabeau. On June twenty-seventh a majority
of the delegates from the two upper estates joined those of the third
estate in constituting a national assembly.
At this juncture the court party began the disastrous policy which in
the end was responsible for most of the terrible excesses of the
French Revolution, by insisting that troops should be called to
restrain the Assembly, and that Necker should be banished. Louis
showed the same vacillating spirit now that he had displayed in
yielding to the Assembly, and assented. The noble officers had lately
shown themselves untrustworthy, and the men in the ranks refused to
obey when called to fight against the people. The baser social
elements of the whole country had long since swarmed to the capital.
Their leaders now fanned the flame of popular discontent until at last
resort was had to violence. On July twelfth the barriers of Paris were
burned, and the regular troops were defeated by the mob in the Place
Vendôme; on July fourteenth the Bastille, in itself a harmless
anachronism, but considered by the masses to typify all the tyrannical
shifts and inhuman oppressions known to despotism, was razed to the
ground. As if to crown their baseness, the extreme conservatives among
the nobles, the very men who had brought the King to such straits, now
abandoned him and fled.
Louis finally bowed to the storm, and came to reside among his people
in Paris, as a sign of submission. Bailly, an excellent and judicious
man, was made mayor of the city, and Lafayette, with his American
laurels still unfaded, was made commander of a newly organized force,
to be known as the National Guard. On July seventeenth the King
accepted the red, white, and blue--the recognized colors of
liberty--as national. The insignia of a dynasty were exchanged for the
badge of a principle. A similar transformation took place throughout
the land, and administration everywhere passed quietly into the hands
of the popular representatives. The flying nobles found their châteaux
hotter than Paris. Not only must the old feudal privileges go, but
with them the old feudal grants, the charters of oppression in the
muniment chests. These charters the peasants insisted must be
destroyed. If they could not otherwise gain possession of them, they
resorted to violence, and sometimes in the intoxication of the hour
they exceeded the bounds of reason, abusing both the persons and the
legitimate property of their enemies. Death or surrender was often the
alternative. So it was that there was no refuge on their estates, not
even a temporary one, for those who had so long possessed them. Many
had already passed into foreign lands; the emigration increased, and
continued in a steady stream. The moderate nobles, honest patriots to
whom life in exile was not life at all, now clearly saw that their
order must yield: in the night session of August fourth, sometimes
called the "St. Bartholomew of privilege," they surrendered their
privileges in a mass. Every vestige, not only of feudal, but also of
chartered privilege, was to be swept away; even the King's
hunting-grounds were to be reduced to the dimensions permitted to a
private gentleman. All men alike, it was agreed, were to renounce the
conventional and arbitrary distinctions which had created inequality
in civil and political life, and accept the absolute equality of
citizenship. Liberty and fraternity were the two springers of the new
arch; its keystone was to be equality. On August twenty-third the
Assembly decreed freedom of religious opinion; on the next day freedom
of the press.