The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924086360983 DATE DUE ^^^ -'iiiii^iL?.]^!!. GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S. A In compliance with current copyriglit law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 1999 THE CAUSES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BV RICHARD HEATH PABNEY, M.A., Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY ;88a Copyright, i8 HENRY HOLT & CO. Pres* W. L Mershon 8e. Co., Rahway, N. J, 3is ^atfe«v, THE SUREST GUIDE AND BEST INSTRUCTOR OF HIS YOUTH, THE TRUEST FRIEND OF HIS MANHOOD, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. Of all the events in the annals of man since the dawn of the Christian Era, the French Revolution is, perhaps, the most extraordinary. It is not strange, therefore, that it should have fascinated the imagination of a multitude of historians. Nor can it be denied that Blanc, Mignet, Michelet, Carlyle, von Sybel, Taine, and others have vividly depicted its stirring scenes. But, however complete the pic- ture they have given us of the Revolution itself, I venture to think that the causes of the Revolution have never been comprehensively treated by any sin- gle writer whatever. It would be difficult to give a more brilliant account of the pomp and pageantry of the old French Court ; of the enormous privileges of the nobility and clergy ; of the frightful misery of the peasantry ; of the crushing weight of taxa- tion ; of the bands of ferocious poachers, smugglers and highwaymen that swarmed through France in the eighteenth century; and of many other mat- ters of importance, than is given in Taine's L' Ancicn Regime. Louis Blanc has discussed with ability some of the more remote causes of the Revolution, and has shown clearly the revolutionary tendency of the works of Quesnay, Gournay, the elder Mira- beau, and others of the Econoinistcs. His treatment. VI PREFACE. too, of the conflict between Jesuits and Jansenists, and of the radical writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, d'Holbach, and others is exceedingly vig- orous. The ablest discussion, however, of this lit- erary movement against Church and State is given by Buckle. That brilliant thinker has described with a master-hand the vast influence of England upon France, and has traced the course of the tur- bulent intellectual stream from its rise at the death of Louis XIV. to its inundation of France in 1789. He has pointed out the baleful effects of the " pro- tective spirit," and the fatal consequences to the French government of its insane persecution of lite- rary men. He has shown with much clearness and learning the close connection between the progress of physical science and the radical spirit of the age, and has called attention to many other interesting symptoms of the approaching Revolution. The con- dition of the bourgeoisie, the great preponderance of Paris, and the extreme legislative, administrative and judicial centralization are among the subjects so powerfully handled by de Tocqueville. Other topics have been well presented by still other writers. But there is no writer — -so far as I am aware — who has not omitted, in his enumeration of the causes of the Revolution, to discuss some point, or points, of the gravest importance. To sup- ply, in a measure, this deficiency, is the object of this work. That the author has succeeded in giving a completely adequate discussion of so great and complex an historical question, it would be arrogant to claim. But he nevertheless ventures to hope PREFA CE. VU that, in a short space, he has given a more compre- hensive account of the causes of the great upheaval than has thus far appeared. In preparing the work, the author has not only- made use of the facts recorded by the above-men- tioned writers and otliers, but has also used their thoughts, and even their language, when it seemed best to do so. In passages where the language of any writer has been paraphrased for the sake of con- densation or for other reasons, no quotation marks have, of course, been employed. For such cases this general acknowledgment, it is hoped, Avill suffice, and will relieve the author of the necessity of load- ing his margin with references. The work is based on a series of nine lectures which were delivered in the spring of 1886, by special request, before the faculty and students of Washing- ton and Lee University and the public of Lexington, Virginia. R. H. DABNEY. Bloomington, Ind., February 15, 1888. CONTENTS. Chapter Page I. Introductory ...... i II. MEDi.a:vAi. Priests, Nobles, and Kiugs . . g III. Pecuniary Privileges of Nobility and Clergy . 13 IV. The Classes and the Masses . . . ..20 V. Absentee Landlords .... 26 VI. Patrician Monopoly of the Chase . -35 VII. Egotism and Intolerance of the Clergy . 41 VIII. Sinecures of the Nobility . . . -45 IX. The Vampires of Versailles ... 50 [X. Prince and Prelate versus Squire and Curate . 54 XI. Absolutism of the King . . . ._ 58 XII. Life at the Court . . . . .62 XIII. The Middle Class .... 77 XIV. Peasantry and Populace . . . .86 XV. Direct Taxes ...... 93 XVI. Indirect Taxes C^ . . . .97 XVII. Forced Labor and Military Service . . 103 XVIII. Poachers, Smugglers, Beggars, Brigands . . 107 XIX. Extreme Centralization . . . .113 XX. Intellectual Decline under Louis XIV. . . 128 XXI. Influence of England upon France . . 134 XXII. Persecution of French Writers . . .144 XXIII. Rationalistic Movement in Europe . . 158 XXIV. English Deists and other Writers . . 172 XXV. Digression on Witchcraft . . .183 XXVI. England and France ..... igo XXVII. Why the attack on the Church Preceded That on the State ..... 194 C02VT£NTS. Chapter XXVIII. Jesuits and Jansenists « XXIX. The Attack on t he Church XXX. The Materialistic Philosophy XXXI. Progress of Physical Science XXXII. Influence of Physical Science XXXIII. The Political Economists ." XXXIV. Absolute Monarchy Attacked XXXV. Absolute Democracy Preached XXXVI. Approach op the Crisis XXXVII. Summary and Conclusion . Paos . 202 209 . 224 233 . 241 247 260 265 . 280 286 THE CAUSES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. WHEN the Roman Empire, weak from internal decay, had yielded at length to the savage force of the Hunnish hordes and the sturdy strokes of the rude Germanic tribes of the North, Europe sank down into the torpid slumber of the Dark Ages. In the West, it seemed that the civilization of Greece and Rome had been entirely swept away ; and in the Byzantine Empire the descendants of Aristotle and Plato wasted their intellectual acute- ness in ferocious theological wranglings upon in- soluble questions. Hom(?ousians and Hom^zousians made the air resound with their vain disputes, and Athanasians murdered Arians, while Arians butchered Athanasians. For hundreds of years Con- stantinople was the battleground of opposing sects ; and even in the fifteenth century, when the sword of the Ottoman Turk was flaming before the gates of the city, the Greekscould get no help from the Pope of 2 IN TROD UCTOR Y. Rome because they were unable to agree whether the Holy Ghost proceedeth from the Father and the Son or only from the Father. In Western Europe, for a time, things were even worse. For about five or six hundred years, thought all but ceased entirely. The age of the Merovingians was an age of gross super- stition, savage anarchy, and bloodshed. Nor was the genius of Charlemagne sufficient to create civili- zation out of barbarism ; and after his death anarchy reigned once more supreme in Italy, Germany, and France. And yet, amidst all this lawlessness and confusion, the old civilization was not wholly dead. The priests, the only class who possessed even the sem- blance of an education, could at least read and write a species of mongrel Latin, and thus preserved, in spite of their not infrequent participation in rapine and murder, at least the instrument of future intel- lectual and social progress. Gradually there was formed from mingled Roman and Germanic elements the institution of Feudalism, which culminated in the age of chivalry and the Crusades — that strange product of the religious and the warlike spirits, where pious enthusiasm, chivalrous devotion, and heroic valor were indissolubly blended with high- way robbery, ferocious cruelty, and brutal lust. The Crusades were the symptom and the result of the power of the noble and the power of the priest ; but they also mark the period when that power began to wane. The contact of the Christians with the then far more civilized Mohammedans had stimulated Europe INTRODUCTORY. 3 to thought. Heresies arose, and, though deluged with blood, could never be extinguished. Men had at least begun to think for themselves, men like Abelard and Arnold of Brescia, like Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus ; and, thought being once aroused, the Church was unable to crush it. It could be extirpated neither by the wholesale massa- cre of the Albigenses, nor by the abolition, on a charge of heresy, of the order of the Knights Tem- plar, and the burning of fifty-four of its members, nor by the persecution of the Wyclififites and the Lollards and the Hussites. All these heresies were premonitory symptoms of the approach of that vast rebellion against authority which, aided by the printing-press, culminated in the Reformation and the French Revolution. And as with the priest, so with the noble. At the close of the Crusades the nobility was decimated by battle and pestilence. The estates of many of the nobles were burdened with debt, and came into the hands of the thrifty burgesses of the rising cities. Everywhere in Europe the " industrial spirit " was gradually overcoming the martial indolence of the nobility; and the towns, in alliance with the kings, were breaking the power of the aristocracy. This movement was accelerated by the invention of gun- powder, which put the mail-clad knight on a level with the peasant musketeer, and the turreted castle at the mercy of the cannon. The middle and lower classes, in their struggle against the tyranny of the nobles, formed an alliance with the Crown ; but when the kings of Europe, after weakening the political 4 INTMODUCTORY. power of the nobles, attempted themselves to tyran- nize over the people, they provoked an opposition, feeble at first, but which, like the great rebellion against authority in religion, grew stronger and stronger, and also culminated in the French Revo- lution. In France the Crown had begun its victories over the great nobles as early as the reign of Louis VI., before the middle of the twelfth century; and from that time on tlie movement was slow but steady toward unity and order under the king, as opposed to disjointed anarchy under the nobles. When Philip Augustus defeated John of England and Otho IV. of Germany at the battle of Bouvines in 12 14, the French people felt distinctly, for the first time, a thrill of national and union sentiment. There were many reactions, of course, many temporary triumphs of the sectional spirit of the nobles ; but these were but the eddies in the stream, and were unable to effect- ually impede the central current, which, under kings like Louis VIII., Louis IX., Philip the Fair, and, later on, Louis XI. and Francis I., flowed inevitably toward the goal of an organized and coherent nation. The decisive strokes, however, were dealt by Richelieu, who crushed the centrifugal tendencies of the Huguenot nobles; and by Mazarin, who tri- umphed over the uprising known as the Fronde, and thus ushered in the concentrated absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. Under this sovereign, whose saying, L'Hat, cestmoi, is the very epitome of the theory of unlimited monarchy, France was the greatest mili- tary power in the world and the arbiter of Europe. IN TROD UC TOR Y. 5 The king of England and some of the petty German princes were the hireh'ngs of Louis, and the domains of France were enlarged. For a long time, the people, dazzled by military glory and the splendor of the Court of Versailles, which was the ideal of nearly every prince in Europe, bore not only without a murmur, but even gladly, the lack of all political freedom and the tyranny of the royal officials. But when the over- weening arrogance of Louis had plunged the coun- try into disastrous wars against the combined forces of nearly all Europe ; when his religious fanaticism had driven from France more than half a million* of her most opulent and industrious citizens, the Hugue- nots ; when, in spite of grinding taxation, the treasury was almost empty, and the population de- creasing, the love of the people turned to hate ; and when at last the old King's eyes had closed in death, the country went almost mad with joy.f Bowed down by misfortunes of many kinds, and a slave to the influence of the superstitious Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV. had become exceedingly pious in the latter part of his reign, and had infused a spirit of religious hypocrisy through the whole court. But when he died there followed a sudden and violent reaction, and many indemnified them- selves for the tyranny under which they had suf- fered by plunging into the grossest excesses. But, * Weber's "Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte," Leipzig, 1873, Vol. II., p. 259. Buckle's "History of Civilization," New York, 1870, Vol. I., p. 493. t Buckle, p. 517. 6 INTRODUCTORY. among the young men of that day, there were some whose ideas of liberty rose higher than license ; and, determined to restore to France that freedom of speech which she had lost, they turned their eyes to the only country where that freedom was then al- lowed. This determination "gave rise," says Buckle, "to that junction of the French and Eng- lish intellects which, looking at the immense chain of its effects, is by far the most important fact in the history of the eighteenth century." But before examining this and the other causes of that stupendous upheaval which is called the French Revolution, I shall endeavor to paint a picture of France as it was before the Revolution, a picture of the Old Regime — a picture of the Court, of the nobility, of the clergy, of the bourgeoisie or middle class, of the peasantry and the populace of the cities, of the social life in general, and of the char- acter and methods of the government. Having done this, I shall proceed to inquire why it was that so rotten an edifice'was inevitably doomed to fall ; and the reader will then see that the French Revo- lution was not the product of chance, not an acci- dent, but the inevitable result of complex and re- sistless forces which, for nearly a hundred years, had been slowly but surely undermining the very foun- dations of the old French society ; that it was, in fact, but the explosion of a powder magazine, to which the train had been long since laid, but the denouement of a terrible tragedy long prepared. Of course, if Louis XV. and Louis XVL had been men of different characters, and if their ministers and ad- IN TROD UC TOR Y. 7 visers had been 'other than they were, the details of the Revolution might have been slightly different. If Napoleon had possessed a less phenomenal genius for war, the doctrines of the Revolution would not have been disseminated so rapidly and so radically through Europe as they were. But the great gen- eral results of the Revolution, the destruction of the antiquated and oppressive rights of the privileged classes, in short, the destruction of almost every- thing that pertains to mediaeval Feudalism, were produced, and produced inevitably, by great general causes, wholly beyond the control of any individual. It was the misfortune of France that the rubbish of the Middle Ages had to be swept away by the dyna- mite of Revolution ; while in England, under more favorable conditions, it was, and still is being, re- moved by the process of gradual reform. For in England, owing to the insular position of the coun- try, which protected it from foreign foes, there was never the same necessity for a strong central mili- tary power as on the continent, where each nation is constantly menaced by its neighbors. The Crown was, therefore, never able in England to triumph so completely over the nobles, and after- wards over the people, as in France. In England there were legal methods of popular opposition to the encroachments of the King ; but in France there was no great legislative assembly like the English Parliament, no great popular political meetings, no freedom of the press, no habeas corptis, no Bill of Rights ; and the so-called parliaments (which were courts of justice with closely circumscribed semi- 8 INTRODUCTORY. legislative functions, such as the right to register or remonstrate against the King's edicts) concerned themselves much more with the narrow interests of their class than with the rights of the people. Thus it was that, the laws being all on the side of the privileged classes, and these classes being determined to retain their privileges, there was only one road to popular freedom — the road of the Revolution. I shall begin, then, by examining the structure of the old French society — its several classes, and the relative status of these classes. And, first, a look at the privileged classes. CHAPTER II. MEDIEVAL PRIESTS, NOBLES, AND KINGS. IT has already been stated that, in the Dark Ages, the clergy was the only class that possessed even the rudiments of an education. And, although it cannot be denied that, in so rude a time, the priests were often as savage as the laymen, that they were sometimes actually the chieftains of robber-bands, it is nevertheless true that they w^re the only class which, in an age of lawlessness, advocated peace and opposed brute force. In an age when men pre- ferred a life of alternate indolence and robbery as a means of livelihood to honest work, the monks championed in words and by their example those habits of steady industry which are the basis of civil- ization. They alone it was who kept alive, amidst universal ignorance, the few sparks of the ancient literature, science, and art which had survived the inundation of the Roman Empire by the barba- rians. Looked upon by these rude men with the same awe with which their own former priests and sorcerers had inspired them, the Christian clergy were enabled, by threats of misfortune in this world and of eternal damnation in the next, to diminish, at least to some extent, the number of lawless and violent crimes. By the pomp and pageantry of a lo MEDIEVAL PRIESTS, NOBLES, AND KINGS. gorgeous and impressive ceremonial they infused into the minds of their ignorant followers a higher ideal than that of a simple cut-throat. In the midst of anarchy the Church alone possessed a powerful organization, habits of subordination, and a system of laws. Bishops and abbots were the ablest ad- visers and ministers of the kings. By intelligent and regular labor the monk produced more, and by sobriety and. economy consumed less, than the lay- man. Thus it was that where the latter failed the former prospered. He succored the needy and the fugitive ; and often the monastery was the nucleus of a future town. All this, and more, the clergy of the early Middle Ages performed for the people ; and they were richly rewarded by the enormous influence and 'power which they wielded for many centuries, and by the wealth which the pious heaped upon the Church. But when Europe had begun to awake from her mediaeval slumber ; when the clergy, instead of being the sole fosterers of the remnants of literature and science, had begun to oppose intellectual progress ; when the monasteries were no longer the centres of industry, but the seed-plots of idleness and vice ; when the great revolution of the sixteenth century had divided the Church into opposing sects ; and when the enthusiasm of that time had subsided, — it was seen that the Church still possessed, indeed, enormous wealth and numberless privileges, but that she no longer performed the services, in return for which, in a superstitious age, she had been permitted to wield so vast a power. THE TRUE ARISTOCRAT. 