SHOWING THAT THE CONDITION OF THE FRENCH PEASANTRY, NOTWITHSTANDING
THE PROGRESS OF CIVILISATION, WAS SOMETIMES WORSE IN THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY THAN IT HAD BEEN IN THE THIRTEENTH.
In the eighteenth century the French peasantry could no longer be
preyed upon by petty feudal despots; they were seldom the object of
violence on the part of the Government; they enjoyed civil liberty,
and were owners of a portion of the soil; but all the other classes of
society stood aloof from this class, and perhaps in no other part of
the world had the peasantry ever lived so entirely alone. The effects
of this novel and singular kind of oppression deserve a very attentive
separate consideration.
As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV.
complained, as we learn from Péréfix, that the nobles were quitting the
rural districts. In the middle of the eighteenth century this desertion
had become almost general; all the records of the time indicate and
deplore the fact, economists in their writings, the Intendants in
their reports, agricultural societies in their proceedings. A more
authentic proof of the same fact is to be found in the registers of the
capitation tax. The capitation tax was levied at the actual place of
residence, and it was paid by the whole of the great nobility and by a
portion of the landed gentry at Paris.
In the rural districts none remained but such of the gentry as their
limited means compelled to stay there. These persons must have found
themselves placed in a position with reference to the peasants, his
neighbours, such as no rich proprietor can be conceived to have
occupied before.[59] Being no longer in the position of a chief, they
had not the same interest as of old to attend to, or assist, or direct
the village population; and, on the other hand, not being subject to
the same burdens, they could neither feel much sympathy with poverty
which they did not share, nor with grievances to which they were not
exposed. The peasantry were no longer the subjects of the gentry; the
gentry were not yet the fellow-citizens of the peasantry--a state of
things unparalleled in history.
This gave rise to a sort of absenteeism of feeling, if I may so express
myself, even more frequent and more effectual than absenteeism properly
so called. Hence it arose that a gentleman residing on his estate
frequently displayed the views and sentiments which his steward would
have entertained in his absence; like his steward, he learned to look
upon his tenants as his debtors, and he rigorously exacted from them
all that he could claim by law or by custom, which sometimes rendered
the application of the last remnant of feudal rights more harsh than it
had been in the feudal times.
Often embarrassed, and always needy, the small gentry lived shabbily
in their country-houses, caring only to amass money enough to spend in
town during the winter. The people, who often find an expression which
hits the truth, had given to these small squires the name of the least
of the birds of prey, a _hobereau_, a sort of Squire Kite.
No doubt individual exceptions might be presented to these
observations: I speak of classes, which ought alone to detain the
attention of history. That there were in those times many rich
landowners who, without any necessary occasion and without a common
interest, attended to the welfare of the peasantry, who will deny? But
these were persons who struggled successfully against the law of their
new condition, which, in spite of themselves, was driving them into
indifference, as it was driving their former vassals into hatred.
This abandonment of a country life by the nobility has often been
attributed to the peculiar influence of certain ministers and certain
kings--by some to Richelieu, by others to Louis XIV. It was, no doubt,
an idea almost always pursued by the Kings of France, during the three
last centuries of the monarchy, to separate the gentry from the people,
and to attract the former to Court and to public employments. This was
especially the case in the seventeenth century, when the nobility were
still an object of fear to royalty. Amongst the questions addressed
to the Intendants, they were sometimes asked--‘Do the gentry of your
province like to stay at home, or to go abroad?’
A letter from an Intendant has been found giving his answer on this
subject: he laments that the gentry of his province like to remain with
their peasants, instead of fulfilling their duties about the King.
And let it here be well remarked, that the province of which this
Intendant was speaking was Anjou--that province which was afterwards
La Vendée. These country gentlemen who refused, as he said, to fulfil
their duties about the King, were the only country gentlemen who
defended with arms in their hands the monarchy in France, and died
there fighting for the Crown; they owed this glorious distinction
simply to the fact that they had found means to retain their hold over
the peasantry--that peasantry with whom they were blamed for wishing to
live.
