OF THE SPECIES OF LIBERTY WHICH EXISTED UNDER THE OLD MONARCHY, AND OF
THE INFLUENCE OF THAT LIBERTY ON THE REVOLUTION.
If the reader were here to interrupt the perusal of this book, he
would have but a very imperfect impression of the government of the
old French monarchy, and he would not understand the state of society
produced by the Revolution.
Since the citizens of France were thus divided and thus contracted
within themselves, since the power of the Crown was so extensive and
so great, it might be inferred that the spirit of independence had
disappeared with public liberty, and that the whole French people were
equally bent in subjection. Such was not the case; the Government
had long conducted absolutely and alone all the common affairs of
the nation; but it was as yet by no means master of every individual
existence.
Amidst many institutions already prepared for absolute power some
liberty survived; but it was a sort of strange liberty, which it is
not easy at the present day to conceive aright, and which must be very
closely scrutinised to comprehend the good and the evil resulting from
it.
Whilst the Central Government superseded all local powers, and filled
more and more the whole sphere of public authority, some institutions
which the Government had allowed to subsist, or which it had created,
some old customs, some ancient manners, some abuses even, served to
check its action, to keep alive in the hearts of a large number of
persons a spirit of resistance, and to preserve the consistency and the
independent outline of many characters.
Centralisation had already the same tendency, the same mode of
operation, the same aims as in our own time, but it had not yet the
same power. Government having, in its eagerness to turn everything
into money, put up to sale most of the public offices, had thus
deprived itself of the power of giving or withdrawing those offices
at pleasure. Thus one of its passions had considerably impaired the
success of another: its rapacity had balanced its ambition. The State
was therefore incessantly reduced to act through instruments which it
had not forged, and which it could not break. The consequence was that
its most absolute will was frequently paralysed in the execution of
it. This strange and vicious constitution of the public offices thus
stood in stead of a sort of political guarantee against the omnipotence
of the central power. It was a sort of irregular and ill-constructed
breakwater, which divided the action and checked the stroke of the
supreme power.
Nor did the Government of that day dispose as yet of that countless
multitude of favours, assistances, honours, and moneys which it has now
to distribute; it was therefore far less able to seduce as well as to
compel.
The Government moreover was imperfectly acquainted with the exact
limits of its power.[50] None of its rights were regularly acknowledged
or firmly established; its range of action was already immense, but
that action was still hesitating and uncertain, as one who gropes along
a dark and unknown track. This formidable obscurity, which at that time
concealed the limits of every power and enshrouded every right, though
it might be favourable to the designs of princes against the freedom of
their subjects, was frequently not less favourable to the defence of it.
The administrative power, conscious of the novelty of its origin
and of its low extraction, was ever timid in its action when any
obstacle crossed its path. It is striking to observe, in reading the
correspondence of the French Ministers and Intendants of the eighteenth
century, how this Government, which was so absolute and so encroaching
as long as its authority is not contested, stood aghast at the aspect
of the least resistance; agitated by the slightest criticism, alarmed
by the slightest noise, ready on all such occasions to stop, to
hesitate, to parley, to treat, and often to fall considerably below
the natural limits of its power. The nerveless egotism of Louis XV.,
and the mild benevolence of his successor, contributed to this state
of things. It never occurred to these sovereigns that they could be
dethroned. They had nothing of that harsh and restless temper which
fear has since often imparted to those who govern. They trampled on
none but those whom they did not see.
Several of the privileges, of the prejudices, of the false notions
most opposed to the establishment of a regular and salutary free
government, kept alive amongst many persons a spirit of independence,
and disposed them to hold their ground against the abuses of authority.