1 1 What her wealth and privileges were we shall presently see. But, first, a glance at the career of the nobility. When, after the death of Charlemagne, society was dissolved into its elements, and anarchy prevailed, who was it that was the natural aristocrat ? Evidently, the man who could fight most bravely and effectually in defence of himself and of others. Evidently, too, the man with sufficient means to possess a horse, a costly suit of armor and a good sword, or, still more, a fortified castle, was far more likely to succeed as a warrior than a pauper peasant. Hence there arose, partly by force, but largely by tacit consent, a division of labor between the noble and the peasant — the latter tilling the soil as a serf, and the former protecting him against robbery and violence. Like the negro slaves of the ante bellum Southern States, the mediaeval serfs were compelled to work for the nobles, and, in so barbarous an age, were of course more often maltreated ; but they received, in return, protection against their enemies, and attention in sickness and misfortune. The interests of lord and serf were linked together ; and the peasant was proud of the splendor and military prowess of his leader. The landed estate of a feudal baron was a country in miniature for the serf, like the Southern plantation for the negro slave. In so anarchical an age, however, the lesser nobles were often unable to protect themselves and their dependants from the depredations of hostile neigh- bors ; and, therefore, many of them swore fealty to the great counts and dukes in return for protection. 12 MEDIEVAL PRIESTS, NOBLES, AND KINGS. Thus more and more of the lesser nobles were united and organized under a few of the great territorial lords ; and at length the evolution was complete, when the greatest lord of all, the King, had united the whole country into a coherent organism. CHAPTER III. PECUNIARY PRIVILEGES OF NOBILITY AND CLERGY. PRIESTS, nobles, and kings, therefore, performed great services in their time ; and they also received an ampl-e recompense. But power begets arrogance, and inherited wealth begets luxury and sloth. And when we look at France in the eighteenth century we see that the privileged classes, so far from performing the services due from them, led lives of licentious ease, while the toiling millions groaned under their grasping tyranny. So far from being looked up to and admired as honored leaders, they were hated and feared by the people, whom they despised and neglected. Taine has estimated that in France, before the Revolution, the nobility numbered about 140,000, and the clergy about 130,000; that is, about 25,000 or 30,000 noble families, and about 23,000 monks in 2,500 monasteries, 37,000 nuns in 1,500 convents, and 60,000 curates and vicars in as many churches and chapels. If we divide the soil of France into five equal parts, we find that one of these fifths was owned by the king and the towns, another by the middle class, another by the peasantry, another by the nobility, and another by the clergy. Thus, the two latter classes, who numbered but 14 PRIVILEGES OF NOBILITY AND CLERGY. 270,000 in a population of 27,000,000, owned two- fifths of the soil of France. It must be remembered, too, that upon the land of the privileged classes were nearly all the largest and handsomest buildings, the palaces, castles, con- vents, and cathedrals, and nearly all the most costly furniture, silver plate, works of art, etc. The prop- erty of the clergy was worth nearly four billion francs, with an income of 80,000,000 or 100,000,000 a year. To this \ve must add the tithes, 123,000,000 a year, which make a total annual income of about 200,000,000 ; a sum which, owing to the subsequent change in the relative value of the precious metals, must be doubled if we wish to estimate the mod- ern equivalent. The Benedictine monks of Cluny alone, less than 300 in number, had an income of 1,800,000 francs ; the Cardinal de . Rohan, arch- bishop of Strasburg, of more than a million. Doubling these figures to obtain the modern equiva- lents, we see what colossal fortunes were in the hands of the great magnates of the Church. The case of the nobles was similar. It has been calculated that the appanages of the princes of the royal family, the counts of Artois and Provence, and the dukes of Orleans and Penthifevre covered a seventh of the territory of France. The princes of the blood possessed together a yearly income of nearly 25,000,000, the duke of Orleans alone an income of 11,500,000. And even this vast sum must be doubled for comparison with modern times. Such were some of the remnants of the period when dukes and counts were practically the sov- kkEMPTION FROM TAXATION: 15. fereigns of their territories. Dethroned by the kings, they had lost their sovereignty and ceased to per. form the duties of sovereigns, but retained their wealth. And they retained not merely the wealth, but many of the privileges and immunities of sover- eigns ; for example, their total or partial exemption from taxation. The iaille, the largest direct tax, which amounted, according to Necker, to 91,000,000 a year, fell almost entirely upon the roturiers or ple- beians. Nor were the nobles of the eighteenth century subject, except to a very small extent, to the vingtiemes and capitation, two other direct taxes, bearing respectively revenues of 76,500,000 and of 41,500,000 francs. These two taxes were originally intended to fall uniformly upon all citizens; but the clergy were soon enabled, through masterly diplomacy, to cast off the burden. Being an organized body, they could treat with the King, and gained the right to tax themselves and to pay their share in the form of a so-called "free gift" {don gratuit) ; then to diminish the amount of this gift, or sometimes not pay it at all. In 1788 they paid only 1,800,000 francs, and in 1789 they paid nothing at all. Still more : they sometimes actually succeeded in per- suading the King to pay them something out of the public treasury. The nobles, not being an organ- ized body, made private arrangements with the ministers, intendants, and other officials, who felt great deference for their rank. Their blue blood exempted them, their servants, and their servants' servants from military service, from the entertain- l6 PRIVILEGES OF NOBILITY AND CLERGY. ment of soldiers, and from the obligation to repair the public roads. The capitation tax being im- posed in a certain proportion to the Amount oi taille due from the tax-payer, the nobles, accordingly, paid scarcely any capitation. " In the provinces," says Turgot, " the capitation of the privileged has been gradually reduced to an excessively moderate amount, whereas the capitation of those subject to the taille is almost equal to the entire taille." For example, in the province of Champagne, where the capitation brought in nearly 1,500,000 francs, the nobility paid only 14,000. According to Calonne, if the concessions and privileges had been sup- pressed, the. vingt iemes \vou\d have brought in double what they did. The wealthier and more influential the noble, the greater his immunity. " I make arrangements," said the duke of Orleans, " with the ofificials, and pay only about what I wish to." The princes of the blood paid, as their share of the two mngtihne taxes, only 188,000 francs, instead of payifigr'Ss they should have done, 2,400,000. At bottom, the exemption of the nobility from taxa- tion was a remnant of their lost sovereignty; and the noble resisted the tax-gatherer, not solely from pecuniary interest, but because to be taxed was re- garded as the mark of a plebeian. " Your sensitive heart," wrote a nobleman to an intendant, "will never consent to a father of my station being taxed to the full extent of the vingtiimes like a vulgar father." Everywhere we see remnants, in the form of cer- emonies, rights and privileges, of this old sover- FRAGMENTS OF FEUDALISM. 17 eignty. The bishop, the abbot, the abbess, the chapter, as well as the laj' lord, possessed a species of domain ; for the monastery and the church were formerly miniature states like the county and the duchy. Thirty-two bishops, without counting the chapters, were thus the temporal as well as the spiritual lords, in whole or in part, of their episco- pal cities, sometimes of the environs, and some- times, as with the bishop of Saint-Claude, of the entire territory. Some noblemen were, to a certain extent, almost like viceroys. For example, the house of Orleans collected for itself the aides, which were taxes on wines and liquors, on articles of gold and silver, on the manufacture of iron, on steel, cards, paper, starch, etc. Even the lesser lord pos- sessed many rights which had survived the period of his local sovereignty. He had his special pew in church and the right of sepulture in the choir, and often the right of choosing the curate. Often, too, he was a justice, with the right to name the bailiff, the clerk of the court, the notaries, and other officials. He had his private prison, and sometimes actually his private scaffold. He appropriated the property of a man condemned to death, and also all lands which had lain uncultivated for ten years. If a piece of land was sold, the nobleman of the district took for himself a sixth, and sometimes a fifth or even a fourth of the price, which was also the case when land was rented for more than nine years. In 1724 the king suppressed 1,200 tolls which were levied by the nobles; but, though others were being continually suppressed, a great number i8 PRIVILEGES OF Nobility and clergV. remained. For example, the lord, or seigneur, levied tolls on the bridges, on the roads, on the fer- ries, on the boats ascending or descending, etc. Horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs which passed his chateau paid him toll. He taxed provisions and merchandise brought to his fair or his market. He forced the people to have their bread baked in his oven, their grapes pressed in his wine-press, their corn ground at his mill, their cattle butchered at his slaughter-house. For all this they had to pay exorbitant prices ; for he forcibly suppressed all competition and maintained the monopolies for himself. One million five hundred thousand peas- ants, who still wore the chain of serfdom upon their necks, were obliged to work ten or twelve days a year for their seigneurs, and to pay them an annual tax. In the barony of Choiseul, in the province of Champagne, the inhabitants were forced to plow and sow the lands of their master and to harvest and house his crops ; each parcel of land, each house, each herd of cattle paid him dues ; children inherited the property of their parents only on con- dition of living with them during their life-time ; and if absent at their death, the seigneur inherited the property. In the provinces of Bourbonnais,* Nivernais, Auvergne, Bourgogne, and others, the seigneur made the people pay for pasturing their cattle on the common. Everywhere in Old France we see the seigneur exercising similar rights, although their justification was gone. He owned * De Tocqueville, " L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution,' Mote at end of volume. FISH, GAME, PIGEONS. 19 the non-navigable streams in his domain, and he alone could grant the right to fish in them. To hunt was a mark of nobility, and therefore the seig- neur alone had the right to do so. The exclusive right to sell wine during the thirty or forty days after the harvest enabled him to obtain higher prices than the roturier. Blue blood possessed also the monopoly of owning pigeons ; and as thousands of these birds preyed upon the crops of the roturier, who was prohibited, under severe penalties, from killing tliem, there were few of the feudal rights more hated than this — as was seen at the opening of the Revolution, when the pigeon-houses all over France were torn down by the infuriate peasants. CHAPTER IV. THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. THESE and many more were the feudal rights enjoyed by the seigneur and execrated by the roturier. In the tenth century, the count, the bishop, and the abbot had performed services corresponding to their privileges. Butnotsonow. Havingceased to be the sovereign and the military leader of his peasants, the seigneur should, at least, have per- formed the functions of their local magistrate and of their representative with the central government. Outside of France we find the feudal rights of the no- bility and clergy still more numerous and severe ; but we also find greater services performed. As late as 1809 the bishop of Miinster in Westphalia ruled like a king ; but although he flogged his subjects as a father would flog his boys, he at any rate protected and cared for them as a father. He gave them an asylum in sickness and old age, and provided for their widows when they died. The code of Frederick the Great shows us that serfdom in Prussia was still more severe, but that it was also coupled with obliga- tions on the part of the lords. In England, the clergy still received the tithe from land-owners, and that, too, the strict tenth, instead of, as in France, an THE ENGLISH SQUIRE. 21 amount ranging from the eleventh to the thirty- second part of the crop. The Enghsh nobility owned a still larger proportion of the land than the French, and exercised a still greater authority. But the tenants and laborers of the English squire were no longer his serfs nor even his vassals; they were free. His government was by influence and not by — command. As proprietor and patron, as cultivator and improver of the land, the English squire gained the respect of the country people of his neighbor- hood ; and as lord-lieutenant, officer of the militia, administrator, and justice of the peace, he visibly performed useful social functions. And, what is • very important, he was not an absentee like the ; French seigne^ir, who danced attendance upon the King at Versailles, but resided upon his estate, and was thus well known from boyhood to the local pub- lic, and was in sympathy with his neighbors in his business and his pleasures, in his fox-hunts and in his services as a vestryman. Formerly, the French nobility had also resided upon their estates ; and even at the period that we are considering this was the case in a few of the provinces. And where it was the case we find much less discontent than else- where. While the seigneur treated the bourgeois with disdain, he showed great courtesy and affability to the peasant. When famine and distress came upon the peasants, they were not infrequently succored by the resident nobility and clergy. But these belonged for the most part to the poorer and lower ranks of the two great classes. The great nobles, like the great and influential dignitaries of 2 2 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. the Church, the commendatory abbots, the grand vicars, the canons, the bishops, and the archbishops, resided mostly in the large cities, and especially in Paris and Versailles. Only the poor and broken- down nobles, and the priors and curates (cur^s) dwelt in the country. These men, living, as they did, in daily contact with the peasants, felt sympathy with them — especially after general attention had been directed to the latter by the writings of Rousseau and the political economists, and the philanthropic spirit had spread from Paris to the chateaux and abbeys of the provinces. But in spite of the kindly disposition of the resi- dent nobles, and in spite of the kindly offices which some of them performed towards the poor, they continued to be, as a class, both hurtful and hated. For, while retaining their feudal rights, they no longer performed their feudal duties. In these the central government, as we shall see hereafter, had supplanted them. Without special permission of the King, no twenty seigneurs could meet together and deliberate. If those of Franche-Comt^ were allowed to dine together once a year and hear mass, it was only by tolerance, and only in the presence of the royal intendant. Except in his -very limited judicial duties, the seigneur took no part in public affairs. Nothing remained to him but his titles and his desire for titles and rank-distinctions. The instructions to many delegates of the nobility to the States-General of 1789 contained demands for a dis- tinctive mark of honor for the nobles — as, for ex- ample, a cross or a ribbon. Acts of administration. IMPOVEklStiED NOBLES. 