THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL LIBERTY AND THE ESTRANGEMENT OF CLASSES
WERE THE CAUSES OF ALMOST ALL THE DISORDERS WHICH LED TO THE
DISSOLUTION OF THE OLD SOCIETY OF FRANCE.
Of all the disorders which attacked the constitution of society in
France, as it existed before the Revolution, and led to the dissolution
of that society, that which I have just described was the most fatal.
But I must pursue the inquiry to the source of so dangerous and strange
an evil, and show how many other evils took their origin from the same
cause.
If the English had, from the period of the Middle Ages, altogether
lost, like the French, political freedom and all those local franchises
which cannot long exist without it, it is highly probable that each
of the different classes of which the English aristocracy is composed
would have seceded from the rest, as was the case in France and more or
less all over the continent, and that all those classes together would
have separated themselves from the people. But freedom compelled them
always to remain within reach of each other, so as to combine their
strength in time of need.
It is curious to observe how the British aristocracy, urged even by
its own ambition, has contrived, whenever it seemed necessary, to
mix familiarly with its inferiors, and to feign to consider them
as its equals. Arthur Young, whom I have already quoted, and whose
book is one of the most instructive works which exist on the former
state of society in France, relates that, happening to be one day
at the country-house of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, at La Roche
Guyon, he expressed a wish to converse with some of the best and most
wealthy farmers of the neighbourhood. ‘The Duke had the kindness to
order his steward to give me all the information I wanted relative
to the agriculture of the country, and to speak to such persons as
were necessary on points that he was in doubt about. At an English
nobleman’s house there would have been three or four farmers asked to
meet me, who would have dined with the family among ladies of the first
rank. I do not exaggerate when I say that I have had this at least
an hundred times in the first houses of our islands. It is, however,
a thing that in the present state of manners in France would not be
met with from Calais to Bayonne, except by chance in the house of some
great Lord, who had been much in England, and then not unless it were
asked for. I once knew it at the Duke de Liancourt’s.’[43]
Unquestionably the English aristocracy is of a haughtier nature than
that of France, and less disposed to mingle familiarly with those who
live in a humbler condition; but the obligations of its own rank have
imposed that duty upon it. It submitted that it might command. For
centuries no inequality of taxation has existed in England, except
such exemptions as have been successively introduced for the relief
of the indigent classes. Observe to what results different political
principles may lead nations so nearly contiguous! In the eighteenth
century, the poor man in England enjoyed the privilege of exemption
from taxation; the rich in France. In one country the aristocracy has
taken upon itself the heaviest public burdens, in order to retain the
government of the State; in the other the aristocracy retained to
the last exemption from taxation as a compensation for the loss of
political power.
In the fourteenth century the maxim ‘No tax without the consent of the
taxed’--_n’impose qui ne veut_--appeared to be as firmly established in
France as in England. It was frequently quoted; to contravene it always
seemed an act of tyranny; to conform to it was to revert to the law.
At that period, as I have already remarked, a multitude of analogies
may be traced between the political institutions of France and those
of England; but then the destinies of the two nations separated and
constantly became more unlike, as time advanced. They resemble two
lines starting from contiguous points at a slight angle, which diverge
indefinitely as they are prolonged.
I venture to affirm that when the French nation, exhausted by the
protracted disturbances which had accompanied the captivity of King
John and the madness of Charles VI., suffered the Crown to levy a
general tax without the consent of the people, and when the nobility
had the baseness to allow the middle and lower classes to be so
taxed on condition that its own exemption should be maintained, at
that very time was sown the seed of almost all the vices and almost
all the abuses which afflicted the ancient society of France during
the remainder of its existence, and ended by causing its violent
dissolution; and I admire the rare sagacity of Philippe de Comines
when he says, ‘Charles VII., who gained the point of laying on the
_taille_ at his pleasure, without the consent of the States of the
Realm, laid a heavy burden on his soul and on that of his successors,
and gave a wound to his kingdom which will not soon be closed.’
Observe how that wound widened with the course of years; follow step by
step that fact to its consequences.
Forbonnais says with truth in his learned ‘Researches on the Finances
of France,’ that in the Middle Ages the sovereigns generally lived on
the revenues of their domains; and ‘as the extraordinary wants of the
State,’ he adds, ‘were provided for by extraordinary subsidies, they
were levied equally on the clergy, the nobility, and the people.’
The greater part of the general subsidies voted by the three Orders in
the course of the fourteenth century were, in point of fact, so levied.
