SHOWING THAT A GREAT ADMINISTRATIVE REVOLUTION HAD PRECEDED THE
POLITICAL REVOLUTION, AND WHAT WERE THE CONSEQUENCES IT PRODUCED.
Nothing had yet been changed in the form of the French Government,
but already the greater part of the secondary laws which regulated
the condition of persons and the administration of affairs had been
abolished or modified.
The destruction of the Guilds, followed by their partial and incomplete
restoration, had totally changed all the old relations between workmen
and their employers. These relations had become not only different, but
uncertain and difficult. The police of the masters was at an end; the
authority of the State over the trades was imperfectly established; and
the artisan, placed in a constrained and undecided position between the
Government and his employer, did not know to whom he was to look for
protection, or from whom he was to submit to restraint. This state of
discontent and anarchy, into which the whole lower class of the towns
had been plunged at one blow, produced very great consequences as soon
as the people began to reappear on the political stage.
One year before the Revolution a Royal edict had disturbed the order
of the administration of justice in all its parts; several new
jurisdictions had been created, a multitude of others abolished, and
all the rules of judicial competence changed. Now in France, as I have
already shown, the number of persons engaged in administering justice
and in executing the sentences of the law was enormous. In fact, it may
be said that the whole of the middle class was more or less connected
with the tribunals. The effect of this law, therefore, was to unsettle
the station and property of thousands of families, and to place them in
a new and precarious position. The edict was little less inconvenient
to litigants, who found it difficult, in the midst of this judicial
revolution, to discover what laws were applicable to their cases, and
by what tribunals they were to be decided.
But it was the radical reform which the Administration, properly so
called, underwent in 1787, which more than all the rest first threw
public affairs into disorder, and shook the private existence of every
individual citizen.
I have already mentioned that in what were termed the _pays
d’élection_, that is to say, in about three-quarters of France, the
whole administration of each district was abandoned to one man, the
Intendant, who acted not only without control, but without advice.
In 1787, in addition to the Intendant, a Provincial Assembly was
created, which assumed the real administration of the country. In each
village an elective municipal body likewise took the place of the
ancient parochial assemblies, and in most cases of the Syndic.
A state of the law so opposed to that which had preceded it, and which
so completely changed not only the whole course of affairs, but the
relative position of persons, was applied in all places at the same
moment and almost in the same manner, without the slightest regard to
previous usages or to the peculiar situation of each province, so fully
had the passion for unity which characterised the Revolution taken
possession of the ancient Government, which the Revolution was about to
destroy.
These changes served to display the force of habit in the action of
political institutions, and to show how much easier it is to deal with
obscure and complicated laws, which have long been in use, than with a
totally new system of legislation, however simple.
Under the old French monarchy there existed all sorts of authorities,
which varied almost infinitely, according to the provinces; but as
none of these authorities had any fixed or definite limits, the
field of action of each of them was always common to several others
besides. Nevertheless, affairs had come to be transacted with a
certain regularity and convenience; whereas the newly established
authorities, which were fewer in number, carefully circumscribed, and
exactly similar, instantly conflicted and became entangled in hopeless
confusion, frequently reducing each other mutually to impotence.
Moreover the new law had one great vice which in itself would have
sufficed, especially at first, to render it difficult of execution: all
the powers it created were collective[81] or corporate.
Under the old monarchy there had been only two methods of
administration. Where the administration was entrusted to one man, he
acted without the assistance of any assembly; wherever assemblies
existed, as in the _pays d’état_ or in the towns, the executive power
was not vested in any particular person; the Assembly not only governed
and superintended the administration, but administered itself, or by
means of temporary commissions which it appointed.
As these were the only two modes of operation which were then
understood, when one was given up the other was adopted. It is
strange that in the midst of a community so enlightened, and where
the administration of the Government had long played so prominent a
part, no one ever thought of uniting the two systems and of drawing a
distinction, without making a separation, between the power which has
to execute and that which superintends and directs. This idea, which
appears so simple, never occurred to any one; it was not discovered
until the present century, and may be said to be the only great
invention in the field of public administration which we can claim.
