THAT THE FRENCH AIMED AT REFORM BEFORE LIBERTY.
It is worthy of observation that amongst all the ideas and all the
feelings which led to the French Revolution, the idea and the taste
for political liberty, properly so called, were the last to manifest
themselves and the first to disappear.
For some time past the ancient fabric of the Government had begun to
be shaken; it tottered already, but liberty was not yet thought of.
Even Voltaire had scarcely thought about it; three years’ residence
in England had shown him what that liberty is, but without attaching
him to it. The sceptical philosophy which was then in vogue in England
enchanted him; the political laws of England hardly attracted his
attention; he was more struck by their defects than by their merits. In
his letters on England, which are one of his best pieces, Parliament
is hardly mentioned; the fact was that he envied the English their
literary freedom without caring for their political freedom, as if the
former could ever long exist without the latter.
Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, a certain number of
writers began to appear who devoted themselves especially to questions
of public administration, and who were designated, in consequence of
several principles which they held in common, by the general name of
political economists or _physiocrates_. These economists have left less
conspicuous traces in history than the French philosophers; perhaps
they contributed less to the approach of the Revolution; yet I think
that the true character of the Revolution may best be studied in their
works. The French philosophers confined themselves for the most part to
very general and very abstract opinions on government; the economists,
without abandoning theory, clung more closely to facts. The former said
what might be thought; the latter sometimes pointed out what might be
done. All the institutions which the Revolution was about to annihilate
for ever were the peculiar objects of their attacks; none found favour
in their sight. All the institutions, on the contrary, which may be
regarded as the product of the Revolution, were announced beforehand
by these economical writers, and ardently recommended; there is hardly
one of these institutions of which the germ may not be discovered in
some of their writings; and those writings may be said to contain all
that is most substantial in the Revolution itself.
Nay, more, their books already bore the stamp of that revolutionary
and democratic temper which we know so well: they breathe not only the
hatred of certain privileges, but even diversity was odious to them;
they would adore equality, even in servitude. All that thwarts their
designs is to be crushed. They care little for plighted faith, nothing
for private rights--or rather, to speak accurately, private rights have
already ceased in their eyes to exist--public utility is everything.
Yet these were men, for the most part, of gentle and peaceful lives,
worthy persons, upright magistrates, able administrators; but the
peculiar spirit of their task bore them onwards.
The past was to these economists a subject of endless contempt. ‘This
nation has been governed for centuries on false principles,’ said
Letronne, ‘everything seems to have been done by haphazard.’ Starting
from this notion, they set to work; no institution was so ancient or so
well-established in the history of France that they hesitated to demand
its suppression from the moment that it incommoded them or deranged the
symmetry of their plans. One of these writers proposed to obliterate
at once all the ancient territorial divisions of the kingdom, and
to change all the names of the provinces, forty years before the
Constituent Assembly executed this scheme.
They had already conceived the idea of all the social and
administrative reforms which the Revolution has accomplished before
the idea of free institutions had begun to cross their minds. They
were, indeed, extremely favourable to the free exchange of produce,
and to the doctrine of _laissez faire et laissez passer_, the basis of
free trade and free labour; but as for political liberties, properly
so called, these did not occur to their minds, or, if perchance they
did occur to their imaginations, such ideas were at once rejected.
Most of them began to display considerable hostility to deliberative
assemblies, to local or secondary powers, and, in general, to all
the checks which have been established, at different times, in all
free nations, to balance the central power of the Government. ‘The
system of checks,’ said Quesnay, ‘is a fatal idea in government.’
‘The speculations on which a system of checks has been devised are
chimerical,’ said a friend of the same writer.
The sole guarantee invented by them against the abuse of power was
public education; for, as Quesnay elsewhere observes, ‘despotism is
impossible when the nation is enlightened.’ ‘Struck by the evils
arising from abuses of authority,’ said another of his disciples,
‘men have invented a thousand totally useless means of resistance,
whilst they have neglected the only means which are truly efficacious,
namely, public, general, and continual instruction in the principles
of essential justice and natural order.’ This literary nonsense was,
according to these thinkers, to supply the place of all political
securities.
Letronne, who so bitterly deplored the forlorn condition in which the
Government had left the rural districts, who described them as without
roads, without employment, and without information, never conceived
that their concerns might be more successfully carried on if the
inhabitants themselves were entrusted with the management of them.