The Nobles despised the Administration, properly so called, though they
sometimes had occasion to apply to it. Even after they had abandoned
their former power, they retained something of that pride of their
forefathers which was alike adverse to servitude and to law. They cared
little for the general liberty of the community, and readily allowed
the hand of authority to lie heavy on all about them; but they did not
admit that it should lie heavy on themselves, and they were ready in
case of need to run all risks to prevent it. At the commencement of the
Revolution that nobility of France which was about to fall with the
throne, still held towards the King, and still more towards the King’s
agents, an attitude far higher, and language far more free, than the
middle class, which was so soon to overthrow the monarchy. Almost all
the guarantees against the abuse of power which France possessed during
the thirty-seven years of her representative government, were already
loudly demanded by the nobles. In reading the instructions of that
Order to the States-General, amidst its prejudices and its crotchets,
the spirit and some of the great qualities of an aristocracy may still
be felt.[51] It must ever be deplored that, instead of bending that
nobility to the discipline of law, it was uprooted and struck to the
earth. By that act the nation was deprived of a necessary portion
of its substance, and a wound was given to freedom which will never
be healed. A class which has marched for ages in the first rank has
acquired, in this long and uncontested exercise of greatness, a certain
loftiness of heart, a natural confidence in its strength, and a habit
of being looked up to, which makes it the most resisting element in
the frame of society. Not only is its own disposition manly, but its
example serves to augment the manliness of every other class. By
extirpating such an Order its very enemies are enervated. Nothing can
ever completely replace it; it can be born no more; it may recover the
titles and the estates, but not the soul of its progenitors.
The Clergy, who have since frequently shown themselves so servilely
submissive to the temporal sovereign in civil matters, whosoever
that temporal sovereign might be, and who become his most barefaced
flatterers on the slightest indication of favour to the Church, formed
at that time one of the most independent bodies in the nation, and the
only body whose peculiar liberties would have enforced respect.[52]
The provinces had lost their franchises; the rights of the towns were
reduced to a shadow. No ten noblemen could meet to deliberate together
on any matter without the express permission of the King. But the
Church of France retained to the last her periodical assemblies. Within
her bosom even ecclesiastical power was circumscribed by limits which
were respected.[53] The lower clergy enjoyed the protection of solid
guarantees against the tyranny of their superiors, and was not prepared
for passive obedience to the Sovereign by the uncontrolled despotism
of the bishop. I do not attempt to pass any judgment on this ancient
constitution of the Church; I merely assert that by this constitution
the spirit of the priesthood was not fashioned to political servility.
Many of the ecclesiastics were moreover gentlemen of birth, and they
brought with them into the Church the pride and indocility of their
condition. All of them had, moreover, an exalted rank in the State,
and certain privileges there. The exercise of those feudal rights,
which had proved so fatal to the moral power of the Church, gave to its
members, in their individual capacity, a spirit of independence towards
the civil authority.
But that which especially contributed to give the clergy the opinions,
the wants, the feelings, and often the passions of citizens, was the
ownership of land. I have had the patience to read most of the reports
and debates still remaining to us from the old Provincial Estates
of France, and particularly those of Languedoc, a province in which
the clergy participated even more than elsewhere in the details of
the public administration; I have also examined the journals of the
Provincial Assemblies which sat in 1779 and 1787. Bringing with me in
this inquiry the impressions of our own times, I have been surprised to
find bishops and priests, many of whom were equally eminent for their
piety and for their learning, drawing up reports on the construction
of a road or a canal, discussing with great science and skill the best
methods to augment the produce of agriculture, to ensure the well-being
of the inhabitants, and to encourage industry, these churchmen being
always equal, and often superior, to all the laymen engaged with them
in the transaction of the same affairs.
I maintain, in opposition to an opinion which is very generally and
very firmly established, that the nations which deprive the Roman
Catholic clergy of all participation in landed property, and convert
their incomes into salaries, do in fact only promote the interests of
the Papacy, and those of the temporal Ruler, whilst they renounce an
important element of freedom amongst themselves.
A man who, as far as the best portion of his nature is concerned, is
the subject of a foreign authority, and who in the country where he
dwells can have no family, will only be linked to the soil by one
durable tie--namely, landed property. Break that bond, and he belongs
to no place in particular. In the place where the accident of birth
may have cast him, he lives like an alien in the midst of a civil
community, scarcely any of whose civil interests can directly affect
him. His conscience binds him to the Pope; his maintenance to the
Sovereign. His only country is the Church. In every political event
he perceives little more than the advantage or the loss of his own
profession. Let but the Church be free and prosperous, what matters all
the rest? His most natural political state is that of indifference--an
excellent member of the Christian commonwealth, but elsewhere a
worthless citizen. Such sentiments and such opinions as these in a
body of men who are the directors of childhood, and the guardians of
morality, cannot fail to enervate the soul of the entire nation in
relation to public life.