23 such as the laying of royal taxes, the levying of the militia, the regulation of the statute labor upon the public roads, were regarded by the seigneur as beneath him, and fit only for a roturier. Disdainful and exclusive, he sulked in his chateau, and, so far from defending his peasants, was content to defend himself, to maintain his privileges, to have his taxes reduced, to obtain for his domestics exemption from military service, to preserve his person, his dwelling, his servants, and his hunting and fishing grounds from the universal usurpation which was delivering all property and all rights into the hands of " Mon- seigneur " the intendant and "Messieurs" the siibdeUgti^s. But, in spite of all their privileges, the nobility « were becoming impoverished ; and the poorer, the , prouder. In the memoirs of the time we meet with pen-pictures of hunting noblemen in hob-nailed shoes, with old rusty swords at their sides — half- starved, but refusing to work. The right of primo- geniture, instituted that sovereignty and patronage might not be divided, ruined the nobles when sov- ereignty and patronage were no longer theiis. " In Brittany," says Chateaubriand, "the eldest son inherited two-thirds of the property, and the younger sons divided among them the remaining third." Thus, he continues, " the younger sons of the younger sons soon reached the partition of a pigeon, a rab- bit, and a hunting-dog." Disdaining mercantile busi- ness, manufactures, and employment as government officials, they sank ever deeper into poverty. " High and puissant lords of a pigeon-house, a toad-hole, and 24 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. a rabbit warren," the more they lacked of the sub- stance of nobility the more they were attached to the name. Half-starved upon their estates, they spent the winter in the city, and squandered their little all. Debts and mortgages accumulated ; and, piece by piece, tlie seigneitr was compelled to sell his land, until, at last, nothing remained but his dwelling and his feudal rights. Having no other income than that from these rights, he of course rigorously en- forced the payments, however oppressive for the peasant they might be. Such, then, is the last scene of the great feudal drama. Such is the situation of the nobility after their political overthrow by the monarchy. In this last scene we behold the nobleman and the peasant, no longer bound together by the ties of mutual interests and mutual aid, but face to face as creditor and debtor. The peasant is the debtor. He must pay a large share of his hard-won earnings to the idle lord who does nothing for him in return. Around the crumbling chateau we see that sympathy and love are crumbling and falling into dust, while envy and hatred rise up and grow strong. The nobleman stands alone and isolated — a stranger among his vassals. With smouldering rage in his heart the hard-worked, half-starved peasant hands over to his lord a portion of the scanty wheat-crop that has escaped the ravages of the lordly pigeons and deer. With sullen anger, too, he gives to the seigneur a portion of the wine he has made, and one-sixteenth of the flour which is made at the mill of the lord. When he sells a field for 600 francs, he resigns with THE BELL OF jMOTRE DAME. 25 suppressed fury one hundred to his master. But wait. Wait till 1789. Wait till the storm of the Bastille has given the signal that the cup of bitter- ness is full, and the bell of Notre Dame has tolled the death-knell of the Feudal Age ; and we shall see the smouldering rage of the imbruted peasant burst forth into a flame — a flame that will consume the pigeon-house and the ancestral chateau, and drive the naked lord out into the darkness, upon the pitch- forks of his former serfs. CHAPTER V. ABSENTEE LANDLORDS. WHEN we pass from the lands where the nobles resided to those that were owned by absen- tees, the spectacle becomes still sadder. For these absentee nobles and clerical dignitaries were the privileged persons of the privileged classes — the aristocracy of the aristocracy. By their residence at the royal court, by their intermarriages and mutual visits, by their manners and their luxury, by the influence which they exercised and the hostility which they excited, they formed a group apart. They it was who possessed the vastest estates and the most extensive seigniories. The smallness of their numbers — for there were only about a thousand each of the upper nobility and the upper clergy — rendered still more conspicuous and odious the immensity of their monopoly. We have already seen that the appanages of the princes of the blood comprised one-seventh of the territory of France. From his forests and his canal alone the Dulce of Orleans, before marrying a wife as rich as himself, drew an income of a million. The seigniory of Clermontois, belonging to the Prince de Conde, con- tained forty thousand inhabitants; and not merel\' WHA T JS A BISHOP? 27 the usual feudal fees which swelled the purse of the seigneur belonged to this prince, but even the taxes which elsewhere belonged to the central government accrued to his Most Serene Highness {Son Altesse S^r^nissime). The Archbishop of Cambray, who was at the same time Duke of Cambray and Count of Cambr^sis, possessed the suzerainty of all ^he fiefs in a region which contained 75,000 inhabitants. He chose half the aldermen of Cambray and the entire administrative body of Cateau ; he named the abbots of two large abbeys; he presided over the provincial assembly and the permanent bureau which succeeded it. Near him, in Hainaut, the abbot of Saint-Amand owned seven-eighths of the provostship and received on the remaining eighth the seigniorial rents, corvdes, and tithes; moreover, he named the provost and the aldermen. According to the avowal of their own ofificial organs in 1788, the 131 bishops and archbishops had together '^,600,000 francs of episcopal revenue and 1,200,000 in abbeys, that is, an average income of 50,000 apiece, according to their own admission, but 100,000 in truth. " What is a bishop? " was a ques- tion that some one asked in that time. " A bishop," was the reply, "is a grand seigneur with an income of a hundred thousand," which in our own day would be worth two hundred thousand. Thirty-three of the abbots received incomes which, when estimated in modern French money, ranged from one to five hundred thousand francs apiece, and twenty-seven of the abbesses incomes ranging from eighty to four hundred thousand. 28 ABSE^TTEE LAHDLORbS. The recipients of all these gigantic incomes squeezed from the starving poor should surely; have resided upon their estates and performed some ser- vice in return. But the officials of the Crown had" politically supplanted them, and the gregarious national character of the French impelled tliem toward the capital. That they should come to the Court was, moreover, the desire of the monarch, whose splendor was the greater, the greater the number of lords to revolve as satellites around him. By such courtly services the nobles were sure of obtaining from the King governorships, military commands, bishoprics, fiefs, pensions, sinecures of every species and description. Not to come to the Court was to neglect a duty to His Majesty and to incur his dis- ■ pleasure ; so that the cabinet ministers of the King wrote to the intendants to inquire whether the nobles of their respective provinces liked to stay at home, and whether they refused to come and pay their respects to the King. The Court of Versailles was a great permanent salon, the scene of a great permanent festival, where the nobleman had naught to do but to be ever in proximity to his royal master, to show himself, to cut a figure, to amuse himself, and to converse, at the centre of news, of action and affairs, with the dite of the kingdom and the arbiters of ton, elegance, and taste. " Sire," said a courtier to Louis XIV., "to be away from Your Majesty is not merely to be unhappy; it is to be ridiculous." To be exiled from the Court and com- pelled to live on his country estate was the worst disgrace for a nobleman ; and to the humiliation was •'ALL FRAiVCE" AT Tr-LE COURT. 29 added the ennui of the situation. In the eyes of the French courtier of that age the loveliest country- seat was a frightful "desert." " Exile alone," says Arthur Young, an intelligent English country gentle- man who, just on the eve of the Revolution, travelled through France in all directions for three years, " forces the French nobility to do what the English do by preference: to reside upon their estates to improve them." "There is not a single estate of- considerable size in the kingdom," said the elder Mirabeau in 1756, " of which the proprietor is not at Paris, and does not con.sequently neglect his estate." Besides the exiles, only the poorer nobles stayed in the country. The rest were at Paris and Versailles. "All France was there," frequently said Saint-Simon and other chroniclers in speaking of festivities at the court. And all of France that counted for anything tvas there. The millions who worked and starved counted for naught at the gorgeous court of Louis le Grand. The consequence of this neglect of their country estates by the nobility was that a third of the soil of France was as badly cultivated and as unproductive as Ireland in the worst days of absenteeism. "All the signs I have seen of their grandeur," says Arthur Young, in speaking of the vast estates of the Prince de Soubise and the Duke de Bouillon, "are heaths, moors, deserts, fern-beds. Visit their castles, wherever they may be, and you will find them in the midst of forests inhabited by deer, wild boars, and wolves." And if the nobility thus allowed the land to grow wild and uncultivated, how could it be otherwise 30 ABSENTEE LANDLORDS. with the peasants? Cut off from the upper class, and, as we shall hereafter see, from the middle class also, that is, from both of those classes who, by inter- course with them, would have introduced new ideas and refining and civilizing influences among them, living in misery and squalor, how could- the peasants of France have been much better than brutes ? And when at length the signal came, what was there to prevent their rising up and overwhelm- ing their oppressors with fire and sword? But of this the nobles knew nothing. Absolutism had so long reigned supreme in France that no one thought of the possibility of the masses rising up in arms. The idyllic pictures of the peasantry that were painted by the master-hand of Rousseau infused, indeed, a spirit of sentimental compassion for the poor into the minds of the upper classes, but pro- duced the false impression that the villager was a good, gentle, humble, grateful, simple-hearted creature. And how should the gay, bespangled lord, who passed his butterfly existence in the illumined ball-rooms of Versailles, know aught of the true nature of the wretched inmate of a filthy cabin? How could he knew that beneath the seemingly gay exterior of the peasant — for not even misery can wholly suppress the natural buoyancy of man, and especially of a Frenchman — there lurked the ferocity of a tiger? It is cheap and easy for demagogues and doctri- naires to rant with indiscriminate abuse against kings and nobles; but impartial History must remember that kings and nobles, like other men, are human UNPRACTICAL PHILANTHROPY. 31 beings, and that their specific faults are due to the specific circumstances in which they are placed. The French nobles were by no means worse at heart than other men. Shortly before the Revolution they dis- cussed with enthusiasm the " rights of man," " lib- erty," " equality," and the other similar current phrases. They said, too, that it was necessary to succor the suffering people ; but their ideas were en- tangled in vague generalities and were utterly unpractical. Coming but seldom in contact with the peasantry they knew but little of their real condi- tion ; and consequently their sympathy was intel- lectual and vaguely philanthropic rather than imme- diate and in the feelings. The compassion of a man who actually sees but one human being in the ago- nies of death from starvation is far more powerfully excited than that of one who merely hears or reads of starving thousands in a distant province. This is human nature, and it is useless to rail at it. The French nobles at Versailles saw and knew almost as little of the peasants who toiled and starved that they might dance as their descendants know of the red-skinned followers of Sitting Bull and Hole-in-the- Day. Had they resided on their estates, and become personally acquainted with their peasants, they could and would have been more lenient towards them. But, instead of this, each of them employed an agent {rigisseur) to collect the tithes and other dues from the peasants. Thus, the proprietor, being absent and failing to come in contact with the laborers, thought but little of their suflerings ; while the agent who had bargained to hand over a fixed sum to the 32 ABSENTEE LANDLORDS. lord had no right to be generous at the expense of his employer, and was not likely to pay out of his own pocket any deficiency. Moreover, he was fre- quently of a low and mercenary character, like the negro-traders in the Southern States before the Civil War, and not only collected rigorously from the peasants all that they owed their lord, but only too often levied an additional tax for his own selfish ends. The same was true when the noble rented out to a tenant, for a fixed sum, his estate and the feudal rights attached to it. The tenant, in this case, like the agent in that, was regarded by the peasantry as a " ravening wolf." The Duke d'Aiguil- lon spoke truly when he said in a speech in tlie Na- tional Assembly on that famous Fourth of August, 1789, when Feudalism in France was overthrown: " The proprietors of feudal estates are but rarely guilty of the excesses which their vassals so com- plain of ; but their agents are often pitiless." But even when a seigneur desired to withdraw the administration of his estate from the mercenary hands of the agent, he may have been unable to do so. He was perhaps in debt, and had been forced to hand over to his creditors such and such a portion of his land or such and such a branch of his feudal revenue. For centuries the luxury, extravagance, and carelessness of the upper nobility, and that false pride which made them think it beneath the dignity of a nobleman to concern himself with pecuniary matters, had been accumulating and increasing their debts. To be careless about money matters was then, as it is now by some people, considered the SALE OF JUDICIAL OFFICES. 33 mark of a gentleman. "Archbishop," said Louis XVI. to M. de Dillon, " they tell me that you are in debt, and deeply, too. Is it so?" "Sire," replied the prelate, with the irony oi a grand seignetir, "I will inquire of my steward, and shall then have the honor of imparting to Your Majesty the desired in- formation." In 1785 the Duke de Choiseul estimated his property in his will at fourteen, and his debts at ten millions. The Duke of Orleans, the richest pro- prietor in the kingdom, owed seventy-four millions at his death. Nothing but marriages for money and the favor of the King could replenish the coffers of the nobility. Hence it was that, following the ex- ample of the King himself, they turned everything possible into money, especially the places of which they disposed ; and, giving up authority for pecu- niary profit, lost the last vestige of sovereignty that remained to them. Everywhere they laid aside the venerated character of chief to assume the odious character of trafficker. " The most of them," says Renauldon, a contemporary, "sell their [judicial] offices." "What happens then? Justice, too often exercised by scoundrels, degenerates into robbery or into an alarming impunity" for crime. All the seigniorial courts, say the election platforms {cahiers) of 1789, are infested with a crowd of officials of all kinds, there being frequently as many as ten in a district which could not support two unless they had other means of making a living. Hence they were at the same time judges, attorneys, fiscal agents, clerks, notaries, etc., each in a different place, each serving in several seigniories and under various 34 ABSENTEE LANDLORDS. titles, all itinerant, all in collusion like " confidence- men " (Jripons en foire), and meeting at the tavern to fiddle, drink, and sell justice to the highest bidder. Receiving but meagre salaries, these judicial leeches indemnified themselves by practising extortion upon the peasants. It is easy to imagine, therefore, the tyranny, corruption, and negligence of such a regime. " Nowhere," says Renauldon, " is impunity for crime greater than in the seigniorial courts. . . . No notice is taken of the most atrocious crimes." For the seigneur is unwilling to undergo the expense of a criminal trial; and his judges and attorneys are afraid of not being paid for their proceedings. Hence his lands become the asylum for all the crim- inals of the neighborhood. But wait. The day will come when the officials whom he has uselessly mul- tiplied will demand his head, and the bandits whom he has tolerated will carry it aloft on the point of a pike ! CHAPTER VI. PATRICIAN MONOPOLY OF THE CHASE. BESIDES his office as judge, which he usually sold to mercenary rascals, there was another sphere in which the authority of the seigneur was still active and severe, and even more hurtful and hated. This was his monopoly of the right to hunt. This sounds at first like a trivial matter. But it will be seen, after examining the circumstances, that it was a weighty one. During the anarchy of the Middle Ages, when the nobleman was the fully armed and mounted military protector of his domain, when half the land was covered with forests or lying fallow, and wild beasts ravaged the other half, there was some reason for the nobleman's being the chief hunter. He was the hereditary man-at-arms, who fought against wolves and wild boars as well as against tramps and brigands. But now that nothing remained to this chieftain but the title and the epaulettes, his privilege had ceased to be a service and had become a vexation. The exclusive right to hunt was now the badge of a hateful class-distinction. The nobles, even when dignitaries of the Church, were greatly addicted to the chase — in spite of edicts and the canon law. '"You hunt a great deal, 36 PATH] CI AN MONOPOLY OF THE CHASE. Bishop," said Louis XV. to M. de Dillon. " How is it that you prohibit the chase to your curates when you pass your life in setting them the exam- ple?" " Sire, my curates are not noble ; for them hunting is a fault of their own ; for me, it is the fault of my ancestors." The pride of caste being thus enlisted, the nobles guarded this right with the greatest vigilance. Hence it was that their captains of the hunting-giounds {capitaines de chasse), their foresters and game-keepers protected the wild beasts from intruders as if they had been men, and hunted down men as if they had been wild beasts. In the district of Pont 1' Eveque, in 1789, we read of " four recent unpunished assassinations of poachers by the game-keepers of Mme. d'A., of Mme. N., of a prelate and of a marshal of France." We read also that the Count d'Oisy was in the habit of hunting on horseback and riding through the grain-fields of twenty villages in the environs of his chateau, and that his armed game-keepers had killed several peasants under pretext of watching over the rights of their master. In this district the game devoured every year the best of the crop, twenty thousand razieres of wheat, and as much of other grains. Around Evreux, the tender care for the game was such that the peasants were not permit- ted to pull up in the summer the weeds that choked the wheat. The game-keepers of the forest of Gouf- fray in Normandy " were so terrible," we are told, " that they maltreated, insulted, and murdered men." If a farmer went to law to recover damages for the loss of his grain, the result was that, in addition CROPS DEVOURED BY THE GAME. 37 to his crop, he lost his time and the costs of the suit. In the environs of Domfront the inhabitants of more than ten parishes were obliged to watch the whole night, during more than six months of the year, in order to preserve their crops from the game. But it was in the Ik de France, that is, in the province which contained Paris and Versailles, that this state of things was worst. An official report tells us that in the single parish of Vaux near Meulan the rab- bits from the neighboring warrens ravaged eight hun- dred cultivated acres (arpcnts) and destroyed a har- vest of two thousand four hundred measures (seticrs), that is, the annual nourishment of eight hundred persons. Not far off, at la Rochette, herds of deer devoured everything in the fields during the day, and, at night, even went into the gardens of the people and injured the young trees. Out of 500 peach trees planted in a vineyard at Farcy, less than twenty survived the browsing of the deer for three years. An estate which had been rented for 2,000 francs brought in only 400 after the establishment of the captaincy of Versailles. D'Argenson tells us in his memoirs that the Sieur de Montmorin, captain of the chase of Fontaine- bleau, drew immense sums from his office, and acted like a veritable brigand ; in consequence of which the inhabitants of more than a hundred villages ceased to sow their fields, knowing that the fruits and grains would be devoured by the deer and other game. At Bois-le-Roi, near Fon- tainebleau and Melun, three-quarters of the land lay waste. Nearly all the houses of Brolle were in 38 PATRICIAN MONOPOLY OF THE CHASE. ruins; and at Coutilles and Chapelle-Rablay five farms were abandoned. At Arbonne a quan- tity of fields were deserted, and at Villiers and Dame-Marie eight hundred acres remained uncul- tivated. And strangely enough, in proportion as the manners of the century grew more humane, the regime of the chase gr&\w worse. In 1789, one hundred patches of cover for the game were planted in a single canton of the captaincy of Fon- tainebleau, in spite of the remonstrances of the pro- prietors. By the regulation of 1762 every individ- ual residing within the limits of a captaincy was forbidden to enclose his property with walls, hedges, or ditches, without special permission. And even in case of permission he was obliged to leave an empty space broad enough for the noble hunts- men to pass through with ease. The peasants were forbidden to own any fire-arm or other wea- pon suited for the chase, and were not allowed to own a ferret or a dog, unless it w&te^ kept tied. The peasant was not even permitted to mow his hay before St. John's day, or to enter his own field from the 1st of May to the 24th of June, or to go to the islands of the Seine, or to cut grass there, even if the grass belonged to him. For at this period the partridges were sitting ; and for a sitting partridge the noble legislators felt, of course, a deeper concern than they would have done for a peasant woman in child-bed. In short, there were in France four hundred square leagues of territory under the regime of the cap- taincies ; and in all France the game, both large and English and french nobles. 