Nevertheless the abandonment of the country by the class which then
formed the head of the French nation must not be mainly attributed to
the direct influence of some of the French kings. The principal and
permanent cause of this fact lay not so much in the will of certain men
as in the slow and incessant influence of institutions; and the proof
is, that when, in the eighteenth century, the Government endeavoured
to combat this evil, it could not even check the progress of it. In
proportion as the nobility completely lost its political rights without
acquiring others, and as local freedom disappeared, this emigration
of the nobles increased. It became unnecessary to entice them from
their homes; they cared not to remain there. Rural life had become
distasteful to them.
What I here say of the nobles applies in all countries to rich
landowners. In all centralised countries the rural districts lose
their wealthy and enlightened inhabitants. I might add that in all
centralised countries the art of cultivation remains imperfect and
unimproved--a commentary on the profound remark of Montesquieu, which
determines his meaning, when he says that ‘land produces less by reason
of its own fertility than of the freedom of its inhabitants.’ But I
will not transgress the limits of my subject.
We have seen elsewhere that the middle classes, equally ready to quit
the rural districts, sought refuge from all sides in the towns. On no
point are all the records of French society anterior to the Revolution
more agreed. They show that a second generation of rich peasants was a
thing almost unknown. No sooner had a farmer made a little money by his
industry than he took his son from the plough, sent him to the town,
and bought him a small appointment. From that period may be dated the
sort of strange aversion which the French husbandman often displays,
even in our own times, for the calling which has enriched him. The
effect has survived the cause.
To say the truth, the only man of education--or, as he would be called
in England, the only _gentleman_--who permanently resided amongst the
peasantry and in constant intercourse with them, was the parish priest.
The result was that the priest would have become the master of the
rural populations, in spite of Voltaire, if he had not been himself
so nearly and ostensibly linked to the political order of things; the
possession of several political privileges exposed him in some degree
to the hatred inspired by those political institutions.[60]
The peasant was thus almost entirely separated from the upper
classes; he was removed from those of his fellow-creatures who might
have assisted and directed him. In proportion as they attained to
enlightenment or competency, they turned their backs on him; he stood,
as it were, tabooed and set apart in the midst of the nation.
This state of things did not exist in an equal degree amongst any
of the other civilized nations of Europe, and even in France it was
comparatively recent. The peasantry of the fourteenth century were
at once more oppressed and more relieved. The aristocracy sometimes
tyrannised over them, but never forsook them.
In the eighteenth century, a French village was a community of persons,
all of whom were poor, ignorant, and coarse; its magistrates were as
rude and as contemned as the people; its syndic could not read; its
collector could not record in his own handwriting the accounts on which
the income of his neighbours and his own depended. Not only had the
former lord of the manor lost the right of governing this community,
but he had brought himself to consider it a sort of degradation to
take any part in the government of it. To assess the _taille_, to call
out the militia, to regulate the forced labour, were servile offices,
devolving on the syndic. The central power of the State alone took any
care of the matter, and as that power was very remote, and had as yet
nothing to fear from the inhabitants of the villages, the only care it
took of them was to extract revenue.
Let me show you what a forsaken class of society becomes which no one
desires to oppress, but which no one attempts to enlighten or to serve.
The heaviest burdens which the feudal system had imposed on the rural
population had without doubt been withdrawn and mitigated; but it
is not sufficiently known that for these burdens others had been
substituted, perhaps more onerous. The peasant had not to endure all
the evils endured by his forefathers, but he supported many hardships
which his forefathers had never known.
The _taille_ had been decupled, almost exclusively at the cost of the
peasantry, in the preceding two centuries. And here a word must be said
of the manner in which this tax was levied, to show what barbarous
laws may be founded and maintained in civilised ages, when the most
enlightened men in the nation have no personal interest in changing
them.
I find in a confidential letter, written by the Comptroller-General
himself, in 1772, to the Intendants, a description of this tax, which
is a model of brevity and accuracy. ‘The _taille_,’ said that minister,
‘arbitrarily assessed, collectively levied as a personal, not a real,
tax in the great part of France, is subject to continual variations
from all the changes which happen every year in the fortunes of the
taxpayers.’ The whole is in these three phrases. It is impossible to
depict more ably the evil by which the writer profited.
