SHOWING THAT THE REIGN OF LOUIS XVI. WAS THE MOST PROSPEROUS EPOCH OF
THE OLD FRENCH MONARCHY, AND HOW THIS VERY PROSPERITY ACCELERATED
THE REVOLUTION.
It cannot be doubted that the exhaustion of the kingdom under Louis
XIV. began long before the reverses of that monarch. The first
indication of it is to be perceived in the most glorious years of his
reign. France was ruined long before she had ceased to conquer. Vauban
left behind him an alarming essay on the administrative statistics of
his time. The Intendants of the provinces, in the reports addressed by
them to the Duke of Burgundy at the close of the seventeenth century,
and before the disastrous War of the Spanish Succession had begun, all
alluded to the gradual decline of the nation, and they speak of it not
as a very recent occurrence: ‘The population has considerably decreased
in this district,’ says one of them. ‘This town, formerly so rich and
flourishing, is now without employment,’ says another. Or again: ‘There
have been manufactures in this province, but they are now abandoned;’
or, ‘The farmers formerly raised much more from the soil than they do
at present; agriculture was in a far better condition twenty years
ago.’ ‘Population and production have diminished by about one-fifth
in the last thirty years,’ said an Intendant of Orleans at the same
period. The perusal of these reports might be recommended to those
persons who are favourable to absolute government, and to those princes
who are fond of war.
As these hardships had their chief source in the evils of the
constitution, the death of Louis XIV., and even the restoration of
peace, did not restore the prosperity of the nation. It was the general
opinion of all those who wrote on the art of government or on social
economy in the first half of the eighteenth century, that the provinces
were not recovering themselves; many even thought that their ruin was
progressive. Paris alone, they said, grows in wealth and in extent.
Intendants, ex-ministers, and men of business were of the same opinion
on this point as men of letters.
For myself, I confess that I do not believe in this continuous decline
of France throughout the first half of the eighteenth century; but an
opinion so generally entertained amongst persons so well informed,
proves at least that the country was making at that time no visible
progress. All the administrative records connected with this period of
the history of France which have fallen under my observation denote,
indeed, a sort of lethargy in the community. The government continued
to revolve in the orbit of routine without inventing any new thing;
the towns made scarcely an effort to render the condition of their
inhabitants more comfortable or more wholesome; even in private life no
considerable enterprise was set on foot.
About thirty or forty years before the Revolution broke out the scene
began to change. It seemed as if a sort of inward perturbation, not
remarked before, thrilled through the social frame. At first none but
a most attentive eye could discern it; but gradually this movement
became more characterised and more distinct. Year by year it gained in
rapidity and in extent; the nation stirs, and seems about to rise once
more. But, beware! It is not the old life of France which re-animates
her. The breath of a new life pervades the mighty body, but pervades it
only to complete its dissolution. Restless and agitated in their own
condition, all classes are straining for something else; to better that
condition is the universal desire, but this desire is so feverish and
wayward that it leads men to curse the past, and to conceive a state of
society altogether the reverse of that which lies before them.
Nor was it long before the same spirit penetrated to the heart of the
Government. The Government was thus internally transformed without any
external, alteration; the laws of the kingdom were unchanged, but they
were differently applied.
I have elsewhere remarked that the Comptrollers-General and the
Intendants of 1760 had no resemblance to the same officers in 1780. The
correspondence of the public offices demonstrates this fact in detail.
Yet the Intendant of 1780 had the same powers, the same agents, the
same arbitrary authority as his predecessor, but not the same purposes;
the only care of the former was to keep his province in a state of
obedience, to raise the militia, above all to collect the taxes;
the latter has very different views, his head is full of a thousand
schemes for the augmentation of the wealth of the nation. Roads,
canals, manufactures, commerce, are the chief objects of his thoughts;
agriculture more particularly attracts his notice. Sully came into
fashion amongst the administrators of that age.
Then it was that they began to form the agricultural societies, which I
have already mentioned; they established exhibitions, they distributed
prizes. Some of the circulars of the Comptrollers-General were more
like treatises on husbandry than official correspondence.
In the collection of all the taxes the change which had come over the
mind of the governing body was especially perceptible. The existing law
was still unfair, arbitrary and harsh, as it had long been, but all its
defects were mitigated in the application of it.