39 small, was the tyrant of the peasant. " Every time," says Montlosierin liis memoirs in 1789, " that I happened to meet a herd of deer on my route, my (peasant) guides exclaimed : ' Voil^ la noblesse ! ' there you see the nobility ! " We see, then, another of the disastrous effects of the overthrow of the nobles by the Crown in their po- litical power, without the simultaneous abolition of their privileges, the sole excuse for which would have been the performance of useful public functions. That the French nobility, owing to their absenteeism, failed to perform properly the few local functions which still remained to them, and prostituted justice by the sale of the ofifices to avaricious plunderers, we have already seen. But there is another kind of ser- vice which they might have rendered, and which the English nobility did and do render. The English nobility not merely performed useful local services in the counties, and not merely paid heavy taxes: they served also as representatives of the nation in Parliament, either by hereditary right in the House of Lords or by election in the House of Commons. But in France, which is a continental country sur- rounded by enemies, and not so protected by the sea as England, the people had assisted the Crown to break the political power of the nobles for the sake of unity and strength. Power had been con- centrated in the hands of the King ; and of course, with time, the King, being mortal, abused his pow- er. The States-General, which corresponded to the English Parliament, had never met regularly, and they had met for the last time in the year 1614. 40 PATRICIAN MONOPOLY OF THE CHASE Thus France possessed no national legislative body. A few of the provinces had local legislatures ; and the clergy were an organized body. But the clergy defended their own class-interests, while the inde- pendence of the provincial legislatures was more apparent than real. CHAPTER VII. EGOTISM AND INTOLERANCE OF THE CLERGY. DE TOCQUEVILLE declares the clergy to have been one of the most independent, enlightened, and liberty-loving bodies of men under the Old Regime. What their enlightenment was we shall hereafter see, when we come to examine their per- sistent intolerance towards freedom of thought and scientific progress. It is true that they loved inde- pendence — especially independence from bearing their share of the public burdens. They also loved liberty — for themselves, but by no means for others. Every five years they met, and in the interval two chosen agents watched over the interests of the order. We have seen how they succeeded in sub- stituting a " free gift " for the compulsory payment of taxes, and how this free gift gradually dwindled in dimensions until they not only paid nothing into the treasury of the country but actually succeeded in drawing out of it a million and a half francs a year. So much the better for the Church ; so much the worse for the people. Thanks to the diligent solici- tations of the Church's agents with the royal ministers and judges, the feudal rights of chapters and bishops were maintained, while the complaints 42 INTOLERANCE OF THE CLERGY. of the public were unheeded. For example, in 1781, in spite of a decision by the Parliament of Rennes, the canons of St. Malo were maintained in their monopoly of the right to own a bake-furnace, to the detriment of the bakers, who wished to cook bread in their own shops, and of the public, who wished cheaper bread. In 1773 a schoolmaster was removed by the Bishop of Langres, in spite of the protests of the inhabitants, and forced to give up his place to a successor appointed by the bishop. In 1770, Rastel, a Protestant, who had opened a school at Saint- Affrique, was persecuted at the demand of the bishop and the agents of the clergy, with the result that his school was closed and he himself imprisoned. The clergy helped the government only when the government helped them. The tone of command on the part of the King and the submissive air on the part of the clergy did not make the transaction any the less a bargain. In return for a law against the Protestants, or some other advantage, they were willing to increase the size of the " free gift." In this way the Edict of Nantes was gradually revoked in the seventeenth century, article by article — each new persecution being bought by a new bargain ; so that, if the clergy aided the government it was only on condition that the government should play the part of the hangman. During the whole eighteenth century the Church took care that the process should go on. In 1717, an assembly of seventy-four Pro- testants having been surprised at Andure, the men were sent to the galleys and the women to prison. An edict of 1724 declares that all who took part in PERSECUTIOlSr OF PROTESTANTS. 43 a Protestant meeting, or who had any direct or in- direct communication with a Protestant preacher, should have their property confiscated, that the women should have their heads shaved and be im- prisoned for life, and the men be condemned to perpetual servitude in the galleys. In 1745 and 1746, in the province of Dauphin^, 277 Protestants were condemned to the galleys and a number of women to be flogged. From 1744 to 1752 six hundred Protestants in the east and south were imprisoned, and eight hundred condemned to various punishments. In 1774 the children of a Calvinist of Rennes were taken from him. Up to the very eve of the Revolution, Protestant ministers were hanged in Languedoc, and dragoons were sent against their congregations in the desert ; upon one of which occasions bullets passed through the skirts of the mother of Guizot, the historian and statesman. For, in Languedoc, where the clergy was the most influential body in the provincial assembly, the temporal power of the bishops was greater than any- where else. And with the power to do so came also the desire to make converts with powder and ball. In 1775 Archbishop Lomenie de Brienne said to the young King at the Communion : " You will rebuke the system of a culpable toleration. Finish the work undertaken by Louis the Great. It is reserved for you to strike the last blow at Calvinism in your realm." The assembly of the clergy in 1 780 declared that throne and altar would be equally in danger if heresy were allowed to break its chains. Even in 1789, the clergy, though reluctantly consenting to 44 INTOLERANCE OF THE CLERGY. to'lerate non-Catholics, complained in their cahiers, or platform, that the edict of 1787 was too liberal, and desired that Protestants be excluded from judicial positions, from exercising their worship in public, and from intermarriage with Catholics. They demanded, moreover, the censorship of all books, an ecclesiastical committee to denounce objection- able ones, and ignominious punishments upon the authors of irreligious works. Lastly, the clergy claimed for themselves the direction of the public schools and the supervision of the private ones. In this intolerance and egotism there is nothing strange. For a corporation, even more than an in- dividual, thinks first, and above all, of itself. In England, where not merely priesthood and nobility, but the people at large, were represented and organized, the upper classes served not merely their own private ends, but also those of the public; but in France the privileged orders, being unopposed by any organized political body, subordinated the general welfare to their selfish interests. CHAPTER VIII. SINECURES OF THE NOBILITY. THE nobility had lost the right to assemble and deliberate, like the clergy, upon measures con- ducive to their interests ; but by constant attendance at Court they were able to make up for the loss of this right. In fact, the nobility were the source from which the ranks of the upper clergy were re- cruited. A secret * decision of the Court provided that " all ecclesiastical property, from the most modest priory to the richest abbeys, should be reserved for the nobility." In fact, all fat places, both lay and ecclesiastic, were for them; all sinecures, both lay and ecclesiastic, were for them or their re- lations, friends, clients, and servants. "France," says Taine, " resembled a vast stable where the blooded horses got double or triple feed for doing nothing or only half work, while the draft-horses did full work on half feed, and sometimes failed to get even that." Nineteen ecclesiastical chapters be- longed to noblemen and twenty-five to noblewomen ; and also two hundred and sixty Maltese command- eries to the nobility by right of institution. By royal favor, all the archbishops and all the bishops * Mlmoires de Madame Campan, Paris, l822, vol. i., p. 237. 4" SINECURES OF THE NOBtLlTV. but five were nobles, as were three-fourths of the commendatory abbots and vicars-general. If we pick out those of the abbesses appointed by the King who had incomes of 20,000 and upwards, we find that they too were of noble blood. Thus the fifteen hundred ecclesiastical sinecures in the gift of the King existed almost solely for the nobles. And, moreover, the richest prelates received, in addition to their episcopal revenues, the richest abbeys. Even according to the ofificial clerical directory (almanac), which puts the figures much lower than they were in reality, we see that M. d' Argentre, Bishop of Sdez, had a supplementary income (in ad- dition to his episcopal revenue) of 34,000 francs ; M. de Suffren, Bishop of Sisteron, 36,000; M. de Girac, Bishop of Rennes, 40,000 ; M. de Bour- deille. Bishop of Soissons, 42,000; M. d'Agout de Bonneval, Bishop of Pamiers, 45,000; M. de Marboeuf, Bishop of Autun, 50,000; M. de Rohan, Bishop of Strasburg, 60,000 ; M. de Cice, Archbishop of Bordeaux, 63,000 ; M. de Luynes, Archbishop of Sens, 82,000; M. de Bernis, Archbishop of Alby, 100,000; M. de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, 106,000 ; M. de Dillon, Archbishop of Narbonne, 120,- 000 ; M. de La Rochefoucauld, Archbishop of Rouen, 130,000. These sums, it will be remembered, were merely supplementary to their episcopal incomes. They were much understated in the ofificial directory ; so that to arrive at the true amounts we must double and sometimes treble these figures, and quadruple, and sometimes sextuple them, to obtain the modern equivalents. M.de Rohan had an income, not of sixty GO VERNORSHIPS. 4 7 thousand, but of four hundred thousand francs ; and M. de Brienne, without counting his salary as cabinet minister, or the pension of 6,000 francs attached to his blue ribbon (cordon bleu), possessed in benefices an income of 678,000, not to mention that the wood felled at one of his abbeys, shortly before his letire- ment from the cabinet, had brought him in a million francs. Besides the ecclesiastical ones, there was a goodly number of lay sinecures which fell into the lap of the nobility. For instance, there were in the prov- inces thirty-seven large governor-generalships and several smaller ones, sixty-six lieutenant-governor- ships, four hundred and seven special governorships, thirteen governorships of royal palaces, and a num- ber of others — all sinecures, and existing merely for the sake of parade, all in the hands of the nobles, all lucrative, not only from the salary that was paid from the public treasury, but also from the local profits. Here, too, the nobility had allowed themselves to be deprived of political power, politi- cal action, and political utility, for the sake of the title, the pomp, and the casli. The real governor was tlie royal intendant, whereas the titular gouver- neur could perform no function of administration without special permission. His business was to give grand dinners ; and even for this permission was necessary — the permission to go and reside in his province. But there was money in it. The gov- ernor-generalship of Berry was worth 35,000 a year; that of Guyenne, 120,000; that of Languedoc, 160,- 000. The special governorship of Havre brought 48 SINECURES OF THE NOBILITY. in 35,000 francs besides the perquisites ; an average lieutenant-governorship, like that of Roussillon, 13,- 000 or 14,000; and a special governorship from 12,- 000 to 18,000. And of these it should be observed that, in the lie de France alone, there were thirty- four — at Vervins, Senlis, Melun, Fontainebleau, Dourdan, Sens, Limours, Etampes, Dreux, Houdan, and other towns that were equally insignificant. In Languedoc, a province with a legislative body, where the pockets of the tax-payers should have been better protected, three so-called sub-commanders (sous-cominaiidants) at Tournon, Alais, and Mont- pellier received 16,000 a year for doing nothing. Twelve lieutenants du rat, or royal lieutenants, were equally useless except for show ; which was also the case with three alleged lieutenant-generals who re- ceived 30,000 francs apiece every three years for en- tirely imaginary services. Similarly, the Count de Caraman, who, as proprietor of the Languedoc canal, received an income of more than 600,000 a year, was given 30,000 additional every three years, for no legitimate cause — unless we say that the fact that he also received frequent and handsome gifts from the province for repairing the canal was such a cause. The province also gave the Count de Perigord a gratuity of 12,000 francs besides his salary as com- mandant, and to his wife an additional gratuity of 12,000 the first time that she honored the provincial assembly with her presence. The province likewise employed forty guards for this same commandant, who, together with their captain, received 15,000 a year. The gouverneur, too, had eighty or a hun- LEECHES, GREAT AND SMALL. 49 dred guards, with numerous privileges, and salaries of three or four hundred a year, but, as the gouver- netir never resided in the province, with nothing wliatever to do. For these idlers, therefore, the yearly expense to the province was at least 24,000, besides 5,000 or 6,000 for their captain. And to this we must add 7,500 for the secretaries of the gotcver- neitr, besides a salary of 60,000 and infinite perqui- sites for ihe gotcverneur himself. Thus we see that around the great leeches of noble birth there swarmed innumerable lesser leeches equally intent upon sucking the substance from the people. To eat, drink and be merry at the expense of others was the business of their lives. The ses- sions of the provincial assembly were six weeks' periods of feasting, and the occasions of an expend- iture by the intendant of 25,000 francs in dinners and receptions. CHAPTER IX. THE VAMPIRES OF VERSAILLES. THESE numerous statistical figures are tedious, perhaps ; but if we wish to understand clearly the causes of that terrific explosion at the end of the eighteenth century, which is even now reverber- ating in dull rumblings to the furthest verges of the civilized world, we must be willing to examine still other figures. Let us look at the centre of it all, the Court. Here, as elsewhere, the offices were lucrative sine- cures; and, large as were the salaries connected with them, the perquisites were still larger. Passing over the 295 cooks in the royal palace and the waiters at the royal tables, we may mention that the first stew- ard got 84,000 a year in provisions and the like, without counting his salary and the " grandes livr^es" which he received in money. The first chamber- maids of the queen, who are put down in the direc- tory at 1 50 francs a year, but who actually received 12,000, made in reality 50,000 by the sale of partially consumed candles. Augeard, a secretary, whose place was nominally worth only 900 a year, confessed himself that it brought liJm in 200,000. The captain of the hunting-grounds of Fontainebleau made a yearly profit of 2O,O0O francs on the sale of rabbits. SINECURES AT COURT. 5 1 The governess of the King's children, Mme. de Tal- lard, received 115,000 a year. And so with the rest of them. Grand officers of the palace, governors of the royal mansions, captains of the chase, cham- berlains, equerries, gentleman-servants, gentlemen in ordinary, pages, gouverneurs, almoners, chaplains, ladies of honor, ladies of the bedchamber, lady com- panions, in the palace of the King, in the palace of the Queen, in the palace of Monsieur (the brother of the King) and of Madame (his wife), of the Count d'Artois and the Countess d'Artois, of Mesdames, of Madame Royale, of Madame Elizabeth, and of every princely family, etc., etc. — hundreds of places, with salaries and perquisites, but without duties, all for show and pomp. It would have been simpler to give all these peo- ple their money without appointing them to imag- inary positions. And, in fact, the memoirs are full of evidence that the French monarch, in numberless instances, did adopt this simpler method of wasting the people's money upon Duke Tom, Count Dick, or Marquis Harry. Dangeau mentions in his diary nu- merous cases, for example, in which Louis XIV. rewarded with hard cash the conversion of Hugue- not nobles to the true faith. We might multiply almost indefinitely the list of high and noble lords who, upon any or no pretext, plunged their greedy hands into the public treasury. But, to make the list of moderate length, we will only look at the chief of these vampires — the princes and princesses of the blood. Upon one occasion, the King gave the Prince de Conti 1,500,000 francs to pay his debts; 52 THE VAMPIRES OF VERSAILLES. While awaiting the inheritance of his father, the Duke of Orleans received from the King a pension of 50,000 ecus. After receiving his inheritance, which brought him a yearly income of three million francs, he gave up his pension, but soon received it back again when he told the King that his three millions a year were not sufificient. Twenty years later, in 1780, when Louis XVI. made the so-called grande r^forme de laboiiche, by which he " retrenched " the table expenses, he still gave Mesdames (his sisters) 600,000 francs a year for their food alone. Such was retrenchment and reform in that age. Six hun- dred thousand francs for the meals alone of three aged dames I The two brothers of the King received 8,300,000 francs, besides 2,000,000 in appanages. For the Dauphin, Mme. Royale, Mme. Elizabeth, and Mesdames, 3,500,000; and for the Queen 4,000,000, according to Necker's account in J 784. We learn from Augeard that Calonne, immediately after en- tering upon his ministry, raised a loan of one hun- dred millions, of which not a fourth ever entered the public treasury. By far the larger portion of it was snapped up by the blood-suckers of the Court. I will mention but two of the items. Twenty-five millions went to Monsieur (who was afterwards King Louis XVIIL) and fifty-six millions to the Count d'Artois (afterwards King Charles X.). And let me remind the reader once more that all these figures must be doubled to obtain the modern equivalents. Thus it is that the men who in earlier times were the local chiefs, or, in Homeric phrase, the " shep- herds of the people," had now fleeced, flayed, and THE FLEECERS FLEECED. 