We shall see hereafter the results of the contrary practice when
these administrative habits were transferred to political life, and
when, in obedience to the traditions of the old institutions of the
monarchy, hated as they were, the system which had been followed by
the provincial estates and the small municipalities of the towns was
applied in the National Convention; and the causes which had formerly
occasioned a certain embarrassment in the transaction of business
suddenly engendered the Reign of Terror.
The Provincial Assemblies of 1787 were invested with the right of
governing themselves in most of the cases in which, until then, the
Intendant had acted alone; they were charged, under the authority of
the Central Government, with the assessment of the _taille_ and with
the superintendence of its collection--with the power of deciding what
public works were to be undertaken, and with their execution. All the
persons employed in public works, from the inspector down to the driver
of the road-gang, were under their control. They were to order what
they thought proper, to render an account of the services performed
to the Minister, and to suggest to him the fitting remuneration. The
parochial trusts were almost entirely placed under the direction of
these assemblies; they were to decide, in the first instance, most
of the litigated matters which had until then been tried before the
Intendant. Many of these functions were unsuitable for a collective and
irresponsible body, and moreover they were to be performed by men who
were now, for the first time, to take a part in the administration.
The confusion was made complete by depriving the Intendant of all
power, though his office was not suppressed. After taking from him the
absolute right of doing everything, he was charged with the task of
assisting and superintending all that was to be done by the Assembly;
as if it were possible for a degraded public officer to enter into the
spirit of the law by which he has been dispossessed and to assist its
operation.
That which had been done to the Intendant was now extended to his
Sub-delegate. By his side, and in the place which he had formerly
occupied, was placed a District Assembly, which was to act under the
direction of the Provincial Assembly, and upon analogous principles.
All that we know of the acts of the Provincial Assemblies of 1787,[82]
and even their own reports, show that as soon as they were created
they engaged in covert hostilities and often in open war with the
Intendants, who made use of their superior experience only to embarrass
the movements of their successors. Here an Assembly complained that
it was only with difficulty that it could extract the most necessary
documents from the hands of the Intendant. There an Intendant accused
the members of the Assembly of endeavouring to usurp functions, which,
as he said, the edicts had still left to himself. He appealed to the
Minister, who often returned no answer, or merely expressed doubts,
for the subject was as new and as obscure to him as to every one else.
Sometimes the Assembly resolved that the Intendant had administered
badly, that the roads which he had caused to be made were ill planned
or ill kept up, and that the corporate bodies under his trust have gone
to ruin. Frequently these assemblies hesitated in the obscurity of laws
so imperfectly known; they sent great distances to consult one another,
and constantly sent each other advice. The Intendant of Auch asserted
that he had the right to oppose the will of the Provincial Assembly
which had authorised a parish to tax itself; the Assembly maintained
that this was a subject on which the Intendant could no longer give
orders, but only advice, and it asks the Assembly of the Ile de France
for its opinion.
Amidst all these recriminations and consultations the course of
administration was impeded and often altogether stopped; the vital
functions of the country seemed almost suspended. ‘The stagnation of
affairs is complete,’ says the Provincial Assembly of Lorraine, which
in this was only the echo of several others, ‘and all good citizens are
grieved at it.’
On other occasions these new governing bodies erred on the side of
over-activity and excessive self-confidence; they were filled with a
restless and uneasy zeal, which led them to seek to change all the old
methods suddenly, and hastily to reform all the most ancient abuses.
Under the pretext that henceforth they were to be the guardians of
the towns, they assumed the control of municipal affairs; in a word,
they put the finishing stroke to the general confusion by aiming at
universal improvement.
Now, when we consider what an immense space the administrative powers
of the State had so long filled in France, the numerous interests
which were daily affected by them, and all that depended upon them or
stood in need of their co-operation; when we reflect that it was to
the Government rather than to themselves that private persons looked
for the success of their own affairs, for the encouragement of their
manufactures, to ensure their means of subsistence, to lay out and keep
up their roads, to maintain their tranquillity, and to preserve their
wealth, we shall have some idea of the infinite number of people who
were personally injured by the evils from which the administration of
the kingdom was suffering.
But it was in the villages that the defects of the new organisation
were most strongly felt; in them it not only disturbed the course
of authority, it likewise suddenly changed the relative position of
society, and brought every class into collision.