A correct impression of the revolution which may be effected in the
human mind by a change wrought in social conditions, may be obtained
from a perusal of the Instructions given to the Delegates of the Clergy
at the States-General of 1789.[54]
The clergy in those documents frequently showed their intolerance,
and sometimes a tenacious attachment to several of their former
privileges; but, in other respects, not less hostile to despotism,
not less favourable to civil liberty, not less enamoured of political
liberty, than the middle classes or the nobility, this Order proclaimed
that personal liberty must be secured, not by promises alone, but by
a form of procedure analogous to the Habeas Corpus Act. They demanded
the destruction of the State prisons, the abolition of extraordinary
jurisdictions and of the practice of calling up causes to the Council
of State, publicity of procedure, the permanence of judicial officers,
the admissibility of all ranks to public employments, which should be
open to merit alone; a system of military recruiting less oppressive
and humiliating to the people, and from which none should be exempted;
the extinction by purchase of seignorial rights, which sprung from
the feudal system were, they said, contrary to freedom; unrestricted
freedom of labour; the suppression of internal custom-houses; the
multiplication of private schools, insomuch that one gratuitous school
should exist in every parish; lay charitable institutions in all the
rural districts, such as workhouses and workshops of charity; and every
kind of encouragement to agriculture.
In the sphere of politics, properly so called, the clergy proclaimed,
louder than any other class, that the nation had an indefeasible and
inalienable right to assemble to enact laws and to vote taxes. No
Frenchman, said the priests of that day, can be forced to pay a tax
which he has not voted in person or by his representative. The clergy
further demanded that States-General freely elected should annually
assemble; that they should in presence of the nation discuss all its
chief affairs; that they should make general laws paramount to all
usages or particular privileges; that the deputies should be inviolable
and the ministers of the Crown constantly responsible. The clergy
also desired that assemblies of States should be created in all the
provinces, and municipal corporations in all the towns. Of divine right
not a word.
Upon the whole, and notwithstanding the notorious vices of some of
its members, I question if there ever existed in the world a clergy
more remarkable than the Catholic clergy of France at the moment when
it was overtaken by the Revolution--a clergy more enlightened, more
national, less circumscribed within the bounds of private duty and
more alive to public obligations, and at the same time more zealous
for the faith:--persecution proved it. I entered on the study of
these forgotten institutions full of prejudices against the clergy of
that day: I conclude that study full of respect for them. They had in
truth no defects but those inherent in all corporate bodies, whether
political or religious, when they are strongly constituted and knit
together; such as a tendency to aggression, a certain intolerance of
disposition, and an instinctive--sometimes a blind--attachment to the
particular rights of their Order.
The Middle Classes of the time preceding the Revolution were also much
better prepared than those of the present day to show a spirit of
independence. Many even of the defects of their social constitution
contributed to this result. We have already seen that the public
employments occupied by these classes were even more numerous than
at present, and that the passion for obtaining these situations was
equally intense. But mark the difference of the age. Most of those
places being neither given nor taken away by the Government, increased
the importance of those who filled them without placing them at the
mercy of the ruler; hence, the very cause which now completes the
subjection of so many persons was precisely that which most powerfully
enabled them at that time to maintain their independence.
The immunities of all kinds which so unhappily separated the middle
from the lower classes, converted the former into a spurious
aristocracy, which often displayed the pride and the spirit of
resistance of the real aristocracy. In each of those small particular
associations which divided the middle classes into so many sections,
the general advantage was readily overlooked, but the interests and
the rights of each body were always kept in view. The common dignity,
the common privileges were to be defended.[55] No man could ever lose
himself in the crowd, or find a hiding-place for base subserviency.
Every man stood, as it were, on a stage, extremely contracted it is
true, but in a glare of light, and there he found himself in presence
of the same audience, ever ready to applaud or to condemn him.
The art of stifling every murmur of resistance was at that time far
less perfected than it is at present. France had not yet become that
dumb region in which we dwell: every sound on the contrary had an echo,
though political liberty was still unknown, and every voice that was
raised might be heard afar.