53 deserted their flocks for the privileges, the pomp, and the gold of the court. But wait. The day will come when the fleeced sheep will discover what use has been made of their wool. And on that day the fleecers will find themselves alone ; the deserting shepherds will find themselves deserted, and their sheep transformed into wolves. " Sooner or later," said the parliament of Dijon in 1764, "the people will learn that the debris of our revenues continue to be lavished in ill-deserved donations, in exces- sive and numerous pensions, upon the same persons, in dowries, sinecures, and useless salaries." And sooner or later — it might have added — the people will rise up and crush the greedy ring of aristocrats that prey upon their vitals. CHAPTER X. PRINCE AND PRELATE versus SQUIRE AND CURATE. HAVING forgotten the public, the high aristoc- racy of France neglected also the subordi- nate members of their own class. Like generals on furlough, who had neglected amidst their revelry to keep the confidence and affection of the lower offi- cers, they had forgotten that, on the day of battle, they would be nothing but generals without an army, and that the soldiers would seek other leaders . among themselves. The great lords and prelates of the Court were isolated from the lesser rural nobility and the lower clergy. Against the grasping clique at Versailles a dull murmur had been rising and growing for a century, until, at last, it became a clamor, in which the spirit of the old and the spirit of the new, the spirit of rustic Feudalism and of the new radical philosophy thundered in unison. " The nobility," said the bailiff of Mirabeau in 1781, "is disgracing and ruining itself." "The Court ! " cried d'Argenson, " in that word lies all the evil. The Court has become the senate of the nation. The meanest valet in Versailles is a senator ; the very chambermaids take part in the government, if not to decree, at least to obstruct legislation. . . . DEMOCRATIC NOBLES. 55 The Court is the tomb of the nation." The father of Chateaubriand, a rustic nobleman, was a hater of the Court. Many army-officers among the lesser nobility, seeing that none but the lords of the Court could hope for promotion, quit the service and retired to their estates, to brood in wearisome idle- ness over disappointed hopes and ambitions. The Marquis de Ferrieres said in 1789: "The most of them are so disgusted with the Court and the ministers that they are almost democrats." And when these discontented rural nobles came to elect delegates to those celebrated States-General of 1789 which annihilated the Old Regime, they bit- terly opposed the election of the great lords, and insisted, in their platform, upon the curtailment of the privileges of the Court nobility. Still greater was the hatred of the lower clergy towards the great magnates of the Church. For to the sense of injustice was added the fact that the lat- ter were nobles while the former belonged to the plebeian class of roUtriers. While the great prelates lived at Versailles in pomp and luxury, the simple country parsons lived often in penury and even filth. " I pity the lot of a country parson," says Voltaire, " who, in order to live, is obliged to dispute with his wretched parishioner a sheaf of wheat, to go to law against him, to exact the tithe of pease and lentils, to consume his miserable life in con- tinual quarrels. . . . Still more do I pity the parson to whom rich tithe-owning monks dare to give a salary of but forty ducats for performing, during the whole year, at a distance of two or three 56 PRINCE AND PR EL A TE, SQUIRE AND CUR A IE. miles from his house, by night and by day, in sun and in rain, in snow and in ice, the most painful and disagreeable functions." In 1785 the salary of a country curate was but 700 francs, or about 140 dol- lars, and that of a vicar half as much. Living among miserable creatures who expected him to give alms out of even this slender pittance, the country parson felt a secret bitterness of heart against the idle plutocrats of the upper clergy, with their plethoric purses and scanty charity. At Saint-Pierre de Bar- jouville, for example, where the Archbishop of Toulouse took half of the tithes, he gave but eight francs a year in charity. And this is but one ex- ample among many similar ones. As it was usually the business of the seignetir or beneficiary to keep the church and the parsonage in repairs, it happened frequently, on account of his absenteeism, indebted- ness, or indifference, that both church and parsonage fell in ruins. " I arrived," says a curate of Touraine, "in the month of June, 1788. . . . The par- sonage would resemble a hideous cave if it were not open on all sides to wind and frost." He de- scribes the house as having on the first floor two brick-paved rooms, four feet and a half high, with- out doors or windows, and a third room, six feet in height, which served as parlor, dining-room, kitchen, laundry, and as the damp receptacle for the rain-water of the yard or garden. In the upper story were three similar apartments, the whole being absolutely full of cracks and splits in the wall that menaced ruin, and without doors or sashes that would hold. Contrast all this with the gorgeous CURATES SIDE WITH THE COMMONS. 57 palaces of the great prelates, with their grand equi- pages and their kitchen utensils of massive silver; and we need wonder little atthchatred borne them by the rank and file of the clergy. These latter it was, too, who had to bear the chief burden of the *' free gift " to the Crown. In the diocese of Cler- mont, the curates contributed for this purpose from 60 to 120 francs apiece and more. The prelates paid but little ; and for the plebeian curate there was no hope of rising to a high place in the hierarchy of the Church. Like the subordinate ofificer in the army, he too had to give up the hope of promotion. Hence it was that, when the time came for choosing delegates to the States-General, the rural clergy treated their chiefs as the rural nobility treated theirs. Everywhere the curates attempted to elect only curates, and to exclude, when possible, not merely the canons, the abbots, the priors, and all other beneficiaries, but also the first chiefs of the hierarchy, that is, the bishops and archbishops. And so great was their success that, out of three hun- dred clerical delegates to the States-General, two hundred and eight were curates. And at the critical moment, when the Third Estate had declared itself to be the true and only " National Assembly," it vvas_the_Jower clergy and_the_lower_npbiiity_who }weri t ove r to th em,, and thus_tyrned th£_sc.3le in favor of th e people against_the aristocracy. CHAPTER XI. ABSOLUTISM OF THE KING. HAVING examined the privileges of nobility and clergy, it remains to examine the most enor- mous privilege of ail — that of the King ; for among this staiif of hereditary nobles, he was the hereditary general. And although his office was not a sinecure to the same extent as their rank, it was accompanied by still greater temptations and still greater evils. For, while the nobility had lost almost entirely their legitimate occupation, the power and the occupation of the monarch had become, in theory at least, as boundless as the aims of the state and the people. L'^tat, c'est ntoi, " /am the State," said Louis XIV. The Crown had taken upon itself a task that sur- passes the capacity of man. Well-nigh all political functions were centralized, as will hereafter appear, and local self-government all but annihilated. For the present, however, I will defer the con- sideration of the administrative centralization, and point out the more personal privileges of the King. As each noble possessed his estate, so did the King, the feudal chief of the nobles, consider that he owned as private property the whole of the King- dom. All France being therefore his estate, who had the right to ask what use he made of its reve- FRANCE THE PROPERTY OF THE KING. 59 nues? And not only was he, according to the feudal theory of the Middle Ages, the proprietor of France and the French ; but in addition, according to the theory of the jurists, he was, like Cassar, the sole and perpetual representative of the nation ; and, according to the theologians, the master of the people by divine right. The public treasury being therefore identical with that of the monarch, it was as impertinent to meddle with the money-matters of the latter as with those of a private citizen. Hence it was regarded as a piece of almost inconceivable temerity when, in 1788, the theory was enunciated in the Salon of the Palais-Royal that the public revenues should not be at the disposal of the King, except a sum sufficient to defray the expenses of the royal household, but should be deposited in the public treasury, to be employed only for the pur- poses designated by an assembly representative of the nation. In the reign of Louis XIV. such a prop- osition would have been received with still greater amazement than a communistic proposal in our own day to divide the income of every rich man into two parts, the smaller for his own use, and by far the larger to be disposed of by the legislature. Such a proposition would, indeed, have been almost impossible in 1688 ; and that it was made in 1788 was no uncertain sign of the immense revolution which had already taken place in the whole attitude of the French mind. For the actual Revolution, as we shall see, was but the violent symptom of a revolution in thought already accomplished. But the shock of 1789 was necessary to show the 6o ABSOLUTISM OF THE KING. King that the day was past when he could look upon France as his private property, to be used or abused as he thought fit. Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had waged wars to gratify their vanity, to further their dynastical or personal interests, or to satisfy the caprices of a mistress. For these and similar ends, the King thought he had the right to expend both the blood and the money of his subjects. For his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV. spent 36,000,000 francs. According to d'Argen- son, the royal stables contained in 175 1 four thousand horses ; and the expenses of the royal household, in that year, were sixty-eight millions, ornearly a fourth of the public revenue. And why not? Was not the public revenue the King's revenue ? Why should not Louis XVL have purchased for Marie Antoinette the palace of St. Cloud for 7,700,000? For was this not a trifle in comparison with the 477,000,000 which were then the income of His Majesty? If France and the French were the chattels of the King, why should he not have given his own money to his favorites ? What objection was there to his bestowing the honor and the salary of a colonelcy upon the sons of dukes, ministers, and other courtiers, upon the relations and friends of his mistresses, when they reached the age of sixteen ? If colonels of sixteen were not likely to add to the efficiency of the army, whose business was that ? Was it not the King's army ? To these questions the Revolution made answer; and it was high time. For when Necker became Minister of Finance he found that the treasury was THE DA y OF RECKONING. 6 1 being drained of twenty-eight millions a year for pensions ; and even during his reform administration the Countess dePolignac received 400,000 francs to pay her debts, 800,000 for the dowry of her daughter, besides the promise, for herself, of an estate yielding 35,000 a year, and, for her lover, the Count de Vaudreuil, a pension of 30,000 a year. The Princess de Lamballe received 100,000 ^ctis a year. But under the ministry of Calonne the royal extravagance became almost boundless. To do a favor to the bankrupt Guemenees the King gave them 12,500,000 francs for three estates for which they had just paid only four millions. The family of the Polignacs received 700,000, and that of the Noailles two millions, a year. The King forgot, or cared little, if he remembered, that the millions lavished upon idle courtiers were squeezed from the hands of starving peasants. He forgot, amid the pomp and ceremony of the Court, that a day of reckoning might come, when the rabble would clamor for his head, and lead him to the scaffold to atone for his murderous expenditure of their treasure. CHAPTER XII. LIFE AT THE COURT. THE pomp and ceremony of the Court have been mentioned more than once ; and this will be a fitting place to describe it. Never since the world began, unless in some of the Oriental despotisms, has its equal been seen. Arthur Young was repeatedly and forcibly struck by the strange lack of vehicles * upon the roads of France ; but there was one road — that from Paris to Versailles: — upon which a ceaseless stream of equi- pages rolled from morning till night. Versailles, which was then as large a city as Richmond, Va., was, in spite of its 80,000 inhabitants, but a mere appendix of the Court. Though one of the most considerable cities in the kingdom, it was but a roy- al residence — filled, peopled, and occupied by the life of a single man. It existed solely to supply the needs, the amusements, the servants, the guards, the society, the display of the King. In Versailles, as elsewhere, there were inns, public houses, shops, and huts for the laborers, domestics, common soldiers, and the like ; but all was there for the purpose of *A. Young's "Travels in Trance," /assim. I was unable to procure the original of this all-important work, but had to content myself with a French translation, Voyages en France, Paris, 1793. THE PALACES OF VERSAILLES. 63 ministering to the King and his noble satellites. Except these necessary inns, etc., the city consisted of palaces and gorgeous edifices with sculptured facades, cornices, balustrades, and monumental stair- cases — lordly buildings, grouped and arranged in artistic order around the vast and magnificent palace of the man who, by divinely obtained right, was master of France. In these sumptuous abodes dwelt the families of France's bluest blood — the dukes and counts and bishops and archbishops — the men who spent here at the Court the vast incomes of their dis- tant estates. On the right of the royal palace was the palace, or, as it was called, the hoteldc Bourbon, the hotel d'Ecquevilly, the hotel de la Tremouille, the hotel de Cond6, the hotel de Maurepas, the hotel de Bouillon, the hotel d'Eu, the hotel de Noailles, the hotel de Penthievre, the hotel de Broglie, the hotel of the Prince de Tingry, the hotels d'Orl^ans, de Chatillon, de Villeroy, d'Harcourt, de Monaco; on the left, the pavillion d'Orl^ans, the pavillion de Monsieur, the hotels de Chevreuse, de Balbelle, de I'Hdpital, d'Antin, de Dangeau, de Pontchartrain, etc., etc., etc. By hundreds might be counted the palaces and buildings in Versailles occupied by the King and his dependants. Not a hundred steps could have been taken in the city without coming upon some accessory of the vast central palace. Not only were there " hotels " for all the great nobles, the generals, and the ministers of the govern- ment ; but there was a hotel for the grand chief of the royal wolf-hunters, for the grand chief of the fal- coners, for the grand master of the hounds ; there 64 LIFE AT THE COURT. was a grand dog-kennel, and a dog-kennel for the Dauphin — and so on, ad infinitum. Everything in this city was "grand." And in Paris, too, there were, of course, countless mansions belonging to the butterflies of the Court ; and in the environs of Paris and Versailles, scores of towns that were nothing but appendices to the Court, or reproductions of it in miniature. For ex- ample, Sceaux, Genevilliers, Brunoy, I'lle Adam, Raincy, Saint -Ouen, Coiombes, Saint -Germain, Saint-Cloud, Marly, Bellevue, Fontainebleau, and many others. Never, since the days of the Caesars, had so vast a space under the sun been filled with the life of one man. I shall not attempt to describe the gorgeous palace — the cost of which was one hundred and fifty-three millions of francs — or the superb and magnificent gardens and park ; but, leaving this to the reader's imagination, will try and depict briefly the kind of life that was led at the Court. Life, for these men and women, was one endless parade and show. Liveries, uniforms, costumes, equipages of unapproachable brilliancy and variety formed the component parts of an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic splendor. For each of the noble grandees it was necessary to keep open, at all times, a grand and magnificent house. His retinue and his ornaments were a part of his person, and his palace had always to be full. To retrench expenses and reduce his retinue was to sink from his high posi- tion. Hence it was that, when Louis XVL at- tempted to introduce reforms, the courtiers declared VAST NUMBERS OF DOMESTJCS. 