The whole sum to be paid by each parish was fixed every three years.
It perpetually varied, as the minister says, so that no farmer could
foresee a year beforehand what he would have to pay in the year
following. In the internal economy of each parish any one of the
peasants named by the collector was entrusted with the apportionment of
the tax on the rest.
I have said I would explain what was the condition of this collector.
Let us take this explanation in the language of the Assembly of the
Province of Berri in 1779, a body not liable to suspicion, for it was
entirely composed of privileged persons, who paid no _taille_, and
were chosen by the King. ‘As every one seeks to evade this office of
collector,’ said this Assembly, ‘each person must fill it in turn.
The levy of the _taille_ is therefore entrusted every year to a
fresh collector, without regard to his ability or his integrity; the
preparation of each roll of assessment bears marks, therefore, of the
personal character of the officer who makes it. The collector stamps
on it his own fears, or foibles, or vices. How, indeed, could he do
better? He is acting in darkness, for who can tell with precision the
wealth of his neighbour or the proportion of his wealth to that of
another? Nevertheless the opinion of the collector alone is to decide
these points, and he is responsible with all his property and even his
person for the receipts. He is commonly obliged for two whole years to
lose half his days in running after the taxpayers. Those who cannot
read are obliged to find a neighbour to perform the office for them.’
Turgot had already said of another province, a short time before, ‘This
office of collector drives to despair, and generally to ruin, those
on whom it is imposed; by this means all the wealthier families of a
village are successively reduced to poverty.’
This unhappy officer was, however, armed with the most arbitrary
powers;[61] he was almost as much a tyrant as a martyr. Whilst he
was discharging functions by which he ruined himself, he had it in
his power to ruin everybody else. ‘Preference for his relations,’ to
recur to the language of the Provincial Assembly, ‘or for his friends
and neighbours, hatred and revenge against his enemies, the want of a
patron, the fear of affronting a man of property who had work to give,
were at issue with every feeling of justice.’ Personal fear often
hardened the heart of the collector; there were parishes in which he
never went out but escorted by constables and bailiffs. ‘When he comes
without the constable,’ said an Intendant to a Minister, in 1764,
‘the persons liable to the tax will not pay.’ ‘In the district of
Villefranche alone,’ says the Provincial Assembly of Guienne, ‘there
were one hundred and six officers constantly out to serve writs and
levy distraints.’
To evade this violent and arbitrary taxation the French peasantry, in
the midst of the eighteenth century, acted like the Jews in the Middle
Ages. They were ostensibly paupers, even when by chance they were not
so in reality. They were afraid to be well off; and not without reason,
as may be seen from a document which I select, not from Guienne, but a
hundred leagues off. The Agricultural Society of Maine announced in its
Report of 1761, that it proposed to distribute cattle by way of prizes
and encouragements. ‘This plan was stopped,’ it adds, ‘on account of
the dangerous consequences to be apprehended by a low jealousy of the
winners of these prizes, which, by means of the arbitrary assessment of
the public taxes, would occasion them annoyance in the following year.’
Under this system of taxation each tax-payer had, in fact, a direct and
permanent interest to act as a spy on his neighbours, and to denounce
to the collector the progress of their fortunes. The whole population
was thus trained to delation and to hatred. Were not such things rather
to be expected in the domains of a rajah of Hindostan?
There were, however, at the same time in France certain districts in
which the taxes were raised with regularity and moderation; these
were called the _pays d’état_.[62] It is true that to these districts
the right of levying their own taxes had been left. In Languedoc,
for example, the _taille_ was assessed on real property, and did
not vary according to the means of the holder. Its fixed and known
basis was a survey which had been carefully made, and was renewed
every thirty years, and in which the lands were divided, according to
their fertility, into three classes. Every taxpayer knew beforehand
exactly what his proportion of the charge amounted to. If he failed
to pay, he alone, or rather his land alone, was liable. If he thought
the assessment unjust, he might always require that his share should
be compared with that of any other inhabitant of the parish, on the
principle of what is now termed in France an appeal to proportionate
equality.