That which more especially in those times ensured to the oppressed the
means of being heard was the constitution of the Courts of Justice.
France had become a land of absolute government by her political
and administrative institutions, but her people were still free by
her institutions of justice. The judicial administration of the old
monarchy was complicated, troublesome, tedious, and expensive: these
were no doubt great faults, but servility towards the Government was
not to be met with there--that servility which is but another form
of venality, and the worst form. That capital vice, which not only
corrupts the judge, but soon infects the whole body of the people, was
altogether unknown to the elder magistracy. The judges could not be
removed, and they sought no promotion--two things alike necessary to
their independence; for what matters it that a judge cannot be coerced
if there are a thousand means of seduction?
It is true that the power of the Crown had succeeded in depriving the
Courts of ordinary jurisdiction of the cognisance of almost all the
suits in which the public authorities were interested; but though
they had been stripped, they still were feared. Though they might be
prevented from recording their judgments, the Government did not always
dare to prevent them from receiving complaints or from recording their
opinions; and as the language of the Courts still preserved the tone of
that old language of France which loved to call things by their right
names, the magistrates not unfrequently stigmatised the acts of the
Government as arbitrary and despotic.[56] The irregular intervention
of the Courts in the affairs of government, which often disturbed the
conduct of them, thus served occasionally to protect the liberties of
the subject. The evil was great, but it served to curb a greater evil.
In these judicial bodies and all around them the vigour of the ancient
manners of the nation was preserved in the midst of modern opinions.
The Parliaments of France doubtless thought more of themselves than
of the commonwealth; but it must be acknowledged that, in defence of
their own independence and honour, they always bore themselves with
intrepidity, and that they imparted their spirit to all that came near
them.
When in 1770 the Parliament of Paris was broken, the magistrates who
belonged to it submitted to the loss of their profession and their
power without a single instance of any individual yielding to the will
of the sovereign. Nay, more, some Courts of a different kind, such as
the Court of Aids, which were neither affected nor menaced, voluntarily
exposed themselves to the same harsh treatment, when that treatment had
become certain. Nor is this all: the leading advocates who practised
before the Parliament resolved of their own accord to share its
fortune; they renounced all that made their glory and their wealth, and
condemned themselves to silence rather than appear before dishonoured
judges. I know of nothing in the history of free nations grander than
what occurred on this occasion, and yet this happened in the eighteenth
century, hard by the court of Louis XV.
The habits of the French Courts of justice had become in many respects
the habits of the nation. The Courts of justice had given birth to the
notion that every question was open to discussion and every decision
subject to appeal, and likewise to the use of publicity, and to a taste
for forms of proceeding--things adverse to servitude: this was the
only part of the education of a free people which the institutions of
the old monarchy had given to France. The administration itself had
borrowed largely from the language and the practice of the Courts.
The King considered himself obliged to assign motives for his edicts,
and to state his reasons before he drew the conclusion; the Council
of State caused its orders to be preceded by long preambles; the
Intendants promulgated their ordinances in the forms of judicial
procedure. In all the administrative bodies of any antiquity, such,
for example, as the body of the Treasurers of France or that of the
_élus_ (who assessed the _taille_), the cases were publicly debated
and decided after argument at the bar. All these usages, all these
formalities, were so many barriers to the arbitrary power of the
sovereign.
The people alone, applying that term to the lower orders of society,
and especially the people of the rural districts, were almost always
unable to offer any resistance to oppression except by violence.
Most of the means of defence which I have here passed in review were,
in fact, beyond their reach; to employ those means, a place in society
where they could be seen, or a voice loud enough to make itself heard,
was requisite; But above the ranks of the lower orders there was not
a man in France who, if he had the courage, might not contest his
obedience and resist in giving way.
The King spoke as the chief of the nation rather than as its master.
‘We glory,’ said Louis XVI., at his accession, in the preamble of a
decree, ‘we glory to command a free and generous nation.’ One of his
ancestors had already expressed the same idea in older language, when,
thanking the States-General for the boldness of their remonstrances, he
said, ‘We like better to speak to freemen than to serfs.’