65 that he acted like a bourgeois. When a prince or princess became of age, he or she received a house- hold — maison. When a prince married, his wife re- ceived one also. And by a household was under- stood a body of domestics consisting of fifteen or twenty distinct groups for fifteen or twenty distinct kinds of service. There were grooms and coachmen, there was a hunting-train, a chapel, a medical facul- ty, servants for the bed-chamber, for the wardrobe, for the kitchen, for the pantry, for the wine-cellars; there was a cabinet and a council, and so on, and so on. Without all this, a princess was not a princess. The inaiso7i of the Duke of Orleans numbered 274 persons, that of Mesdantes 210, that of the Countess d'Artois 239, that of the Countess de Provence 256, that of the Queen 496. When the household to be given to Madame Royale, aged one month, was being discussed, Marie Antoinette desired to sup- press at least a part of the useless pomp ; but even then this infant received a body of eighty persons for the service of her single person! The civil household of Monsieur comprised 420, and his mil- itary household 179 persons, that of the Count d'Artois 237, and his civil household 456. By far the majority of all these people were, of course, entirely useless, except for display. Witli their embroidery and lace, with their refined and easy expression of countenance, their discreet and attentive air, their graceful way of bowing and walk- ing and smiling, they were the living and moving ornaments of the ante-chambers and galleries of the great. Even in the stables and kitchens of the no- 66 LIFE AT THE COURT. bility was the same grace and elegance, the same pomp and display. Such being the splendor of the satellites and plan- ets, what shall we say of the dazzling effulgence of the Royal Sun ! His Majesty's guard, consisting of infantry, cavalry, body-guards, the French Guards, the Swiss Guards, the company of the Hundred Swiss, the Light-horse Guards, the Gendarmes of the Guard, the Guards of the Gate, contained in all 9,050 men, at a yearly cost of nearly eight millions. When the king drove to Paris or Fontainebleau, four trumpets sounded in front and four in the rear, and the gorgeous coach passed between a long double line of soldiers, the Swiss Guards on one side and the French Guards on the other. In front of the coach marched the Hundred Swiss in the costume and arms of the sixteenth century. In all the corps the officers, the trumpeters, and the musicians gleamed with gold lace, and were dazzling to look upon. Behind, and at the sides of the carriage, ran the twelve hundred body-guards, with swords and carbines, in red trousers, high boots and blue coats with white embroidery — all noblemen, chosen for their blue blood and handsome figures. So much for the safety of the monarch. But being himself a nobleman, he was, of course, a horse- man. And, being the greatest of the noblemen, his stables were like palaces and contained a vast num- bef of horses, with more than two hundred car- riages and more than 1,500 liveried men. The cost of the whole, in 1787, but two years before the Rev- olution, was 6,200,000 francs. The chase, also, as THE A'JiVG AS A NayTSiilAiV 67 we have seen, was a favorite amusement of the no- bility, and, above all, of the chief nobleman, the King. His kennels, like his stables, were palatial ; and the food of his dogs cost more than 53,000 francs in 1783. Around Paris an almost continuous circle with a radius of thirty leagues was a guarded hunting-ground, where game of every description was protected and multiplied for the pleasure of the King. Around Fontainebleau were herds of seventy or eighty deer. Every week there was a wolf-chase ; and forty wolves were killed a year. From 1743 to 1774 Louis XV. ran down 6,400 deer. Louis XVL wrote in his diary on August 31, 1781 : "To-day killed 460 head." In 1780 he, with his train, killed 20,534 head of game; in 1781, 20,291; in fourteen years, 189,251. So great, indeed, was his addiction to the chase that, on June 25, 1789, when even the populace of Versailles (who lived by the patronage of the Court) were insulting and attacking the reac- tionary members of the nobility and clergy, when the Bishop of Beauvais * was struck on the head with a stone, and the windows of the Archbishop of Paris were broken by the mob ; only two days after Mirabeau had defied the monarchy in thunder tones, and declared that, as the National Assembly had met in obedience to the might of the people, it should be dispersed only by the might of the bayo- net ; when vast throngs in Paris were eagerly listen- ing, night and day, to the fiery harangues of revolu- tionary orators, — at such a time as this, when the ♦Arthur Young, vol. i. p. 360. 6S LIFE AT THE COURT. black clouds of revolution were lowering overhead, and the question was hanging in the balance* whether Louis XVI. was to remain King of France or be reduced to the puppet-role of a doge of Ven- ice, that stupid creature was — out hunting! — in blissful ignorance of the fate that awaited him. As every prince and princess had a private chapel and a private medical faculty, so also the King. And his were, of course, the largest ; his chapel consisting of 75 almoners, chaplains, confessors, chanters, composers of sacred music, etc., and his faculty containing 48 physicians, surgeons, apothe- caries, oculists, corn-doctors — for even the feet of royalty may be afflicted with corns — and the like. There were numerous other bodies of domestics ; but-passing them by, I will go on to those that ministered to the royal palate. There were three divisions : the first for the king and his younger children ; the second, for the table of the grand master, for that of the grand chamberlain, and that of the princes and princesses who lodged in the King's palace ; the third for the second table of the grand master, for that of the stewards, that of the almoners, that of the gentleman-servants, and that of the valets-de-chambre. In all, 383 cooks and 103 waiters at an expense of 2,177,771 francs a year. In addition to this, the yearly cost of Mme. Eliza- beth's table was 389,173, and that of the tables of Mesdames 1,093, 547 francs, making a total for the royal tables of 3,660,491 francs a year. The wine * Arthur Young, vol. i. p. 362. VARIOUS ROYAL PALACES. 69 merchant's annual bill was 300,000, the bill for game, meat and fish a million francs. And if we enter the sleeping apartment of the King we find another vast body of servants. Two dignitaries preside over them, each with a hundred subordinates : on the one hand, the grand cham- berlain, with the first gentlemen of the bed-chamber, the pages of the bed-chamber, their governors and preceptors, the ushers of the ante-chamber, the valets of the bed-chamber, the cloak-bearers, the barbers, the porters, etc. ; on the other hand, the grand master of the wardrobe, with the masters of the wardrobe, the valets of the wardrobe, the tail- ors, the gentlemen in ordinary, the ushers, and so on — in all 198 persons. Such was the household of the King of France at one of his residences. But, besides Versailles, there were a dozen more : Marly, the two Trianons, la Muette, Meudon, Choisy, Saint-Hubert, Saint-Ger- main, Fontainebleau, Compiegne, Saint-Cloud, and Rambouillet — without counting the Louvre, the Tuileries and Chambord, — with their parks and hunting-grounds, with their governors, inspectors, controllers, janitors, gardeners, horse-guards, foot- guards, etc., a thousand persons in all. Three or four millions a year were spent on buildings and plants, and a couple of millions more for furniture and repairs. Whenever the King moved from one of his palaces to the other, a whole army of butch- ers, bakers, hatters, shoemakers, physicians, sur- geons, merchants, tailors, book-sellers, engravers, in short, all conceivable kinds of people were obliged 70 LIFE AT THE COURT. to accompany him, in order to satisfy at a moment's notice every wish of the monarch and his court. In all, the King's civil household comprised 4,000 persons, and his military household 9,000 or 10,000; besides at least 2,000 more for his relatives : a total of 15,000 persons, in round numbers, at an annual expense to the people of 40 or 45 millions. For ordinary mortals, the life of ceremony and formality led by the King of France and his courtiers would be an appalling bore. When the first valet of the bed-chamber had awakened His Majesty in the morning, five distinct series of persons came in five distinct ^w/r/^ to pay him their respects in the royal bed-room. First came the so-called " familiar ^«- trde"" of the King's children, the princes and prin- cesses of the blood, and also the first physician, the first surgeon, and other useful persons. When they had retired, they were followed by the grande entree of the grand chamberlain, the grand master and the master of the wardrobe, the first gentleman of the bed-chamber, the dukes of Orleans and Penthievre, and some other favored nobles, the ladies of honor and ladies of the bed-chamber of the Queen, of Mes- dames and other princesses — without counting the barbers, tailors, and valets of several species. Mean- time spirit of wine is poured over the King's hands in a silver-gilt plate, and he is then presented with a basin of holy water, whereupon he makes the sign of the cross, and says a prayer. He then gets out of bed in the presence of the whole assemblage and dons his slippers. The grand chamberlain and the first gentleman then present him with his dressing- THE kOYAL LEVEE. ?! wrapper, and he seats himself in an arm-chair to be dressed. At this moment the door re-opens, and a third flood of people pours in. These are the lords who have the precious privilege of assisting at the ceremony of putting His Majesty to bed at night ; but along with them a whole squad of physicians and surgeons in ordinary, managers of the pocket- money, readers and others ; among them the porter of the necessary chair — for so great was the publicity and ceremony of the royal existence that all of its functions were performed in the presence of wit- nesses. At the moment when the ofificers of the wardrobe approach the King to dress him, the first gentleman, being informed by the usher, tells the King the names of the great personages who wait at the door. Then comes the fourth e7itrie, still larger than the preceding. Without counting numerous valets of different kinds, it comprises the majority of the great officers, the grand almoner, the master of the chapel, the master of the oratorium, the captain and the major of the body-guards, the colonel and the major of the French guards, the colonel of the King's regiment, the captain of the Hundred Swiss, the grand huntsman, the grand wolf-hunter, the grand master of ceremonies, the first steward, the foreign ambassadors, the ministers and secretaries, the marshals of France, the great prelates, and many others. Ushers arrange the crowd while the King washes his hands and begins his toilet. Two pages remove his slippers ; the grand master of the ward- robe takes his night-shirt by the right sleeve, the first valet of the wardrobe by the left sleeve. They pull 72 LIFE AT THE COURT. it off and hand it to a valet to be carried away, while still another valet approaches with a shirt. This is the solemn moment, the culminating point of the whole pompous absurdity. The honor of pre- senting the shirt is reserved for the sons and grandsons of France (i. e., of the King, who regards himself as France), or, in case of their absence, for the princes of the blood, or, in their absence, for the grand chamberlain or the first gentleman. When the King has taken the shirt, the whole court is in- troduced in the fifth and last entree, and the toilet proceeds. Definite individuals perform each defi- nite service for the King. One man hands him his handkerchief, another his gloves, another his cane, etc. The toilet being complete, he says his prayers, while a chaplain pronounces in a low voice the orison, qiLCBSumus dens omnipoleiis. This done, the King pre- scribes the order of the day, and passes with the chief courtiers into his cabinet, the rest remaining in the gallery to accompany him later on, when he goes to mass. Such was the royal levee ; and it was of a piece with the rest of the royal life. The same throng was around the King when he put on his hunting boots, when he took them off, when he changed his coat, when he hunted, when he dined, when he re- tired. " Every evening for six years," says d'H^- zecques, a court page, "my comrades and myself saw Louis XVI. retire to bed in public. I have not seen the ceremony omitted ten times ; and then the cause of the omission was accident or indisposition." Of the infinite details of etiquette and ceremony at DEI PICA riON OF THE KING. 73 the royal repasts we may omit all except to mention that twenty or thirty people attended to the glass and the plate of the King. " If I were King of France," said Frederick the Great of Prussia, " my first edict would appoint an extra-king to perform the ceremonies for me." From the cradle to the grave the French monarch was always in public, always on exhibition, always the central figure of innumerable pompous ceremonies. To smile with dignity and grace, and discourse affably upon horses and dogs and game, was the business of the King_ To bow and scrape and be ever on the alert to secure sinecures and pensions was the business of the nobles. For a noble to be absent from the court was almost a crime in the eyes of the monarch. To be ever present and ever bowing and scraping was the surest road to fortune. One night the valet of the Marshal de Noailles asked his lordship at what hour he wished to be awakened in the morning. " Not till ten o'clock," replied the marshal, " unless some one at the Court dies during the night." What he meant was that he wished to apply imme- diately to the King for the fat sinecures, etc., of any courtier that happened to die. To be always where the King could see him was the noble's aim. " He who reflects," says La Bruyfere, "how the counte- nance of the prince is the source of all the felicity of the courtier, how his life is .spent in seeing the prince and in being seen of him, may form some small con- ception how the sight of God makes all the glory and all the joy of the saints." " Pardon me," wrote a duke to Madame de Maintenon, "the extreme lib- 74 LIFE AT THE COURT. erty I take in daring to send you the letter I write to the King, in which I implore him, on my knees, to permit me occasionally to pay him my respects ; for I had as soon die as not see him for two months." Such was life at the palace of the French King ; and life at the hotel or chateau of every noble- man was a miniature copy of the great royal model. Pomp, parade, ceremony, servility, luxury, publicity, were practised, as far as was possible, at the estab- lishment of every petty squire. We are told by de Luynes that the house of the Due de Gfevres was full of courtiers from the time he got up till he went to bed. And it was the same with two or three hundred houses at Paris, Versailles and their envi- rons. And not merely the nobles, great and small ; the ^oAAy parvenus among the rich bourgeois made also as great a display as their purses would allow. They, too, had their levees, their lackeys, their flunkeys, and their sponges and parasites. The ministers and ambassadors lived, of course, with a pomp corresponding to their rank. The mag- nificence, for example, of the Cardinal de Bernis, the ambassador at the Papal Court, was so great that he was called the King of Rome. To ape the splendor of Versailles was the aim of them all — governors- general, commanders, ambassadors, intendants, and the rest. From the central tree at Versailles in- numerable ramifications shot forth in all directions. Nor was all this luxury and display confined to the laity. The bishops and archbishops and commend- atory abbots were men of the world, rich, fashion- able, and anything but austere. At Clairvaux, Dom EPISCOPAL PALACES. 75 Rocourt, polite to men and gallant to women, drove only In a four-horse carriage with an outrider in front of it. His monks called him Mortseigneur, and he held a regular court. At the convent of Origny, the abbess had her domestics, her carriage and horses, and received male visitors and diners in her apartments. The twenty-five chapters for noble- women and the nineteen chapters for noblemen were but so many permanent salons and perpetual rendezvous for fashionable company that was sepa- rated only by a feeble ecclesiastical barrier from the rest of the great world. At the chapter of Ott- marsheim, in Alsatia, " we spent a week," says a vis- itor, " in promenading, in visiting the remnants of Roman roads, in laughing, and even in dancing, . . . . . and especially in talking about clothes." But nowhere, except at Versailles, were the pomp and the crowd greater than in the episcopal palaces. For the bishops, being princes or great lords, lived also like princes. They had their levees, their ante- chambers, their ushers, their valets, their equipages, their open house, their sumptuous meals, and their debts. In the almost royal palace of the Rohan family, who were bishops of Strasburg and cardinals by hereditary descent from uncle to nephew, there were 700 beds, 180 horses, fourteen stewards, twen- ty-five valets de chambre. Sometimes two hundred guests, and, at all times, twenty or thirty of the most charming women of the province, were at their pal- ace. Everywhere among the upper classes was cere- mony and display. Ceremony appeared to be the object of their lives. For example, when the Queen 7 (5 LIFE AT THE COURT. of Louis XV. wished to dine one day, she was awaited by twelve noblemen in a room with a table and twelve plates. These plates were mere pre- tense, however ; for, when the Queen entered, the twelve noblemen withdrew from the table and looked silently on while she ate. Once only is the silence broken. "Come here, Monsieur So-and-so," says the Queen. The monsieur does so, bows, and she says : " I believe this is a fricassee of chicken ? " " That is also my opinion," replies the monsieur, and is dumb once more. This was an extreme case of courtly idiocy ; but, owing to the French esprit, life at Ver- sailles could never be made so horribly tedious as at the Spanish Court. Still, the laws of etiquette and ceremony were very severe. And they applied even to the young prince in the cradle. Four times a day he was fed and attended to by definite women ; but if he was hungry at any other time, or if any- thing happened to him, he had to stand it as best he could. CHAPTER XIII. THE MIDDLE CLASS. HAVING examined the privileges and the idle pomp of nobility, clergy, and king, it is time to take a view of the middle class, or bourgeoisie, in its relations to the nobility and peasantry, and in its internal relations. In the eighteenth century there was, in spite of the differences in rights and privileges, an ever- increasing similarity between the members of the upper and the middle class. Nothing shows this more clearly than a comparison of the cahiers, or, in modern American lingo, the " platforms " of the two classes in 1789. They differed in interests and de- mands, but in other respects were scarcely distin- guishable. Time, which had maintained and even aggravated the privileges that separated the noble from the bourgeois, had rendered them similar in all other respects. For several centuries the former, in ■spite of all his exemptions from taxation and other 'privileges, had been becoming gradually poorer; while the latter, who, instead of Jiving in idleness and luxury at Court, was accustomed to industry and thrift, had been growing gradually richer. The 78 THE MIDDLE CLASS. spendthrift noble had been obliged to sell parcel by parcel of his land to the peasants, until the land reached that state of division fnto the extraordinary- number of excessively small farms which struck Ar- thur Young so forcibly. But the bourgeois was steadily accumulating wealth by manufactures, trade, and commerce. And not merely the pecu- niary condition of the two classes was growing more and more similar. Education and mode of life pro- duced many other similarities. The bourgeois equalled or even surpassed the nobleman in en- lightenment ; for both read the same books, both drank from the same fountain of literature that flowed from Paris to the rest of Europe. In rights alone was a great gulf between the two. Feu- dalism, at its origin, had been, in great measure, a system of true aristocracy, and in England it had remained so. But in France, the nobility, since the Middle Ages, had become a caste. In England, the nobility, though differing in tastes, customs, and ed- ucation from the other classes, nevertheless came into daily contact with them, and were frequently bound to them by ties of mutual interests. So, too, in France, when the nobility had possessed political power, they had come into contact with the peas- antry on their estates and with the bourgeoisie in the States-General. But now that the noble and the bourgeois had become almost identical in tastes and education, when the rich bourgeois, as well as the noble, had his salon, his ante-chamber, and his ushers, the two classes were separated by a wider and deeper gulf than ever before. Since political THE NOBLE AND THE BOURGEOIS. 