Almost all the taxes established at that time were _indirect_, that is,
they were paid indiscriminately by all classes of consumers. Sometimes
the tax was direct; but then it was assessed, not on property, but
on income. The nobles, the priests, and the burgesses were bound to
pay over to the King, for a year, a tenth, for instance, of all their
incomes. This remark as to the charges voted by the Estates of the
Realm applies equally to those which were imposed at the same period by
the different Provincial Estates within their own territories.[44]
It is true that already, at that time, the direct tax known by the name
of the _taille_ was never levied on the noble classes. The obligation
of gratuitous military service was the ground of their exemption; but
the _taille_ was at that time partially in force as a general impost,
belonging rather to the seignorial jurisdictions than to the kingdom.
When the King first undertook to levy taxes by his own authority,
he perceived that he must select a tax which did not appear to fall
directly on the nobles; for that class, formidable and dangerous to
the monarchy itself, would never have submitted to an innovation so
prejudicial to their own interests. The tax selected by the Crown was,
therefore, a tax from which the nobles were exempt, and that tax was
the _taille_.
Thus to all the private inequalities of condition which already
existed, another and more general inequality was added, which augmented
and perpetuated all the rest. From that time this tax spread and
ramified in proportion as the demands of the public Treasury increased
with the functions of the central authority; it was soon decupled, and
all the new taxes assumed the character of the _taille_. Every year,
therefore, inequality of taxation separated the classes of society
and isolated the individuals of whom they consisted more deeply than
before. Since the object of taxation was not to include those most able
to pay taxes, but those least able to defend themselves from paying,
the monstrous consequence was brought about that the rich were exempted
and the poor burdened. It is related that Cardinal Mazarin, being
in want of money, hit upon the expedient of levying a tax upon the
principal houses in Paris, but that having encountered some opposition
from the parties concerned, he contented himself with adding the five
millions he required to the general brevet of the _taille_. He meant
to tax the wealthiest of the King’s subjects; he did tax the most
indigent; but to the Treasury the result was the same.
The produce of taxes thus unjustly allotted had limits; but the demands
of the Crown had none. Yet the Kings of France would neither convoke
the States-General to obtain subsidies, nor would they provoke the
nobility to demand that measure by imposing taxes on them without it.
Hence arose that prodigious and mischievous fecundity of financial
expedients, which so peculiarly characterised the administration of
the public resources during the last three centuries of the old French
monarchy.
It is necessary to study the details of the administrative and
financial history of that period, to form a conception of the violent
and unwarrantable proceedings which the want of money may prescribe
even to a mild Government, but without publicity and without control,
when once time has sanctioned its power and delivered it from the dread
of revolution--that last safeguard of nations.
Every page in these annals tells of possessions of the Crown first sold
and then resumed as unsaleable; of contracts violated and of vested
interests ignored; of sacrifices wrung at every crisis from the public
creditor, and of incessant repudiations of public engagements.[45]
Privileges granted in perpetuity were perpetually resumed. If we could
bestow our compassion on the disappointments of a foolish vanity, the
fate of those luckless persons might deserve it who purchased letters
of nobility, but who were exposed during the whole of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries to buy over and over again the empty honours
or the unjust privileges which they had already paid for several times.
Thus Louis XIV. annulled all the titles of nobility acquired in the
preceding ninety-two years, though most of them had been conferred
by himself; but they could only be retained upon furnishing a fresh
subsidy, _all these titles having been obtained by surprise_, said the
edict. The same example was duly followed by Louis XV. eighty years
later.
The militia-man was forbidden to procure a substitute, for fear, it was
said, of raising the price of recruits to the State.
Towns, corporations, and hospitals were compelled to break their own
engagements in order that they might be able to lend money to the
Crown. Parishes were restrained from undertaking works of public
improvement, lest by such a diversion of their resources they should
pay their direct taxes with less punctuality.
It is related that M. Orry and M. Trudaine, of whom one was the
Comptroller-General and the other the Director-General of Public
Works, had formed a plan for substituting, for the forced labour of
the peasantry on the roads, a rate to be levied on the inhabitants of
each district for the repair of their thoroughfares. The reason which
led these able administrators to forego that plan is instructive: they
feared, it is said, that when a fund had been raised by such a rate
it would be impossible to prevent the Treasury from appropriating the
money to its own purposes, so that ere long the ratepayers would have
had to support both the new money payment and the old charge of forced
labour. I do not hesitate to say that no private person could have
escaped the grasp of the criminal law who should have managed his own
fortune as the Great Louis in all his glory managed the fortune of the
nation.
If you stumble upon any old establishment of the Middle Ages which
maintained itself with every aggravation of its original defects in
direct opposition to the spirit of the age, or upon any mischievous
innovation, search to the root of the evil--you will find it to be some
financial expedient perpetuated in the form of an institution. To meet
the pressure of the hour new powers were called into being which lasted
for centuries.