These regulations are precisely those which are now followed in France;
they have not been improved since that time, but they have been
generalised: for it deserves observation, that although the form of
the public administration in France has been taken from the Government
anterior to the Revolution, nothing else has been copied from that
Government. The best of the administrative forms of proceeding in
modern France have been borrowed from the old Provincial Assemblies,
and not from the Government. The machine was adopted, but its produce
rejected.
The habitual poverty of the rural population had given birth to maxims
little calculated to put an end to it. ‘If nations were well off,’ said
Richelieu, in his Political Testament, ‘hardly would they keep within
the rules.’ In the eighteenth century this maxim was modified, but
it was still believed that the peasantry would not work without the
constant stimulus of necessity, and that want was the only security
against idleness. That is precisely the theory which is sometimes
professed with reference to the negro population of the colonies. It
was an opinion so generally diffused amongst those who governed that
almost all the economists thought themselves obliged to combat it at
length.
The primary object of the _taille_ was to enable the King to purchase
recruits so as to dispense the nobles and their vassals from military
service; but in the seventeenth century the obligation of military
service was again imposed, as we have seen, under the name of the
militia, and henceforth it weighed upon the common people only, and
almost exclusively on the peasantry.
The infinite number of police reports from the constables, which are
still to be found amongst the records of any intendancy, all relating
to the pursuit of refractory militia-men or deserters, suffice to prove
that this force was not raised without obstacles. It seems, indeed,
that no public burden was more insupportable to the peasantry than
this: to evade it they frequently fled into the woods, where they were
pursued by the armed authorities. This is the more singular, when we
see the facility with which the conscription works in France in the
present times.
This extreme repugnance of the peasantry of France before the
Revolution to the militia was attributable less to the principle of the
law than to the manner in which the law was executed; more especially
from the long period of uncertainty, during which it threatened those
liable to be drawn (they could be taken until forty years of age,
unless they were married)--from the arbitrary power of revision, which
rendered the advantage of a lucky number almost useless--from the
prohibition to hire a substitute--from disgust at a hard and perilous
profession, in which all hope of advancement was forbidden; but, above
all, from the feeling that this oppressive burden rested on themselves
alone, and on the most wretched amongst themselves, the ignominy of
this condition rendering its hardships more intolerable.
I have had means of referring to many of the returns of the draft for
the militia, as it was made in 1769 in a large number of parishes. In
all these returns there are some exemptions: this man is a gentleman’s
servant; that, the gamekeeper of an abbey; a third is only the
valet of a man of inferior birth, but who, at least, ‘lives like a
nobleman.’ Wealth alone afforded an exemption; when a farmer annually
figured amongst those who paid the largest sum in taxes, his sons
were dispensed from the militia; that was called encouragement of
agriculture. Even the economists, who, in all other points, were great
partisans of social equality, were not shocked by this privilege; they
only suggested that it should be extended, or, in other words, that the
burden of the poorest and most friendless of the peasants should become
more severe. ‘The low pay of the soldier,’ said one of these writers,
‘the manner in which he is lodged, dressed, and fed, and his entire
state of dependence, would render it too cruel to take any but a man of
the lowest orders.’
Down to the close of the reign of Louis XIV. the high roads were not
repaired, or were repaired at the cost of those who used them, namely,
the State and the adjacent landowners. But about that time the roads
began to be repaired by forced labour only, that is to say, exclusively
at the expense of the peasantry.[63] This expedient for making roads
without paying for them was thought so ingenious, that in 1737 a
circular of the Comptroller-General Orry established it throughout
France. The Intendants were armed with the right of imprisoning the
refractory at pleasure, or of sending constables after them.[64]
From that time, whenever trade augmented, so that more roads were
wanted or desired, the _corvée_ or forced labour extended to new lines,
and had more work to do. It appears from the Report made in 1779 to
the Provincial Assembly of Berri, that the works executed by forced
labour in that poor province were estimated in one year at 700,000
livres. In 1787 they were computed at about the same sum in Lower
Normandy. Nothing can better demonstrate the melancholy fate of the
rural population; the progress of society, which enriched all the other
classes, drove them to despair, and civilisation itself turned against
that class alone.