‘When I began to study our fiscal laws,’ says M. Mollien,[72] in his
Memoirs, ‘I was terrified by what I found there: fines, imprisonment,
corporal punishment, were placed at the disposal of exceptional courts
for mere oversights; the clerks of the revenue farms had almost all
property and persons in their power, subject to the discretion of their
oaths. Fortunately I did not confine myself to the mere perusal of this
code, and I soon had occasion to find out that between the text of the
law and its application there was the same difference as between the
manners of the old and the new race of financiers.’
‘The collection of taxes may undoubtedly give rise to infinite abuses
and annoyances,’ said the Provincial Assembly of Lower Normandy in
1787; ‘we must, however, do justice to the gentleness and consideration
with which these powers have been exercised for some years past.’
The examination of public records fully bears out this assertion.
They frequently show a genuine respect for the life and liberty of
man, and more especially a sincere commiseration for the sufferings
of the poor, which before would have been sought for in vain. Acts of
violence committed by the fiscal officers on paupers had become rare;
remissions of taxation were more frequent, relief more abundant. The
King augmented all the funds intended to establish workshops of charity
in the rural districts, or to assist the indigent, and he often founded
new ones. Thus more than 80,000 livres were distributed by the State
in this manner in the district of Upper Guienne alone in 1779; 40,000
in 1784 in that of Tours; 48,000 in that of Normandy in 1787. Louis
XVI. did not leave this portion of the duties of government to his
Ministers only; he sometimes took it upon himself. When in 1776, an
edict of the Crown fixed the compensation due to the peasantry whose
fields were devastated by the King’s game in the neighbourhood of the
Royal seats, and established a simple and certain method of enforcing
the payment of it, the King himself drew the preamble of the decree.
Turgot relates that this virtuous and unfortunate Prince handed the
paper to him with these words: ‘You see that I too have been at work.’
If we were to pourtray the Government of the old French monarchy such
as it was in the last years of its existence, the image would be too
highly flattered and too unlike the reality.
As these changes were brought about in the minds of the governing class
and of the governed, the prosperity of the nation expanded with a
rapidity heretofore unknown. It was announced by numerous symptoms: the
population largely augmented; the wealth of the country augmented more
largely still. The American War did not arrest this movement; the State
was embarrassed by it, but the community continued to enrich itself by
becoming more industrious, more enterprising, more inventive.
‘Since 1774,’ says one of the members of the administration of that
time, ‘different kinds of industry have by their extension enlarged
the area of taxation on all commodities. ‘If we compare the terms of
arrangement agreed upon at different periods of the reign of Louis
XVI. between the State and the financial companies which farmed the
public revenue, the rate of payment will be found to have risen at each
renewal with increasing rapidity. The farm of 1786 produced fourteen
millions more than that of 1780. ‘It may be reckoned that the produce
of duties on consumption is increasing at the rate of two millions per
annum,’ said Necker, in his Report of 1781.
Arthur Young declared that, in 1788, Bordeaux carried on a larger trade
than Liverpool. He adds: ‘Latterly the progress of maritime commerce
has been more rapid in France than in England; trade has doubled there
in the last twenty years.’
With due regard to the difference of the times we are speaking of, it
may be established that in no one of the periods which have followed
the Revolution of 1789 has the national prosperity of France augmented
more rapidly than it did in the twenty years preceding that event.[73]
The period of thirty-seven years of the constitutional monarchy of
France, which were times of peace and progress, can alone be compared
in this respect to the reign of Louis XVI.
The aspect of this prosperity, already so great and so rapidly
increasing, may well be matter of surprise, if we think of all the
defects which the Government of France still included, and all the
restrictions against which the industry of the nation had still to
contend. Perhaps there may be politicians who, unable to explain the
fact, deny it, being of the opinion of Molière’s physician that a
patient cannot recover against the rules of art. How are we to believe
that France prospered and grew rich with unequal taxation, with a
diversity of customary law, with internal custom-houses, with feudal
rights, with guilds, with purchased offices, &c.? In spite of all this,
France was beginning to grow rich and expand on every side, because
within all this clumsy and ill-regulated machinery, which seemed
calculated to check rather than to impel the social engine, two simple
and powerful springs were concealed, which, already, sufficed to keep
the fabric together, and to drive it along in the direction of public
prosperity--a Government which was still powerful enough to maintain
order throughout the kingdom, though it had ceased to be despotic; a
nation which, in its upper classes, was already the most enlightened
and the most free on the continent of Europe, and in which every man
could enrich himself after his own fashion and preserve the fortune he
had once acquired.