79 liberty died, and the States-General ceased to meet, they had no contact in public life ; and, in private life, they were kept apart by arrogance and hate. And while the ability, wealth, and importance of the bourgeoisie were increasing, the privileges of the no- bility were actually growing greater than before. It was still harder under Louis XVI. for a roturier to become an army officer than under Louis XIV. In the reign of Charles VII., in the fifteenth century, when the tax called taille amounted to but 1,200,000 francs a year, the exemption from it was far from being so valuable a privilege for the nobility as under Louis XIV.; when it amounted to eighty mil- lions a year. When the taille was the only tax, the toeople noticed the exemption of the nobles from /paying it far less than when four other similar direct taxes had been added — not to speak of the royal corv/e, or enforced labor on the public roads, that had been unknown in the Middle Ages. With all these burdens on the mass of the people, the advantage of the nobility appeared immense. This advantage was, indeed, not quite so great as it appeared ; for the taxes sometimes fell upon the nobility, indirectly, through their tenants. But still the inequality was very gr^at. And even if it had not been so, it seemed so, which, for our purpose, is the important fact. For suffering is subjective, and a man's belief that injustice is done him is as potent a cause of discontent as if the injustice were actually committed. In France the injustice was actually enormous, and was severely felt. The more so, from the fact that, even with those taxes 8o THE MIDDLE CLASS. which, at their institution, were intended to fall upon all classes alike, the capitation tax and the vingithnes, care was taken to make the manner of levying them different for the different classes, so that their payment was degrading for the masses but honorable for the nobility. Nowhere in Europe was the inequality of taxation more visible and more constantly felt than in France. And, of all ways of distinguishing between man and man, and between class and class, there is none more pernicious than this, none more likely to foster hatred and isolation. For, see how it acts. Every year, when the taxes are levied, a sharp and definite line, that every one can see, is drawn anew between the classes. Every year the taxed class feels a positive and concrete in- justice ; and the favored class feels a fresh determi- nation to guard its privilege. Louis XI. had conferred nobility upon many plebeians, as a means of abasing the hostile nobles ; but his successors had done it as a means of pecu- niary profit. And they not only sold patents of nobility ; they actually forced* roiuriers to buy them. It was thus possible for a plebeian to attain to patri- cian rank in France as well as in England. But, as de Tocqueville points out, Burke was wrong in con- sidering this a true analogy. For, apart from the title, the distinction between the English nobleman and any other Englishman was but vague and indef- inite. Both paid taxes, both performed duties, and both could be members of Parliament. Not so in * Louis Blanc, Histoirc Je la Revolution Franfaise, Paris, 1847, vol. i. p. 145. ESCAPE FROM TAX A TION ]N THE 10 WNS. 8l France. For, although tlie barrier between the noblesse and the rottire could be surmounted, it was always fixed, always visible, and always to be recog- nized by glaring and odious signs. At no epoch of history, says de Tocqueville, had patents of nobility been so easily acquired as on the eve of the Revolu- tion ; and never had the difference in rights between the bourgeois and the nobleman been so complete. The system of selling patents of nobility not only failed to diminish class-hatred, but it actually in- creased and swelled it by all the envy felt towards the mushroom nobles by their old equals, the bourgeois. Almost the whole of the middle class, under the Old Regime, dwelt in the towns : from two causes — the privileges of the nobility and the taxation. The nobles residing in the country often showed a cer- \ tain good-natured familiarity towards the peasants ; I but their insolence to the middle class was almost \ boundless. Consequently the more well-to-do and educated farmers were glad to get rid of the arro- gance of their blue-blooded neighbors by going to the towns. The taille, however, and the other taxes, were a much more potent cause of their gravitation from country to town. For the townspeople had a thousand ways of lightening the burden of taxation, or even of avoiding it altogether, which the isolated countryman had not. Still more important than the partial or entire escape from paying taxes was the escape from collecting them ; which, as we shall presently see, when examining the state of the peasantry, was a still more grievous burden. Never, 82 THE MIDDLE CLASS. says deTocqueville.was there, under the Old Regime, or under any other regime, a worse condition than that of the village tax-collector. And no one in the village but the nobles could escape it. The conse- quence of which, according to Turgot, was that nearly all of the plebeian freeholders in the villages and country moved into the towns. And here, behind the city walls, they soon lost the tastes of country life and sympathy with the peasants. Being estranged from their former peers, one of the chief aims of such immigrants to the towns was to obtain government offices by which they could get immunity from taxation and other privileges. The number of these offices was prob- ably still greater under the Old Regime than now, in spite of the smaller population at that time. And when we reflect that under Louis Philippe (in this century) there were more than %oo,ooo of them,* we may form some idea of the state of things before the Revolution. Merely in the brief period between 1693 and 1709 about forty thousand new offices were created ; and de Tocqueville counts up 109 persons who were occupied merely in administering justice in an average provincial town in 1750, and 125 per- sons whose business it was to execute the decrees of the former. Of course vast numbers of these offices were sinecures, and filled those deprived of them with envy, and their possessors with egotistic vanity. Thousands of them exempted their posses- sors from public duties — this one from military ser- * Buckle's " History of Civilization," vol. i. p. 451. HOSTILITY TO THE PEASANTS. 83 vice, that one from the corvee, another from the taille, etc. Not only the nobles, therefore, but many of the bourgeois were exempt from burdens that were shifted to the backs of the peasants, who thus differed from the middle class not merely in dwell- ing-place and mode of life, but also in interests. There was, accordingly, nothing more apparent in the eighteenth century than the hostility of the townspeople to the peasants of the suburbs, and the jealousy of the latter toward the former. "The towns," says Turgot, " being occupied with their ■own private interests, are disposed to sacrifice the •country districts and the villages of their neighbor- 'hood." And the hostility of the peasants toward the middle class was shown also by the lowest class in the towns. Everywhere in pre-revolutionary France . Vye see hatred and envy between the different classes, j and between separate groups within each class. When we look at the internal constitution of the middle class, we find it divided into endless hostile groups. Not less than three dozen different cor- , porate cliques were to be found among the so-called ■ notables of a small town. These different cliques, though often small, labored incessantly, by purging themselves of heterogeneous elements, to make them- selves still smaller ; and some succeeded in reducing the number of their members to three or four. Each of these corporations was separated from the others by petty privileges ; and the courts resounded with the clamor of their quarrels. There were con- tinual wranglings about the right of precedence in 84 THE MIDDLE CLASS. the general assembly of the notables; and the wig- makers of the town of La FlJiche refused to take part in the proceedings, in order to publicly testify, as they said, to the " just grief " that they felt at the precedence granted to the bakers. In another town a part of the notables refused to officiate because some artisans had been admitted, with whom they would feel it a humiliation to be associated. Thus we see that these guilds and corporations which, in their origin in the Middle Ages,* had been useful democratic organizations for the purpose of gaining or maintaining civil liberty for the weak against the strong, had now degenerated into aristo- cratic cliques and monopolies. Each of them aimed to contain as few members as possible, that the profits of these few might be correspondingly great. This was carried so far, that the cost of admission into the most insignificant trades f was 400 or 500 francs for an apprentice or journeyman, and actually 3000 or4C)00 for a master-baker or locksmith. Until 1755 no one could become a master except in the town where he had learned his trade, unless he was willing to go through a new apprenticeship. These artificial shackles on free competition had long been hateful to many ; and even as early :j: as 1614 the Third Estate of the States-General had moved the abolition of all guilds founded since 1576, and the prohibition of new ones, on the ground that they * Roscher, " System derVollcswirthschaft," Stuttgart, 1882, iii., § 129. f Roscher, iii., § 134, note 14. t Roscher, iii., § 134, note 16. TESTIMONY OF ENGLISH WHITEKS. 87 fallen one-half within a few years, on account of the poverty of the people. About the same time Sir William Temple wrote that the French peasants were "wholly dispirited by labor and want "; and in 1691, Burton said that on a trip from Calais to Paris " there was opportunity enough to observe what a prodigious state of poverty the ambition and dissoluteness of a tyrant can reduce an opulent and fertile country to. There were visible," he says, "all the marks and signs of a growing misfortune ; all tiie dismal indications of an overwhelming calamity. The fields were uncultivated, the villages unpeopled, the houses dropping to decay." In 1689 a writer named Somers said : " I have known in France poor people sell their beds, and lie upon straw ; all their pots, kettles, and all their necessary household goods, to content the unmerciful collectors of the King's taxes." Dr. Lister, another Englishman who visit- ed Paris in 1698, said : " Such is the vast multi- tude of poor wretches in all parts of this city that whether a person is in a carriage or on foot, in the street, or even in a shop, he is alike unable to tran- sact business, on account of the importunities of mendicants." In 1708 Addison, who knew France well, wrote : " We think here, as you do in the country, that France is on her last legs." And in 1718 Lady Mary Montague wrote as follows in a letter to Lady Rich : " I think nothing so terrible as objects of misery, except one has the god-like attribute of being able to redress them ; and all the country villages of France show nothing else. While the post-horses are changed, the whole town 88 PEASANTRY AMD POPULACE. comes out to beg, with such miserable starved faces, and thin, tattered clothes, they need no other eloquence to persuade one of the wretchedness of their condition." —And not merely English observers noticed the abject misery of the French peasantry. Taine, indeed, has estimated that in the twenty-five years preceding the death of Louis XIV. in lyii,, about six million French peasants died of hunger and misery. In 1725, Saint-Simon wrote that the food of the Norman peasants consisted of herbs, and spoke of the King as a king of beggars, and of the kingdom as a vast hospital of dying men. In 1739, d'Argenson wrote in his diary: "The scarcity of food has just occasioned three upris- ings in the provinces at Ruffec, Caen, and Chinon. Women with bread have been assassinated upon the highways." In 1740, Massillon, Bishop of Clermont- Ferrand, wrote to Fleury : "The peasants of our neighborhood live in frightful misery, without beds, without furniture ; most of them, during half the year, have an insufficient quantity of the barley and oat bread, which is their sole food, and of which they are compelled to deprive themselves and their children in order to pay their taxes the negro slaves in our islands are infinitely better off ; for, though working, they are fed and clothed, with their wives and children ; instead of which our peasants, the hardest workers in the kingdom, are unable, even by the severest and most strenuous labor, to earn bread for themselves and their families, and to pay the taxes." In 1750, d'Argenson speaks of the " frightful misery " of the peasants, and says THE RABBLE IN THE TOWNS. 89 that the taxes were collected with a more than military rigor. " The collectors, with the bailiffs, followed by locksmiths, open the doors, carry ofT the furniture, and sell eveiything for a fourth of its value — the expenses of the sale amounting to even more than the taille. I see nothing but frightful misery"; he continues, "despair has come over the wretched people, and they wish only for death." He writes again that Paris was swarming with beggars, all said to be peasants, who, unable to endure longer the vexations of the country, had come for refuge to the city. And yet the condition of the lower classes in the towns was but little better than in the country. For, at that time, there were twelve thousand labor- ers begging in Rouen, as many at Tours, and so on. Floquet tells us that in Normandy, in 1752, the common people were entirely without bread, and were compelled, in order to escape starvation, to eat things which shock humanity. D'Argenson men- tions that one day, when the Dauphin and Dau- phiness were going to the cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris, more than two thousand women assembled and cried : " Give us bread, or we shall die of hun- ger "; and he says also tligt in the month between January 20 and February 20, 1753, more than/ 800 people in the Saint Antoine suburb of Paris} died of cold and hunger in their garrets. And this, it would be well to remember, when we read that ' this very suburb was one of the chief sources from which the legions of Robespierre were drawn. All through the country, and all through the eighteenth go PEASANTRY AND POPULACE. century, there were famines and bread-riots in this, that, or the other province or town. In the sole province of Normandy tliere were riots in 1725, 1737, 1739, 1752, 1764, 1765, 1766, 1767, 1768 — and always on the same subject, bread. " Entire hamlets," wrote the parliament, " being without the necessaries of life, were obliged to live on the food of beasts." During the lasl^mentioned riot the populace had possession of Rouen for three days, during which they pillaged the public granaries and warehouses. Up to the end of the Old Regime similar explosions took place: in 1770 at Reims; in 1775 at Dijon, Versailles, Saint-Germain, Pontoise, and Paris : in 1782 at Poitiers; in 1785 at Aix in Provence. And lastly, in 1788 and 1789, there was a dearth at Paris and in all France, on the eve of the great final hur- ricane that swept over the land and laid the rotten edifice of the Old Regime in ruins.. These famines were greatly aggravated by the meddling folly of the government. For, not only was freedom of trade with foreign countries ham- pered by " protective " tariffs, — but it was actually prohibited between the provinces — each of which was carefully " protected " by lines of custom-houses, erected by the wise rulers of the country. Ti^e free passage of grain from one province to the other being thus impeded or entirely prevented, a scarcity in one part of the country could not be relieved by the plenty in another. Even well-disposed ministers of the government only made matters worse by their folly in attempting to make the price of pro- visions lower by edicts, and by the government im- BACKWARD STATE OF AGRICULTURE. 91 portation of grain. By such measures they alarmed the owners of grain, and caused them to raise the price still higher. Thus, when Necker tried this plan, the price of grain,* instead of sinking, rose 25 per cent. Misery held a carnival in France. The despotism and fatal wars of Louis XIV. had produced their effects. During the latter part of the seventeenth cen- tury and the beginning of the eighteenth the popula- tion went backwards, and then came to a standstill for a long time. One-fourth of the soil lay uncultivated, and agriculture returned to the methods of the Mid- dle Ages. Except in Flanders and Alsatia the fields lay fallow one year in three, and, in many places, every second year. Bad agricultural implements ; no iron plows ; wooden axles to the carts, and wooden tires to the wheels ; little live-stock and little manure. Hence the crops were small, and the dread of starvation constant. How to live until the next harvest was the all-important question for the peasants. While the price of bread was as high then as now, the wages of laborers were scarcely more than half what they are at present. The peasants ate the most wretched food, and were sometimes reduced to nettles and the bark of trees. Their houses were wretched hovels, with thatched roofs and dirt floors. For clothes they wore rags, and often they had no stockings or shoes. Their squalor was hideous ; and Arthur Young tells us that it was impossible for an English imagination to picture the animals that * Arthur Young, vol. iii., p. 248-9. 92 PEASANTRY AND POPULACE. waited on him at an inn in the town of Souillac, beings called women by the courtesy of the inhabit- ants, but in reality " masses of walking filth." "No Englishman," he says in another place, " can form an idea of the appearance of most of the peasant-women of France "; and in describing one with whom he talked, he says that, though she was but 28 years old, her body was so bent by toil and her face so wrinkled that she seemed sixty or seventy. " God help us," she said, " for we are crushed by the taxes and the privileges of the nobles." CHAPTER XV. DIRECT TAXES. SHE was right. The taxes and the privileges of the nobility were the chief causes of the misery of the peasants. The direct taxes of the central government were the taille and its accessories, the capitation, the vingtihnes, and sometimes a tax by way of substi- tute for the corvee, or enforced labor performed by the peasants in building and repairing the public roads and army barracks, in transporting war-muni- tions, galley-slaves and other criminals from one part of the country to another. Without going into details for the different provinces, we may say that these direct taxes alone absorbed ^j^ per cent, of the net product {produit net) of the peasant propri- etor's farm — or nearly five .times as much as at pres- ent. In addition to these 53 per cent, paid to the government, the peasant * paid about fourteen per cent, more of his farm's net product to his seigneur, and an equal amount to the tithe-owning clergy. When all this had been paid, there remained barely 19 per cent, for himself. And with the exception of the vingtihnes all these' direct taxes fell not * Taine, p. 484-5. 