I find about the same time, in the correspondence of the Intendants,
that leave was to be refused to the peasants to do their forced labour
on the private roads of their own villages, since this labour was to be
reserved to the great high roads only, or, as they were then called,
‘the King’s highway.’ The strange notion that the cost of the roads
was to be defrayed by the poorest persons, and by those who were the
least likely to travel by them, though of recent date, took such root
in the minds of those who were to profit by it, that they soon imagined
that the thing could not be done differently.[65] In 1766 an attempt
was made to commute this forced labour into a local rate, but the same
inequality survived, and affected this new species of tax.
Though originally a seignorial right, the system of forced labour, by
becoming a royal right, was gradually extended to almost all public
works. In 1719 I find it was employed to build barracks. ‘Parishes are
to send their best workmen,’ said the Ordinance, ‘and all other works
are to give way to this.’ The same forced service was used to escort
convicts to the galleys and beggars to the workhouse;[66] it had to
cart the baggage of troops as often as they changed their quarters,
a burden which was very onerous at a time when each regiment carried
heavy baggage after it. Many carts and oxen had to be collected for the
purpose.[67] This sort of obligation, which signified little at its
origin, became one of the most burdensome when standing armies grew
more numerous. Sometimes the Government contractors loudly demanded the
assistance of forced labour to convey timber from the forests to the
naval arsenals. These peasants commonly received certain wages, but
they were arbitrarily fixed and low.[68] The burden of an impost so
ill-assessed sometimes became so heavy as to excite the uneasiness of
the receivers of the _taille_. ‘The outlay required of the peasants
on the roads,’ said one of these officers in 1751, ‘is such, that they
will soon be quite unable to pay the _taille_.’
Could all these new oppressions have been established if there had been
in the vicinity of these peasants any men of wealth and education,
disposed and able, if not to defend them, at least to intercede for
them, with that common master who already held in his grasp the
fortunes of the poor and of the rich?
I have read a letter of a great landowner, writing in 1774 to the
Intendant of his province, to induce him to open a road. This road,
he said, would cause the prosperity of the village, and for several
reasons; he then went on to recommend the establishment of a fair,
which would double, he thought, the price of produce. With excellent
motives, he added that with the assistance of a small contribution a
school might be established, which would furnish the King with more
industrious subjects. It was the first time that these necessary
ameliorations had occurred to him; he had only thought of them in
the preceding two years, which he had been compelled by a _lettre de
cachet_ to spend in his own house. ‘My exile for the last two years in
my estates,’ he candidly observed, ‘has convinced me of the extreme
utility of these things.’
It was more especially in times of scarcity that the relaxation or
total interruption of the ties of patronage and dependence, which
formerly connected the great rural proprietors and the peasantry, was
manifest. At such critical times the Central Government, alarmed by its
own isolation and weakness, sought to revive for the nonce the personal
influences or the political associations which the Government itself
had destroyed; they were summoned to its aid, but they were summoned
in vain, and the State was astonished to find that those persons were
defunct whom it had itself deprived of life.
In this extremity some of the Intendants--Turgot, for instance--in
the poorest provinces, issued illegal ordinances to compel the rich
landowners to feed their tenants till the next harvest. I have found,
under the date of 1770, letters from several parish priests, who
propose to the Intendants to tax the great landowners, both clerical
and lay, ‘who possess vast estates which they do not inhabit, and from
which they draw large revenues to be spent elsewhere.’
At all times the villages were infested with beggars; for, as Letronne
observes, the poor were relieved in the towns, but in the country,
during the winter, mendicity was their only resource.