The King still spoke the language of an arbitrary ruler, but in reality
he himself obeyed that public opinion which inspired or influenced
him day by day, and which he constantly consulted, flattered, feared;
absolute by the letter of the laws, limited by their application.
As early as 1784, Necker said in a public document as a thing not
disputed: ‘Most foreigners are unable to form an idea of the authority
now exercised in France by public opinion; they can hardly understand
what is that invisible power which makes itself obeyed even in the
King’s palace; yet such is the fact.’
Nothing is more superficial than to attribute the greatness and the
power of a people exclusively to the mechanism of its laws; for, in
this respect, the result is obtained not so much by the perfection of
the engine as by the amount of the propelling power. Look at England,
whose administrative laws still at the present day appear so much more
complicated, more anomalous, more irregular, than those of France![74]
Yet is there a country in Europe where the national wealth is greater,
where private property is more extended, varied, and secure, or where
society is more stable and more rich? This is not caused by the
excellence of any laws in particular, but by the spirit which pervades
the whole legislation of England. The imperfection of certain organs
matters nothing, because the whole is instinct with life.
As the prosperity, which I have just described, began to extend
in France, the community nevertheless became more unsettled and
uneasy; public discontent grew fierce; hatred against all established
institutions increased. The nation was visibly advancing towards a
revolution.
Nay, more, those parts of France which were about to become the chief
centres of this revolution were precisely the parts of the territory
where the work of improvement was most perceptible. An examination
of what remains of the archives of the ancient circumscription of
the Ile de France readily shows that the abuses of the monarchy had
been soonest and most effectually reformed in the immediate vicinity
of Paris.[75] There, the liberty and property of the peasants were
already better secured than in any other of what were termed the _pays
d’élection_. Personal forced service had disappeared long before 1789.
The _taille_ was levied with greater regularity, moderation, and
fairness than in any other part of France. The ordinance made in 1772
for the amelioration of this tax in this district is a striking proof
of what an Intendant could do for the advantage or for the misery of a
whole province. As seen through this document, the aspect of the tax
was already changed. Government commissioners were to proceed every
year to each parish; the community was to assemble before them; the
value of the taxable property was to be publicly established, and the
resources of every tax-payer to be ascertained in his presence; in
short, the _taille_ was assessed with the assent of all those who had
to pay it. The arbitrary powers of the village syndic, the unprofitable
violence of the fiscal officers, were at an end. The _taille_ no doubt
retained its inherent defects under any system of collection: it
lighted upon but one class of taxpayers, and lay as heavy on industry
as upon property; but in all other respects it widely differed from
that which still bore the same name in the neighbouring divisions of
the territory.
Nowhere, on the contrary, were the institutions of the whole monarchy
less changed than on the banks of the Loire, near the mouths of that
river, in the marshes of Poitou and the heaths of Brittany. Yet there
it was that the fire of civil war was kindled and kept alive, and that
the fiercest and longest resistance was opposed to the Revolution; so
that it might be said that the French found their position the more
intolerable the better it became. Surprising as this fact is, history
is full of such contradictions.
It is not always by going from bad to worse that a country falls into
a revolution. It happens most frequently that a people, which had
supported the most crushing laws without complaint, and apparently
as if they were unfelt, throws them off with violence as soon as the
burden begins to be diminished. The state of things destroyed by a
revolution is almost always somewhat better than that which immediately
preceded it; and experience has shown that the most dangerous moment
for a bad government is usually that when it enters upon the work of
reform. Nothing short of great political genius can save a sovereign
who undertakes to relieve his subjects after a long period of
oppression. The evils which were endured with patience so long as they
were inevitable seem intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained
of escaping from them. The abuses which are removed seem to lay bare
those which remain, and to render the sense of them more acute; the
evil has decreased, it is true, but the perception of the evil is more
keen. Feudalism in all its strength had not inspired as much aversion
to the French as it did on the eve of its disappearance. The slightest
arbitrary proceedings of Louis XVI. seemed more hard to bear than all
the despotism of Louis XIV.[76] The brief detention of Beaumarchais
produced more excitement in Paris than the Dragonnades.
No one any longer contended in 1780 that France was in a state of
decline; there seemed, on the contrary, to be just then no bounds
to her progress. Then it was that the theory of the continual and
indefinite perfectibility of man took its origin. Twenty years before
nothing was to be hoped of the future: then nothing was to be feared.