Turgot himself, who deserves to rank far above all the rest for the
elevation of his character and the singular merits of his genius, had
not much more taste than the other economists for political liberty,
or, at least, that taste came to him later, and when it was forced
upon him by public opinion. To him, as well as to all the others,
the chief political security seemed to be a certain kind of public
instruction, given by the State, on a particular system and with a
particular tendency. His confidence in this sort of intellectual drug,
or, as one of his contemporaries expressed it, ‘in the mechanism of an
education regulated by principles,’ was boundless. ‘I venture to assure
your Majesty,’ said he, in a report to the King, proposing a plan of
this nature, ‘that in ten years your people will have changed out of
knowledge; and that by their attainments, by their morality, and by
their enlightened zeal for your service and for that of the country,
France will be raised far above all other nations. Children who are
now ten years of age will then have grown up as men prepared for the
public service, attached to their country, submissive, not through fear
but through reason, to authority, humane to their fellow-citizens,
accustomed to recognise and to respect the administration of justice.’
Political freedom had been so long destroyed in France that men had
almost entirely forgotten what are its conditions and its effects.
Nay, more, the shapeless ruins of freedom which still remained, and
the institutions which seem to have been formed to supply its place,
rendered it an object of suspicion and of prejudice. Most of the
Provincial Assemblies which were still in existence retained the spirit
of the Middle Ages as well as their obsolete formalities, and they
checked rather than advanced the progress of society. The Parliaments,
which alone stood in lieu of political bodies, had no power to prevent
the evil which the Government did, and frequently prevented the good
which the Government attempted to do.
To accomplish the revolution which they contemplated by means of all
these antiquated instruments appeared impracticable to the school of
economists. To confide the execution of their plans to the nation,
mistress of herself, was not more agreeable to them; for how was it
possible to cause a whole people to adopt and follow a system of reform
so extensive and so closely connected in all its parts? It seemed to
them more easy and more proper to make the administrative power of the
Crown itself the instrument of their designs.
That new administrative power had not sprung from the institutions of
the Middle Ages, nor did it bear the mark of that period; in spite
of its errors they discovered in it some beneficial tendencies. Like
themselves it was naturally favourable to equality of conditions and
to uniformity of rules; as much as themselves it cordially detested
all the ancient powers which were born of feudalism or tended to
aristocracy. In all Europe no machine of government existed so well
organised, so vast, or so strong. To find such a government ready to
their hands seemed to them a most fortunate circumstance; they would
have called it providential, if it had been the fashion then, as it now
is, to cause Providence to intervene on all occasions. ‘The state of
France,’ said Letronne, ‘is infinitely better than that of England, for
here reforms can be accomplished which will change the whole condition
of the country in a moment; whilst among the English such reforms may
always be thwarted by political parties.’
The point was, then, not to destroy this absolute power, but to convert
it. ‘The State must govern according to the rules of essential order,’
said Mercier de la Rivière, ‘and when this is the case it ought to be
all powerful.’ ‘Let the State thoroughly understand its duty, and then
let it be altogether free.’ From Quesnay to the Abbé Bodeau they were
all of the same mind. They not only relied on the royal administration
to reform the social condition of their own age, but they partially
borrowed from it the idea of the future government they hoped to found.
The latter was framed in the image of the former.
These economists held that it is the business of the State not only
to command the nation, but to fashion it in a certain manner, to form
the character of the population upon a certain preconceived model, to
inspire the mind with such opinions and the heart with such sentiments
as it may deem necessary. In fact, they set no limits to the rights
of the State, nor to what it could effect. The State was not only to
reform men, but to transform them--perhaps if it chose, to make others!
‘The State can make men what it pleases,’ said Bodeau. That proposition
includes all their theories.
This unlimited social power which the French economists had conceived
was not only greater than any power they ever beheld, but it differed
from every other power by its origin and its nature. It did not flow
directly from the Deity, it did not rest on tradition; it was an
impersonal power; it was not called the King, but the State; it was not
the inheritance of a family, but the product and the representative of
all. It entitled them to bend the right of every man to the will of the
rest.
That peculiar form of tyranny which is called Democratic Despotism, and
which was utterly unknown to the Middle Ages, was already familiar to
these writers. No gradations in society, no distinctions of classes, no
fixed ranks--a people composed of individuals nearly alike and entirely
equal--this confused mass being recognised as the only legitimate
sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the faculties which could
enable it either to direct or even to superintend its own government.
Above this mass a single officer, charged to do everything in its
name without consulting it. To control this officer, public opinion,
deprived of its organs; to arrest him, revolutions, but no laws. In
principle, a subordinate agent; in fact, a master.