Occasionally these poor wretches were treated with great violence. In
1767 the Duc de Choiseul, then Minister, resolved suddenly to suppress
mendicity in France. The correspondence of the Intendants still shows
with what rigour his measures were taken. The patrol was ordered at
once to take up all the beggars found in the kingdom; it is said that
more than 50,000 of them were seized. Able-bodied vagabonds were to be
sent to the galleys; as for the rest, more than forty workhouses were
opened to receive them. It would have been more to the purpose to have
opened the hearts of the rich.
This Government of the ancient French monarchy, which was, as I
have said, so mild, and sometimes so timid, so full of formalities,
of delays, and of scruples, when it had to do with those who were
placed above the common people, was always harsh and always prompt in
proceeding against the lower orders, especially against the peasantry.
Amongst the records which I have examined, I have not seen one relating
to the arrest of a man of the middle class by order of the Intendant;
but the peasants were arrested continually, some for forced labour,
some for begging, some for the militia, some by the police or for a
hundred other causes. The former class enjoyed independent courts of
justice, long trials, and a public procedure; the latter fell under the
control of the provost-marshal, summarily and without appeal.[69]
‘The immense distance which exists between the common people and all
the other classes of society,’ Necker wrote in 1785, ‘contributes
to avert our observation from the manner in which authority may be
handled in relation to all those persons lost in a crowd. Without the
gentleness and humanity which characterise the French and the spirit of
this age, this would be a continual subject of sorrow to those who can
feel for others under burdens from which they are themselves exempt.’
But this oppression was less apparent in the positive evil done to
those unhappy classes than in the impediments which prevented them from
improving their own condition. They were free and they were owners of
land, yet they remained almost as ignorant, and often more indigent,
than the serfs, their forefathers. They were still without industrial
employment, amidst all the wonderful creations of the modern arts; they
were still uncivilised in a world glittering with civilisation. If they
retained the peculiar intelligence and perspicacity of their race, they
had not been taught to use these qualities; they could not even succeed
in the cultivation of the soil, the only thing they had to do. ‘The
husbandry I see before me is that of the tenth century,’ was the remark
of a celebrated English agriculturist in France. They excelled in no
profession but in that of arms; there at least they came naturally and
necessarily into contact with the other classes.
In this depth of isolation and indigence the French peasantry lived;
they lived enclosed and inaccessible within it. I have been surprised
and almost shocked to perceive that less than twenty years before the
Catholic worship was abolished without resistance in France and the
churches desecrated, the means taken to ascertain the population of a
district were these: the parish priests reported the number of persons
who had attended at Easter at the Lord’s table--an estimate was added
for the probable number of children and of the sick; the result gave
the whole body of the population. Nevertheless the spirit of the age
had begun to penetrate by many ways into these untutored minds; it
penetrated by irregular and hidden channels, and assumed the strangest
shapes in their narrow and obscure capacities. Yet nothing seemed as
yet externally changed; the manners, the habits, the faith of the
peasant seemed to be the same; he was submissive, and was even merry.
There is something fallacious in the merriment which the French often
exhibit in the midst of the greatest calamities. It only proves that,
believing their ill fortune to be inevitable, they seek to throw it
off by not thinking of it, but not that they do not feel it. Open to
them a door of escape from the evil they seem to bear so lightly, and
they will rush towards it with such violence as to pass over your body
without so much as seeing you, if you are on their path.
These things are clear to us, from our point of observation; but they
were invisible to contemporary eyes. It is always with great difficulty
that men belonging to the upper classes succeed in discerning with
precision what is passing in the mind of the common people, and
especially of the peasantry. The education and the manner of life of
the peasantry give them certain views of their own, which remain shut
to all other classes. But when the poor and the rich have scarcely any
common interests, common grievances, or common business, the darkness
which conceals the mind of the one from the mind of the other becomes
impenetrable, and the two classes might live for ever side by side
without the slightest interpenetration. It is curious to observe in
what strange security all those who inhabited the upper or the middle
storeys of the social edifice were living at the very time when the
Revolution was beginning, and to mark how ingeniously they discoursed
on the virtues of the common people, on their gentleness, on their
attachment to themselves, on their innocent diversions; the absurd and
terrible contrast of ‘93 was already beneath their feet.