The imagination, grasping at this near and unheard-of felicity, caused
men to overlook the advantages they already possessed, and hurried them
forward to something new.
Independently of these general reasons, there were other causes of this
phenomenon which were more peculiar and not less powerful. Although
the financial administration had improved with everything else, it
still retained the vices which are inherent in absolute government.
As the financial department was secret and uncontrolled, many of the
worst practices which had prevailed under Louis XIV. and Louis XV. were
still followed. The very efforts which the Government made to augment
the public prosperity--the relief and the rewards it distributed--the
public works it caused to be executed--continually increased the
expenditure without adding to the revenue in the same proportion;
hence the King was continually thrown into embarrassments greater than
those of his predecessors. Like them, he left his creditors unpaid;
like them, he borrowed in all directions, but without publicity and
without competition, and the creditors of the Crown were never sure of
receiving their interest; even their capital was always at the mercy of
the sovereign.
A witness worthy of credit, for he had seen these things with his own
eyes and was better qualified than any other person to see them well,
remarks on this subject:--‘The French were exposed to nothing but risks
in their relations with their own Government. If they placed their
capital in the State stocks, they could never reckon with certainty on
the payment of interest to a given day; if they built ships, repaired
the roads, clothed the army, they had nothing to cover their advance
and no certainty of repayment, so that they were reduced to calculate
the chances of a Government contract as if it were a loan on terms
of the utmost risk.’ And the same person adds, very judiciously: ‘At
this time, when the rapid growth of industry had developed amongst a
larger number of men the love of property and the taste and the desire
of comfort, those who had entrusted a portion of their property to the
State were the more impatient of a breach of contract on the part of
that creditor who was especially bound to fulfil his obligations.’
The abuses which are here imputed to the French administration were not
at all new; what was new was the impression they produced. The vices
of the financial system had even been far more crying in former times;
but changes had taken place in Government and in society which rendered
them infinitely more perceptible than they were of old.
The Government, having become more active in the last twenty years,
and having embarked in every species of undertaking which it had never
thought of before, was at last become the greatest consumer of the
produce of industry and the greatest contractor of public works in the
kingdom. The number of persons who had pecuniary transactions with the
State, who were interested in Government loans, lived by Government
wages, or speculated in Government contracts, had prodigiously
increased. Never before had the fortune of the nation and the fortunes
of private persons been so much intermingled. The mismanagement of
the public finances, which had long been no more than a public evil,
thus became to a multitude of families a private calamity. In 1789
the State was indebted nearly 600 millions of francs to creditors who
were almost all in debt themselves, and who inoculated with their own
dissatisfaction against the Government all those whom the irregularity
of the public Treasury caused to participate in their embarrassments.
And it must be observed, that as malcontents of this class became
more numerous, they also became more exasperated; for the love of
speculation, the thirst for wealth, the taste for comfort, having grown
and extended in proportion to the business transacted, the same evils
which they might have endured thirty years before without complaint now
appeared altogether insupportable.
Hence it arose that the fundholders, the traders, the manufacturers,
and other persons engaged in business or in monetary affairs, who
generally form the class most hostile to political innovation, the most
friendly to existing governments, whatever they may be, and the most
submissive to the laws even when they despise and detest them, were on
this occasion the class most eager and resolute for reform. They loudly
demanded a complete revolution in the whole system of finance, without
reflecting that to touch this part of the Government was to cause every
other part to fall.
How could such a catastrophe be averted? On the one hand, a nation in
which the desire of making fortunes extended every day--on the other,
a Government which incessantly excited this passion, which agitated,
inflamed, and beggared the nation, driving by either path on its own
destruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[72] [Count Mollien was educated in the fiscal service of the old
monarchy, and after having escaped the perils of the Revolution
he became Minister of the Treasury to the Emperor Napoleon, and
under the Restoration a Peer of France. He left Memoirs of his
Administration, which have been printed for private circulation by his
widow, the estimable Countess Mollien, in four volumes octavo, but
not yet published. These Memoirs are a model of personal integrity
and financial judgment, the more remarkable as it was the fate of
M. Mollien to live in times when these qualities were equally rare.
The work was reviewed in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ 1849-1850, and this
article was republished in 1872, in Mr. Reeve’s ‘Royal and Republican
France.’]
[73] See Note LXVI., Progress of France.
[74] See Note LXVII., Judicial Institutions of England.
[75] See Note LXVIII., Privileges of the District of Paris.
[76] See Note LXIX.