As nothing was as yet to be found about them which came up to this
ideal, they sought it in the depths of Asia. I affirm, without
exaggeration, that there is not one of these writers who has not, in
some of his productions, passed an emphatic eulogy on China. That, at
least, is always to be found in their books; and, as China was still
very imperfectly known, there is no trash they have not written about
that empire. That stupid and barbarous government, which a handful of
Europeans can overpower when they please, appeared to them the most
perfect model to be copied by all the nations of the earth. China was
to them what England, and subsequently the United States, became for
all Frenchmen. They expressed their emotion and enchantment at the
aspect of a country, whose sovereign, absolute but unprejudiced, drives
a furrow once a year with his own hands in honour of the useful arts;
where all public employments are obtained by competitive examination,
and which has a system of philosophy for its religion, and men of
letters for its aristocracy.
It is supposed that the destructive theories which are designated
in our times by the name of _socialism_ are of recent origin: this,
again, is a mistake; these theories are contemporary with the first
French school of economists. Whilst they were intent on employing the
all-powerful government they had conceived in order to change the form
of society, other writers grasped in imagination the same power to
subvert its foundations.
In the _Code de la Nature_, by Morelly, will be found, side by side
with the doctrines of the economists on the omnipotence and unlimited
rights of the State, several of the political theories which have most
alarmed the French nation in these later times, and which are supposed
to have been born before our eyes--community of goods, the right to
labour, absolute equality of conditions, uniformity in all things, a
mechanical regularity in all the movements of individuals, a tyranny to
regulate every action of daily life, and the complete absorption of the
personality of each member of the community into the whole social body.
‘Nothing in society shall belong in singular property to any one,’
says the first article of this code. ‘Property is detestable, and
whosoever shall attempt to re-establish it, shall be shut up for life,
as a maniac or an enemy of mankind. Every citizen is to be supported,
maintained, and employed at the public expense,’ says Article II. ‘All
productions are to be stored in public magazines, to be distributed to
the citizens and to supply their daily wants. Towns will be erected on
the same plan; all private dwellings or buildings will be alike; at
five years of age all children will be taken from their parents and
brought up in common at the cost of the State and in a uniform manner.’
Such a book might have been written yesterday: it is a hundred years
old. It appeared in 1755, at the very time when Quesnay founded his
school. So true it is that centralisation and socialism are products of
the same soil; they are to each other what the grafted tree is to the
wild stock.
Of all the men of their time, these economists are those who would
appear most at home in our own; their passion for equality is so
strong, and their taste for freedom is so questionable, that one might
fancy they are our contemporaries. In reading the speeches and the
books of the men who figured in the Revolution of 1789, we are suddenly
transported into a place and a state of society quite unknown to us;
but in perusing the books of this school of economists one may fancy
we have been living with these people, and have just been talking with
them.
About the year 1750 the whole French nation would not have been
disposed to exact a larger amount of political freedom than the
economists themselves. The taste and even the notion of freedom had
perished with the use of it. The nation desired reform rather than
rights; and if there had been at that time on the throne of France a
sovereign of the energy and the character of Frederick the Great, I
doubt not that he would have accomplished in society and in government
many of the great changes which have been brought about by the
Revolution, and this not only without the loss of his crown, but with
a considerable augmentation of his power. It is said that one of the
ablest ministers of Louis XV., M. de Machault, had a glimpse of this
idea, and imparted it to his master; but such undertakings are not the
result of advice: to be able to perform them a man must have been able
to conceive them.
Twenty years later the state of things was changed. A vision of
political freedom had visited the mind of France, and was every
day becoming more attractive, as may be inferred from a variety of
symptoms. The provinces began to conceive the desire to manage once
more their own affairs. The notion that the whole people has a right
to take part in the government diffused itself and took possession of
the public. Recollections of the old States-General were revived. The
nation, which detested its own history, recalled no other part of it
with pleasure but this. This fresh current of opinion bore away the
economists themselves, and compelled them to encumber their Unitarian
system with some free institutions.
When, in 1771, the Parliaments were destroyed, the same public, which
had so often suffered from their prejudices, was deeply affected by
their fall. It seemed as if with them fell the last barrier which could
still restrain the arbitrary power of the Crown.
This opposition astonished and irritated Voltaire. ‘Almost all the
kingdom is in a state of effervescence and consternation,’ he wrote to
one of his friends; ‘the ferment is as great in the provinces as at
Paris itself. Yet this edict seems to be full of useful reforms. To
abolish the sale of public offices, to render the administration of
justice gratuitous, to prevent suitors from coming from all corners
of the kingdom to Paris to ruin themselves there, to charge the Crown
with the payment of the expenses of the seignorial jurisdictions--are
not these great services rendered to the nation? These Parliaments,
moreover, have they not been often barbarous and persecutors? I am
really amazed at the out-of-the-way people who take the part of these
insolent and indocile citizens. For my own part I think the King right;
and since we must serve, I think it better to serve under a lion born
of a good family, and who is by birth much stronger than I am, than
under two hundred rats of my own condition.’ And he adds, by way of
excuse, ‘Remember that I am bound to appreciate highly the favour the
King has conferred on all the lords of manors, by undertaking to pay
the expenses of their jurisdictions.’