The men of the eighteenth century knew little of that sort of passion
for comfort which is the mother of servitude--a relaxing passion,
though it be tenacious and unalterable, which mingles and intertwines
itself with many private virtues, such as domestic affections,
regularity of life, respect for religion, and even with the lukewarm,
though assiduous, practice of public worship, which favours propriety
but proscribes heroism, and excels in making decent livers but base
citizens. The men of the eighteenth century were better and they were
worse.
The French of that age were addicted to joy and passionately fond
of amusement; they were perhaps more lax in their habits, and more
vehement in their passions and opinions than those of the present day,
but they were strangers to the temperate and decorous sensualism that
we see about us. In the upper classes men thought more of adorning life
than of rendering it comfortable; they sought to be illustrious rather
than to be rich. Even in the middle ranks the pursuit of comfort never
absorbed every faculty of the mind; that pursuit was often abandoned
for higher and more refined enjoyments; every man placed some object
beyond the love of money before his eyes. ‘I know my countrymen,’
said a contemporary writer, in language which, though eccentric, is
spirited, ‘apt to melt and dissipate the metals, they are not prone
to pay them habitual reverence, and they will not be slow to turn
again to their former idols, to valour, to glory, and, I will add, to
magnanimity.’
The baseness of mankind is, moreover, not to be estimated by the degree
of their subserviency to a sovereign power; that standard would be
an incorrect one. However submissive the French may have been before
the Revolution to the will of the King, one sort of obedience was
altogether unknown to them: they knew not what it was to bow before
an illegitimate and contested power--a power but little honoured,
frequently despised, but which is willingly endured because it may be
serviceable or because it may hurt. To this degrading form of servitude
they were ever strangers. The King inspired them with feelings which
none of the most absolute princes who have since appeared in the world
have been able to call forth, and which are become incomprehensible to
the present generation, so entirely has the Revolution extirpated them
from the hearts of the nation. They loved him with the affection due to
a father; they revered him with the respect due to God. In submitting
to the most arbitrary of his commands they yielded less to compulsion
than to loyalty, and thus they frequently preserved great freedom of
mind even in the most complete dependence. To them the greatest evil
of obedience was compulsion; to us it is the least: the worst is in
that servile sentiment which leads men to obey. We have no right to
despise our forefathers. Would to God that we could recover, with their
prejudices and their faults, something of their greatness!
It would then be a mistake to think that the state of society in France
before the Revolution was one of servility and dependence.[57] Much
more liberty existed in that society than in our own time; but it was a
species of irregular and intermittent liberty, always contracted within
the bounds of certain classes, linked to the notion of exemption and of
privilege, which rendered it almost as easy to defy the law as to defy
arbitrary power, and scarcely ever went far enough to furnish to all
classes of the community the most natural and necessary securities.[58]
Thus reduced, and thus deformed, liberty was still not unfruitful.
It was this liberty which, at the very time when centralisation was
tending more and more to equalise, to emasculate, and to dim the
character of the nation, still preserved amongst a large class of
private persons their native vigour, their colour, and their outline,
fostered self-respect in the heart, and often caused the love of glory
to predominate over every other taste. By this liberty were formed
those vigorous characters, those proud and daring spirits which were
about to appear, and were to make the French Revolution at once the
object of the admiration and the terror of succeeding generations. It
would have been so strange that virtues so masculine should have grown
on a soil where freedom was no more.
But if this sort of ill-regulated and morbid liberty prepared the
French to overflow despotism, perhaps it likewise rendered them less
fit than any other people to establish in lieu of that despotism the
free and peaceful empire of constitutional law.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] See Note XLIII.
[51] See Note XLIV., Instructions of the Order of Nobility at the
States-General of 1789.
[52] See Note XLV., Religious Administration of an Ecclesiastical
Province in the Eighteenth Century.
[53] See Note XLVI., Spirit of the Clergy.
[54] See Note XLVII.
[55] See Note XLVIII.
[56] See Note XLIX., Example of the Language of the Courts of Justice.
[57] See Note L.
[58] See Note LI., Of the Reasons which frequently put a restraint on
Absolute Government under the Monarchy.