Let us here pause for a moment as we proceed to consider, amidst all
these minute particulars which I have been describing, one of the
greatest laws of Providence in the government of human societies.
The French nobility persisted in standing aloof from the other
classes; the landed gentry ended by obtaining exemptions from most of
the public burdens which rested upon them; they imagined that they
should preserve their rank whilst they evaded its duties, and for a
time this seemed to be so. But soon an internal and invisible malady
appeared to have infected their condition; it dwindled away though no
one touched it, and whilst their immunities increased their substance
declined. The middle classes, with which they had been so reluctant to
mingle, grew in wealth and in intelligence beside them, without them,
and against them; they had rejected the middle classes as associates
and as fellow-citizens; but they were about to find in those classes
their rivals, soon their enemies, at length their masters. A superior
power had relieved them from the care of directing, of protecting, of
assisting their vassals; but as that power had left them in the full
enjoyment of their pecuniary rights and their honorary privileges,
they conceived that nothing was lost to them. As they still marched
first, they still thought they were leading; and indeed they had still
about them men whom, in the language of the law, they named their
_subjects_--others were called their vassals, their tenants, their
farmers. But, in reality, none followed them; they were alone, and when
those very classes rose against them, flight was their only resource.
Although the destinies of the nobility and the middle classes have
differed materially from each other, they have had one point of
resemblance: the men of the middle classes had ended by living as much
apart from the common people as those of the upper classes. Far from
drawing nearer to the peasantry, they had withdrawn from all contact
with their hardships; instead of uniting themselves closely to the
lower orders, to struggle in common against a common inequality, they
only sought to establish fresh preferences in their own favour; and
they were as eager to obtain exemptions for themselves as the nobles
were to maintain their privileges. These peasants, from whom the
middle classes had sprung, were not only become strangers to their
descendants, but were literally unknown by them; and it was not until
arms had been placed by the middle classes in their hands that those
classes perceived what unknown passions they had kindled--passions
which they could neither guide nor control, and which ended by turning
the instigators of those passions into their victims.
In all future ages the ruins of that great House of France, which
had seemed destined to extend over the whole of Europe, will be the
wonder of mankind; but those who read its history with attention will
understand without difficulty its fall. Almost all the vices, almost
all the errors, almost all the fatal prejudices I have had occasion to
describe, owed either their origin, or their duration, or their extent
to the arts practised by most of the kings of France to divide their
subjects in order to govern them more absolutely.
But when the middle classes were thus thoroughly severed from the
nobility, and the peasantry from the nobility, as well as from the
middle classes--when, by the progress of the same influences within
each class, each of them was internally subdivided into minute bodies,
almost as isolated from each other as the classes to which they
belonged, the result was one homogeneous mass, the parts of which no
longer cohered. Nothing was any longer so organised as to thwart the
Government--nothing so as to assist it; insomuch that the whole fabric
of the grandeur of the monarchy might fall to pieces at once and in a
moment as soon as the society on which it rested was disturbed.
And the people, which alone seem to have learnt something from the
misconduct and the mistakes of all its masters, if indeed it escaped
their empire, failed to shake off the false notions, the vicious
habits, the evil tendencies which those masters had imparted to
it, or allowed it to assume. Sometimes that people has carried the
predilections of a slave into the enjoyment of its liberty, alike
incapable of self-government and hostile to those who would have
directed it.
I now resume my track; and, losing sight of the old and general
facts which have prepared the great Revolution I design to paint, I
proceed to the more particular and more recent incidents which finally
determined its occurrence, its origin, and its character.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] See Notes LII. and LIII.
[60] See Note LIV., Example of the Mischievous Effects of the Pecuniary
Rights of the Clergy.
[61] See Note LV.
[62] See Note LVI., Superiority of Method adopted in the _Pays d’État_.
[63] See Note LVII., Repair of Roads, how regarded.
[64] See Note LVIII., Commitments for Non-performance of Compulsory
Labour.
[65] See Note LIX.
[66] See Note LX., Escort of Galley-slaves.
[67] See Note LXI.
[68] See Note LXII.
[69] See Note LXIII.