When, in 1775, Turgot proposed to the King to reform the administration
of the rural districts, the greatest difficulty he encountered, as he
himself informs us, arose from the unequal incidence of taxation: for
how was it possible to make men who were not all liable to contribute
in the same manner, and some of whom were altogether exempt from
taxation, act and deliberate together on parochial affairs relating
chiefly to the assessment and the collection of those very taxes and
the purposes to which they were to be applied? Every parish contained
nobles and the clergy who did not pay the _taille_, peasants who were
partially or wholly exempt, and others who paid it all. It was as
three distinct parishes, each of which would have demanded a separate
administration. The difficulty was insoluble.
Nowhere, indeed, was the inequality of taxation more apparent than
in the rural districts; nowhere was the population more effectually
divided into different groups frequently hostile to one another.
In order to make it possible to give to the villages a collective
administration and a free government on a small scale, it would have
been necessary to begin by subjecting all the inhabitants to an equal
taxation and lessening the distance by which the classes were divided.
This was not, however, the course taken when the reform was begun
in 1787. Within each parish the ancient distinction of classes was
maintained, together with the inequality of taxation, which was its
principal token, but, nevertheless, the whole administration was placed
in the hands of elective bodies. This instantly led to very singular
results.
When the electoral assembly met in order to choose municipal officers,
the Curé and the Seigneur were not to appear; they belonged, it was
alleged, to the orders of the nobility and the clergy, and this was
an occasion on which the commonalty had principally to choose its
representatives.
When, however, the municipal body was once elected, the Curé and the
Seigneur were members of it by right; for it would not have been decent
altogether to exclude two such considerable inhabitants from the
government of the parish. The Seigneur even presided over the parochial
representatives in whose election he had taken no part, but in most of
their proceedings he had no voice. For instance, when the assessment
and division of the _taille_ were discussed, the Curé and the Seigneur
were not allowed to vote, for were they not both exempt from this
tax? On the other hand, the municipal council had nothing to do with
their capitation-tax, which continued to be regulated by the Intendant
according to peculiar forms.
For fear that this President, isolated as he was from the body which
he was supposed to direct, should still exert an indirect influence
prejudicial to the interests of the Order to which he did not belong,
it was demanded that the votes of his own tenants should not count; and
the Provincial Assemblies, being consulted on this point, gave it as
their opinion that this omission was proper, and entirely conformable
to principle. Other persons of noble birth, who might be inhabitants of
the parish, could not sit in the same plebeian corporation unless they
were elected by the peasants and then, as the by-laws carefully pointed
out, they were only entitled to represent the lower classes.
The Seigneur, therefore, only figured in this Assembly in a position
of absolute subjection to his former vassals, who were all at once
become his masters; he was their prisoner rather than their chief. In
gathering men together by such means as these, it seemed as if the
object was not so much to connect them more closely with each other
as to render more palpable the differences of their condition and the
incompatibility of their interests.
Was or was not the village Syndic still that discredited officer whose
duties no one would accept but upon compulsion, or was the condition
of the Syndic raised with that of the community to which he belonged
as its chief agent?[83] Even this question was not easily answered. I
have found the letter of a village bailiff, written in 1788, in which
he expresses his indignation at having been elected to the office
of Syndic, ‘which was,’ he said, ‘contrary to all the privileges of
his other post.’ To this the Comptroller-General replies that this
individual must be set right: that he must be made to understand that
he ought to be proud of the choice of his fellow-citizens; and that
moreover the new Syndics were not to resemble the local officers who
had formerly borne the same appellation, and that they would be treated
with more consideration by the Government.
On the other hand some of the chief inhabitants of parishes, and even
men of rank, began at once to draw nearer to the peasantry, as soon
as the peasantry had become a power in the State. A landed proprietor
exercising a heritable jurisdiction over a village near Paris
complained that the King’s Edict debarred him from taking part, even as
a mere inhabitant, in the proceedings of the Parochial Assembly. Others
consented, from mere public spirit, as they said, to accept even the
office of Syndic.