A peculiar tax, which was called the due of _franc-fief_, had been
levied from a distant period on the non-noble holders of noble lands.
This tax established between lands the same distinction which existed
between the classes of society, and the one constantly tended to
increase the other. Perhaps this due of _franc-fief_ contributed more
than any other cause to separate the _roturier_ and the noble, because
it prevented them from mingling together in that which most speedily
and most effectually assimilates men to each other--in the possession
of land. A chasm was thus opened between the noble landowner on the
one hand, and his neighbour, the non-noble landowner, on the other.
Nothing, on the contrary, contributed to hasten the cohesion of these
two classes in England more than the abolition, as early as the
sixteenth century, of all outward distinctions between the fiefs held
under the Crown and lands held in villenage.[46]
In the fourteenth century this feudal tax of _franc-fief_ was light,
and was only levied here and there; but in the eighteenth century, when
the feudal system was well-nigh abolished, it was rigorously exacted
in France every twenty years, and it amounted to one whole year’s
revenue. A son paid it on succeeding his father. ‘This tax,’ said the
Agricultural Society of Tours in 1761, ‘is extremely injurious to the
improvement of the art of husbandry. Of all the imposts borne by the
King’s subjects there is indisputably none so vexatious and so onerous
to the rural population.’ ‘This duty,’ said another contemporary
writer, ‘which was at first levied but once in a lifetime, is become
in course of time a very cruel burden.’ The nobles themselves would
have been glad that it should be abolished, for it prevented persons of
inferior condition from purchasing their lands; but the fiscal demands
of the State required that it should be maintained and increased.[47]
The Middle Ages are sometimes erroneously charged with all the evils
arising from the trading or industrial corporations. But at their
origin these guilds and companies served only as means to connect the
members of a given calling with each other, and to establish in each
trade a free government in miniature, whose business it was at once to
assist and to control the working classes. Such, and no more, seems to
have been the intention of St. Louis.
It was not till the commencement of the sixteenth century, in the midst
of that period which is termed the Revival of Arts and Letters, that it
was proposed for the first time to consider the right to labour in a
particular vocation as a privilege to be sold by the Crown. Then it was
that each Company became a small close aristocracy, and at last those
monopolies were established which were so prejudicial to the progress
of the arts and which so exasperated the last generation. From the
reign of Henry III., who generalised the evil, if he did not give birth
to it, down to Louis XVI., who extirpated it, it may be said that the
abuse of the system of guilds never ceased to augment and to spread at
the very time when the progress of society rendered those institutions
more insupportable, and when the common sense of the public was most
opposed to them. Year after year more professions were deprived of
their freedom; year after year the privileges of the incorporated
trades were increased. Never was the evil carried to greater lengths
than during what are commonly called the prosperous years of the reign
of Louis XIV., because at no former period had the want of money been
more imperious, or the resolution not to raise money with the assent of
the nation more firmly taken.
Letrone said with truth in 1775--‘The State has only established
the trading companies to furnish pecuniary resources, partly by the
patents which it sells, partly by the creation of new offices which
the Companies are forced to buy up. The Edict of 1673 carried the
principles of Henry III. to their furthest consequences by compelling
all the Companies to take out letters of confirmation upon payment for
the same; and all the workmen who were not yet incorporated in some one
of these bodies were compelled to enter them. This wretched expedient
brought in three hundred thousand livres.’
We have already seen how the whole municipal constitution of the towns
was overthrown, not by any political design, but in the hope of picking
up a pittance for the Treasury. This same want of money, combined with
the desire not to seek it from the States-General of the kingdom, gave
rise to the venality of public offices, which became at last a thing
so strange that its like had never been seen in the world. It was by
this institution, engendered by the fiscal spirit of the Government,
that the vanity of the middle classes was kept on the stretch for
three centuries and exclusively directed to the acquisition of public
employments, and thus was the universal passion for places made to
penetrate to the bowels of the nation, where it became the common
source of revolutions and of servitude.
As the financial embarrassments of the State increased, new offices
sprang up, all of which were remunerated by exemptions from taxation
and by privileges; and as these offices were produced by the wants of
the Treasury, not of the administration, the result was the creation
of an almost incredible number of employments which were altogether
superfluous or mischievous.[48] As early as 1664, upon an inquiry
instituted by Colbert, it was found that the capital invested in this
wretched property amounted to nearly five hundred millions of livres.
Richelieu had suppressed, it was said, a hundred thousand offices:
but they cropped out again under other names.[49] For a little money
the State renounced the right of directing, of controlling, and of
compelling its own agents. An administrative engine was thus gradually
built up so vast, so complicated, so clumsy, and so unproductive, that
it came at last to be left swinging on in space, whilst a more simple
and handy instrument of government was framed beside it, which really
performed the duties these innumerable public officers were supposed to
be doing.