Voltaire, who had long been absent from Paris, imagined that public
opinion still remained at the point where he had left it. But he was
mistaken. The French people no longer confined themselves to the desire
that their affairs should be better conducted; they began to wish to
conduct their affairs themselves, and it was manifest that the great
Revolution, to which everything was contributing, would be brought
about not only with the assent of the people, but by their hands.
From that moment, I believe that this radical Revolution, which was to
confound in common ruin all that was worst and all that was best in
the institutions and condition of France, became inevitable. A people
so ill-prepared to act for themselves could not undertake a universal
and simultaneous reform without a universal destruction. An absolute
sovereign would have been a less dangerous innovator. For myself,
when I reflect that this same Revolution, which destroyed so many
institutions, opinions, and habits adverse to freedom, also destroyed
so many of those things without which freedom can hardly exist, I
incline to the belief that had it been wrought by a despot it would
perhaps have left the French nation less unfit one day to become a free
people, than wrought as it was by the sovereignty of the people and by
the people themselves.
What has here been said must never be lost sight of by those who would
understand the history of the French Revolution.
When the love of the French for political freedom was awakened, they
had already conceived a certain number of notions on matters of
government, which not only did not readily ally themselves with the
existence of free institutions, but which were almost contrary to them.
They had accepted as the ideal of society a people having no
aristocracy but that of its public officers, a single and all-powerful
administration, directing the affairs of State, protecting those of
private persons. Meaning to be free, they by no means meant to deviate
from this first conception: only they attempted to reconcile it with
that of freedom.
They, therefore, undertook to combine an unlimited administrative
centralisation with a preponderating legislative body--the
administration of a bureaucracy with the government of electors. The
nation as a whole had all the rights of sovereignty; each citizen
taken singly was thrust into the strictest dependence; the former
was expected to display the experience and the virtues of a free
people--the latter the qualities of a faithful servant.
This desire of introducing political freedom in the midst of
institutions and opinions essentially alien or adverse to it, but which
were already established in the habits or sanctioned by the taste of
the French themselves, is the main cause of the abortive attempts at
free government which have succeeded each other in France for more
than sixty years; and which have been followed by such disastrous
revolutions, that, wearied by so many efforts, disgusted by so,
laborious and so sterile a work, abandoning their second intentions for
their original aim, many Frenchmen have arrived at the conclusion that
to live as equals under a master is after all not without some charm.
Thus it is that the French of the present day are infinitely more
similar to the Economists of 1750 than to their fathers in 1789.
I have often asked myself what is the source of that passion for
political freedom which in all ages has been the fruitful mother of the
greatest things which mankind have achieved--and in what feelings that
passion strikes root and finds its nourishment.
It is evident that when nations are ill directed they soon conceive the
wish to govern themselves; but this love of independence, which only
springs up under the influence of certain transient evils produced by
despotism, is never lasting: it passes away with the accident that gave
rise to it; and what seemed to be the love of freedom was no more than
the hatred of a master. That which nations made to be free really hate
is the curse of dependence.
Nor do I believe that the true love of freedom is ever born of the
mere aspect of its material advantages; for this aspect may frequently
happen to be overcast. It is very true that in the long run freedom
ever brings, to those who know how to keep it, ease, comfort, and often
wealth; but there are times at which it disturbs for a season the
possession of these blessings; there are other times when despotism
alone can confer the ephemeral enjoyment of them. The men who prize
freedom only for such things as these are not men who ever long
preserved it.
That which at all times has so strongly attached the affection of
certain men is the attraction of freedom itself, its native charms
independent of its gifts--the pleasure of speaking, acting, and
breathing without restraint, under no master but God and the law. He
who seeks in freedom aught but herself is fit only to serve.
There are nations which have indefatigably pursued her through every
sort of peril and hardship. They loved her not for her material gifts;
they regard herself as a gift so precious and so necessary that no
other could console them for the loss of that which consoles them for
the loss of everything else. Others grow weary of freedom in the midst
of their prosperities; they allow her to be snatched without resistance
from their hands, lest they should sacrifice by an effort that
well-being which she had bestowed upon them. For them to remain free,
nothing was wanting but a taste for freedom. I attempt no analysis of
that lofty sentiment to those who feel it not. It enters of its own
accord into the large hearts God has prepared to receive it; it fills
them, it enraptures them; but to the meaner minds which have never felt
it, it is past finding out.