It was too late: but as the members of the higher classes of society
in France thus began to approach the rural population and sought to
combine with the people, the people drew back into the isolation
to which it had been condemned and maintained that position. Some
parochial assemblies refused to allow the Seigneur of the place to take
his seat among them; others practised every kind of trick to evade the
reception of persons as low-born as themselves, but who were rich. ‘We
are informed,’ said the Provincial Assembly of Lower Normandy, ‘that
several municipal bodies have refused to receive among their members
landowners not being noble and not domiciled in the parish, though
these persons have an undoubted right to sit in such meetings. Some
other bodies have even refused to admit farmers not having any property
in land in the parish.’
Thus then the whole reform of these secondary enactments was already
novel, obscure, and conflicting before the principal laws affecting the
government of the State had yet been touched at all. But all that was
still untouched was already shaken, and it could barely be said that
any law was in existence which had not already been threatened with
abolition or a speedy change by the Central Government itself.
This sudden and comprehensive renovation of all the laws and all
the administrative habits of France, which preceded the political
Revolution of 1789, is a thing scarcely thought of at the present time,
yet it was one of the severest perturbations which ever occurred in the
history of a great people. This first revolution exercised a prodigious
influence on the Revolution which was about to succeed it, and caused
the latter to be an event different from all the events of the same
kind which had ever till then happened in the world and from those
which have happened since.[84]
The first English Revolution, which overthrew the whole political
constitution of the country and abolished the monarchy itself, touched
but superficially the secondary laws of the land and changed scarcely
any of the customs and usages of the nation. The administration of
justice and the conduct of public business retained their old forms and
followed even their past aberrations. In the heat of the Civil Wars the
twelve judges of England are said to have continued to go the circuit
twice a year. Everything was not, therefore, abandoned to agitation at
the same time. The Revolution was circumscribed in its effects, and
English society, though shaken at its apex, remained firm upon its base.
France herself has since 1789 witnessed several revolutions which have
fundamentally changed the whole structure of her government. Most
of them have been very sudden and brought about by force, in open
violation of the existing laws. Yet the disorder they have caused has
never been either long or general; scarcely have they been felt by the
bulk of the nation, sometimes they have been unperceived.
The reason is that since 1789 the administrative constitution of
France has ever remained standing amidst the ruins of her political
constitutions. The person of the sovereign or the form of the
government was changed, but the daily course of affairs was neither
interrupted nor disturbed: every man still remained submissive, in
the small concerns which interested himself, to the rules and usages
with which he was already familiar; he was dependent on the secondary
powers to which it had always been his custom to defer; and in most
cases he had still to do with the very same agents; for, if at each
revolution the administration was decapitated, its trunk still
remained unmutilated and alive; the same public duties were discharged
by the same public officers, who carried with them through all the
vicissitudes of political legislation the same temper and the same
practice. They judged and they administered in the name of the King,
afterwards in the name of the Republic, at last in the name of the
Emperor. And when Fortune had again given the same turn to her wheel,
they began once more to judge and to administer for the King, for the
Republic, and for the Emperor, the same persons doing the same thing,
for what is there in the name of a master? Their business was not so
much to be good citizens as to be good administrators and good judicial
officers. As soon as the first shock was over, it seemed, therefore, as
if nothing had stirred in the country.
But when the Revolution of 1789 broke out, that part of the Government
which, though subordinate, makes itself daily felt by every member of
the commonwealth, and which affects his well-being more constantly and
decisively than anything else, had just been totally subverted: the
administrative offices of France had just changed all their agents and
revised all their principles. The State had not at first appeared to
receive a violent shock from this immense reform; but there was not a
man in the country who had not felt it in his own particular sphere.
Every one had been shaken in his condition, disturbed in his habits, or
put to inconvenience in his calling. A certain order still prevailed in
the more important and general affairs of the nation; but already no
one knew whom to obey, whom to apply to, nor how to proceed in those
lesser and private affairs which form the staple of social life. The
nation having lost its balance in all these details, one more blow
sufficed to upset it altogether, and to produce the widest catastrophe
and the most frightful confusion that the world had ever beheld.
FOOTNOTES:
[81] See Note LXXIV.
[82] See Note LXXV., Contests in the Provincial Assemblies of 1787.
[83] See Note LXXVI.
[84] See Note LXXVII., Definition of Feudal Rights.