It is clear that none of these pernicious institutions could have
subsisted for twenty years if they could have been brought under
discussion. None of them would have been established or aggravated if
the Estates had been consulted, or if their remonstrances had been
listened to when by chance they were still called together. Rarely as
the States-General were convoked in the last ages of the monarchy, they
never ceased to protest against these abuses. On several occasions
these assemblies pointed out as the origin of all these evils the power
of arbitrarily levying taxes which had been arrogated by the King,
or, to borrow the identical terms employed by the energetic language
of the fifteenth century, ‘the right of enriching himself from the
substance of the people without the consent and deliberation of the
Three Estates.’ Nor did they confine themselves to their own rights
alone; they demanded with energy, and frequently they obtained, greater
deference to the rights of the provinces and towns. In every session
some voices were raised in those bodies against the inequality of the
public burdens. They frequently demanded the abolition of the system of
close guilds; they attacked with increasing vigour in each successive
age the venality of public employments. ‘He who sells office sells
justice, which is infamous,’ was their language. When that venality was
established, they still complained of the abusive creation of offices.
They denounced so many useless places and dangerous privileges, but
always in vain. Three institutions had been previously established
against themselves; they had originated in the desire not to convoke
these assemblies, and in the necessity of disguising from the French
nation the taxation which it was unsafe to exhibit in its real aspect.
And it must be observed that the best kings were as prone to have
recourse to these practices as the worst. Louis XII. completed the
introduction of the venality of public offices; Henry IV. extended the
sale of them to reversions. The vices of the system were stronger than
the virtues of those who applied it.
The same desire of escaping from the control of the States-General
caused the Parliaments to be entrusted with most of their political
functions; the result was an intermixture of judicial and
administrative offices, which proved extremely injurious to the good
conduct of business. It was necessary to seem to afford some new
guarantees in place of those which were taken away; for though the
French support absolute power patiently enough, so long as it be not
oppressive, they never like the sight of it; and it is always prudent
to raise about it some appearance of barriers, which serve at least to
conceal what they do not arrest.
Lastly, it was this desire of preventing the nation, when asked for its
money, from asking back its freedom, which gave rise to an incessant
watchfulness in separating the classes of society, so that they should
never come together, or combine in a common resistance, and that the
Government should never have on its hands at once more than a very
small number of men separated from the rest of the nation. In the whole
course of this long history, in which have figured so many princes
remarkable for their ability, sometimes remarkable for their genius,
almost always remarkable for their courage, not one of them ever made
an effort to bring together the different classes of his people, or
to unite them otherwise than by subjecting them to a common yoke. One
exception there is, indeed, to this remark: one king of France there
was who not only desired this end, but applied himself with his whole
heart to attain it; that prince--for such are the inscrutable judgments
of Providence--was Louis XVI.
The separation of classes was the crime of the old French monarchy,
but it became its excuse; for when all those who constitute the rich
and enlightened portion of a nation can no longer agree and co-operate
in the work of government, a country can by no possibility administer
itself, and a master _must_ intervene.
‘The nation,’ said Turgot, with an air of melancholy, in a secret
report addressed to the King, ‘is a community, consisting of different
orders ill compacted together, and of a people whose members have very
few ties among themselves, so that every man is exclusively engrossed
by his personal interest. Nowhere is any common interest discernible.
The villages, the towns, have not any stronger mutual relations than
the districts to which they belong. They cannot even agree among
themselves to carry on the public works which they require. Amidst this
perpetual conflict of pretensions and of undertakings your Majesty
is compelled to decide everything in person or by your agents. Your
special injunctions are expected before men will contribute to the
public advantage, or respect the rights of others, or even sometimes
before they will exercise their own.’
It is no slight enterprise to bring more closely together
fellow-citizens who have thus been living for centuries as strangers
or as enemies to each other, and to teach them how to carry on their
affairs in common.
To divide them was a far easier task than it then becomes to reunite
them. Such has been the memorable example given by France to the world.
When the different classes which divided the ancient social system
of France came once more into contact sixty years ago, after having
been isolated so long, and by so many barriers, they encountered each
other on those points on which they felt most poignantly, and they
met in mutual hatred. Even in this our day their jealousies and their
animosities have survived them.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] See Note XXXVII., Arthur Young’s Tour.
[44] See Note XXXVIII.
[45] See Note XXXIX., Violation of Vested and Corporate Rights.
[46] [This remark must be taken with some qualification as to the fact.
These distinctions are not wholly eradicated at the present day in
England, but they are mere questions of property, not of personal rank
or political influence.]
[47] See Note XL.
[48] See Note XLI., Exemptions of Public Officers from Taxation.
[49] See Note XLII.