94 DIRECT TAXES. only on the peasant proprietor but also on the common day-laborer with no real property whatso- ever. The rag-picker and the hawker of old iron, the inmate of the cellar and the inmate of the garret, all had to pay in cash the direct taxes, or fall victims, to the power of the police. The amount of the taxes was fixed each year secretly and arbitrarily by the cabinet of the King, so much for each province, after which the in- tendants and their subordinates, the sttbdelegu^s, fixed the amount due from each parish. This secret and arbitrary way of changing the amount made it impossible for the tax-payer to know one year what he was to pay the next, and thus rendered all his operations uncertain. The burden of paying the taxes was enormous, but that of collecting them was still greater. For, unless the collector could collect the fixed amount, he was responsible for the deficiency, all his property being liable to confiscation and his person to im- prisonment. We have seen that the dread of this was one cause of the movement of the more well-to- do farmers from country to town. Those who remained had to undertake the task by turns. And it was a task, saysTurgot, which caused the despair, and almost always the ruin, of him who undertook it, which reduced successively to misery all the prosperous families of a village. In 1785, in a single district of the province of Champagne, ninety-five collectors were imprisoned. Being grossly ignorant and unable to read, as a rule, the collector had to carry with hiin a clerk ; a system which opened the DESPOTISM OF l^HE COLLECTOR. 95 door to fraud and corruption. And yet, in spite of his ignorance, his inexperience, and possibly his depravity, this man was intrusted with enormous arbitrary power. His despotic dictum fixed the amount to be paid by each inhabitant, and a train of armed men and bailiffs followed him to enforce his decrees. Knowing that the government was pitiless and would seize his property and his person if he failed to collect the full amount of taxes due from the village, the collector was pitiless himself. With relentless callousness he drove starving families from their homes and sold their property at auction, though often the costs of tlie sale were higher than the receipts. In his heart the sentiment of justice, which would prompt to an equitable distribution of the taxes among the inhabitants, was stifled by the desire to spare his relatives and friends, by hatred and the desire of vengeance upon his enemies, by the fear of displeasing those who gave him work. Being responsible for the whole amount, he imposed higher sums than justice would permit upon prompt and honest payers, to indemnify himself for the sums he failed to collect from the dishonest and the destitute. Those who paid promptly, finding that . by so doing they made it likely that their taxes would be increased next year, ceased to do so, and withheld payment as long as possible. To escape this violent and arbitrary taxation, the French peasant of the i8th century acted like the mediaeval Jew. He took care to avoid all appearance of prosperity, even though he chanced to be prosperous in fact. Under this wretched system each tax-payer 96 DIRECT TAXES. had a direct and permanent interest to act the spy upon his neighbors, and to keep the collector in- formed of any increase in their wealth. Hence, even if a peasant were prosperous, it was of little avail ; for he feared to make use of his money. Even if able to buy improved implements and better horses, he continued to employ half-starved Rosinantes and wooden plows. For, " if I earned more," said a peasant, " the tax-collector would get it." He was afraid to eat good food or to wear good clothes. When Choiseul-Goufifier offered to put tiles upon the roofs of his peasants' huts instead of thatch, they declined with thanks, for fear that their taxes would be immediately increased. Distrustful, rancorous, torpid, and degraded, the French peasants of the Old Regime resembled the Egyptian fellahs or the down-trodden wretches who toil for the rajahs of Hindustan, CHAPTER XVI. INDIRECT TAXES. BUT the picture of misery is not yet complete. The taxes we have thus far discussed were only the direct ones. It remains to discuss those that were indirect. Ordinarily, indirect taxes are much less severely felt than direct. A man who buys a cigar scarcely thinks of the tax connected with it. And even if he does, and objects to it, he at least has the option of doing without the cigar. But he has no legal option as to whether he will pay a direct tax of the government. He sees the latter more plainly and feels it more acutely. In Old France, however, the system of collecting the so- called indirect taxes was so abominable that all the hateful characteristics of direct taxes were attached to them. As with the ancient Romans, they were farmed out by the government for a fixed sum to contractors, who then ground everything possible out of the people. In accordance with the gabelle, or salt-tax, every person above seven years of age was compelled to buy from the government, which had a monopoly of the salt trade, seven pounds of salt a year — at a price (in twelve of the provinces) of thirteen sous a pound, or four times as much, and if we take account of the greater value of money at 98 INDIRECT TAXES. that time than now, eight times as much as at present. Reckoning four such persons to a family, each family had to pay more than eighteen francs a year for salt, or the wages of about nineteen days' labor. " In Normandy," said the parliament of Rouen in 1760, "unhappy wretches who have no bread are daily seized, prosecuted, and their property sold for not buying salt." The vexations connected with this salt-tax were still worse than those con- nected with the taille. To enforce the purchases, an official inquisition was necessary, and the meddling hand of government intruded continually into every man's household. For the seven pounds could only be used for cooking or on the table. Woe to the peasant who by economy saved enough of this salt to cure the flesh of his hog. The government required that he should buy an extra amount of salt for all such purposes ; and if he was detected in violation of this wise law, his hog was confiscated and he was fined three hundred francs. Moreover, he was forbidden to use for cooking or on the table any other salt than the seven pounds. We read of two sisters who lived a mile from a town where the government salt warehouse was open only on Satur- days, and who, being out of salt early in the week, boiled down some brine and thus procured a few ounces of salt. For this they were fined forty-eight francs, and would have been fined more but for influential friends. It was forbidden to get water from the sea and from salt springs on penalty of from twenty to forty francs' fine. It was also for- bidden to drive cattle to the marshes or other places TAXES OjV SAL'/' and WINE. 99 where there was salt, or to let them drink sea-water, on penalty of confiscation and a fine of three hundred francs. Nor was it permitted to use more than a poimd and a half of salt to a barrel of mackerel. There was actually an ordinance to destroy every year the natural salt formed in certain districts of Provence; and the judges were for- bidden under heavy penalties to reduce the fines for violation of the laws concerning salt. There were hundreds of other prohibitions and ordinances, but these are enough to show how the government thrust its vexatious hands into everything con- nected with salt. Meddling officials came to taste the salt upon men's tables ; and, if it was good, de- clared it to have been smuggled in, because the monopoly-salt of the government was usually damaged and mixed with rubbish. Then, there were the aides — taxes on wine and other articles ; and here, too, the footsteps of the peasant were dogged by the rapacious tax-farmer. If a charitable citizen gave a bottle of wine to a poor invalid, he ran the risk of prosecution and excessive fines. At any hour the ofificials could come to the house of the wine-grower to take an inventory of his wine, to dictate to him how much he could drink, and to tax the rest. In a vineyard near Epernay four barrels of wine worth 600 francs were first taxed 30 francs, and then 75 more when they were sold. Of course the people employed all manner of ruses and tricks to evade these impositions; but the ofificials were suspicious and on the alert to pounce unawares upon every suspected house. lOO INDIRECT TAXES. They multiplied their visits and kept registers so exact that they could judge at a glance of the state of a man's cellar. The wine-grower having paid his 30 and then his 75 francs, it became the turn of the wine-merchant, who had to pay 75 more upon shipping the wine to the retailer. The wine starts on its journey, the tax-farmers prescribing the route. If it swerves from the route, it is confiscated ; and if it keeps on the route, additional payments must be made at every step. A boat-load of wine from Languedoc,- Dauphin^, orRoussillon which ascended the Rhone and descended the Loire, to go to Paris by the canal de Briare, paid on the route, without counting the payments on the Rhone, thirty-five or forty different kinds of taxes in addition to the tarifl levied at the gates of Paris, which was forty- seven francs a hogshead. The taxes on the route were paid at fifteen or sixteen different places — thus necessitating a voyage of twelve or fifteen days more than if all had been paid at once. The water-ways, especially, were lined with these stopping-places. For example, there were twenty-five or thirty tolls between Pontarlier and Lyon, and still more between Lyon and Aigues-Mortes. And when the wine had at length reached the cellar of the retail- dealer, still other and heavy taxes had to be paid. Among all peasant cultivators the wine-grower was the most to be pitied ; and, according to Arthur Young, wine-grower and miserable being were syn- onymous terms. In the province of Champagne it happened more than once that the inhabitants of La Ferte threw their wine into the river rather than VJiX^ TIONS OF THE SAL7' TAX. loi pay the exorbitant taxes; and the provincial assem- bly declared that in the greater part of the province the smallest increase of the taxes would drive all the cultivators to desert their lands. Such were the extortions and countless vexations connected with the wine-industry of the Old Regime. And, as for the gabellc, or salt-tax, we have the con- fession of a minister-of finance, Calonne, that it was the cause eveiy year of 4,000 attachments on houses, 3,400 imprisonments, 500 condemnations to the whipping-post, to banishment, or to the galleys. Never were two taxes more artfully devised, not merely for the robbery, but for the irritation of the people, than these two on salt and wine. The taxes, then, were the chief cause of the mis- ery of the lower classes in France ; and the taxes weighed so heavily on these classes, because of the exemptions of the very classes most able to bear them. Not merely the nobles and the clergy but many of the richer bourgeois, were enabled to shift the brunt of the burden upon the feeble shoulders of the poor. The peasants, on the whole, were more wretched than the laborers of the towns ; but these, too, suffered incalculable misery. Seven times in the course of eighty years the kings robbed the towns of the right to elect their local officers, and resold it to them for money. To raise the enormous sums with which to pay for this vain sem- blance of municipal freedom, the towns were com- pelled to double the taxes on articles entering their gates ; and as the heaviest of these tariffs were on the necessaries of life, the artisan and the day-laborer I02 INDIRECT TAXES. were burdened far more than the rich oligarchy who held the offices in their hands. To sum up the misery of the people, Taine puts the following words into the mouth of an imaginary peasant — a type of the real one : " I am miserable because I am taxed too heavily. The burden of taxation is too heavy upon me, because the privi- leged classes are exempt from, carrying their share of it. And not only do they force me to bear their share of the burden, but they levy upon me their ecclesiastical and feudal taxes. When I have given fifty-three per cent, of my net income to the royal tax-collector, I must give, in addition, more than fourteen per cent, to the feudal lord, and also more than fourteen per cent, to the clergy. With the eighteen or nineteen that are left me, I must satisfy the rapacity of the salt and wm^ tax collectors. I alone, poor wretch, pay the expenses of two govern- ments; the one, ancient and local, which to-day is absent, useless, harassing, and humiliating, and acts only through its vexations, its injustice, and its ex- tortion ; the other, recent, central and omnipresent, which, arrogating to itself the performance of all possible functions, has need of enormous pecuniary resources, and falls upon my emaciated shoulders with the whole of its stupendous weight." CHAPTER XVII. FORCED LABOR AND MILITARY SERVICE. AN admirable summary, as far as it goes. But still other points remain to be discussed before the hideous picture of woe is complete. The corve'e has been mentioned more than once, but only in an incidental way. Originally, in the Middle Ages, it was only a local, feudal institution ; but with the triumph of the Crown over the aris- tocracy came the extension of the system to public works. At the end of Louis XIV.'s reign the gov- ernment began to have the public highways re- paired by the corvie alone ; that is to say, by the peasants alone, who, in addition to their other ills, were thus compelled to neglect their fields in order to build splendid high-roads for the equipages of the rich. In 1737 the system was applied to all France. From that time on, we see it extended to more and more roads, until in 1779 we read that the public works executed by the corve'e in the poor province of Berry alone were valued at 700,000 francs a year, which was also the estimate in 1787 for Lower Nor- mandy. Arthur Young, who travelled through France in all directions on the eve of the Revolu- tion, was constantly amazed atthe useless magnifi- 104 FORCED LABOR Al^D MILITARY SERVICE. cence of the roads and the absurdly small amount of travel upon them. From the correspondence of the intendants we learn that it was the custom to refuse to allow the peasants to employ the royal corvde upon their own local roads, because their labor ought to be reserved for the high-roads, or — to use the phrase of the time — the roads of the King. Moreover, the royal corvie was used not only on the roads, but was gradually extended to all public works. In 1719 an ordinance decreed that it should be used in building barracks for the soldiers ; and stipulated that the villages should send their best laborers for this purpose, and that all other work should yield precedence to this. By the corv/e, too, the peasants were compelled to transport the crimi- nals to the prisons and galleys and the beggars to the alms-houses. Their horses and wagons were also obliged to transport the military baggage when the troops changed their camp. And, for all this, the peasants received but a wretched pittance, the amount of which was fixed arbitrarily by the gov- ernment. Perhaps the greatest burden of all which the peas- ant had to bear, says de Tocqueville, was the mili- tary service. The causes which were dissolving the nation into hostile groups and individuals were dis- solving the army also. For there, too, the priv- ileges were for the few and the hardships for the many. Of the 90,000,000 francs spent annually upon the army, 46,000,000 went to the small body of officers, and only 44,000,000 to the great body of the soldiers. These officers were nearly all nobles ; DEGRADA TION OF THE SOLDIERS. 105 and the laws for the exclusion of plebeians became more and more stringent, until it was decreed, a decade* before the Revolution, that no one could hold the rank of captain unless his family had been noble for at least four generations. Thus, on the one hand, the few possessed the authority, the honor, the money, the leisure, the good cheer, and the social pleasures ; on the other hand, the great body of the men had to endure the subordination, the abjection, the fatigue, the en- forced enrolment, with no hope of promotion, with six sous a day and bread fit only for a dog. On the one hand the upper nobility, on the other the dregs of the populace. The knowledge of the latter that they alone had to bear the burdens of- the ser- vice, while the nobles feasted and danced, rendered all the more bitter the ignominy of being flogged like hounds, the pangs of hunger, and the hardships of every kind. Exempt from enforced service were not merely the nobles and the botcrgeois, but also various employees of the government, all the game- keepers, the foresters, the domestics and valets of ecclesiastics, of religious houses, of nobles, and even of bourgeois who " lived nobly "; in short, every one who had influential friends and protectors. Hence there was no middle class in the army. The nobles and the lowest of the populace were sep- arated by a gulf, over which there was no interven- ing bridge ; and the popular hatred of the service was so great that many fled to the forests to escape it, and were hunted down like wild beasts. In a * Mme. Campan, pp 235-236. lo6 FORCED LABOR AND MILITARY SERVICE. single district where, during the Revolution, there were from fifty to a hundred volunteers in a day, men cut off their own thumbs, before the Revolu- tion, to avoid enlistment in the army. D'Argenson mentions, in 1752, that since the peace of 1748 there had been 30,000 deserters ; and Voltaire mentions how shocked he was at learning that the number of deserters in eight years reached 60,000. But when the crisis came, when the King and the nobles and the priests expected this army to protect them and uphold them in their privileges — this army which was composed of despised, maltreated, and imbruted peasants, of jail-birds and adventurers, of the riff- raff of the great cities, and of all that was most wretched and desperate in the populace — they found that they had reckoned without their host. In 1788, before the insurrection in Dauphin^, the Marshal de Vaux reported to the government that no reliance could be placed upon the troops. And he was right. After the storm of the Bastille, troops of women* filled the streets and cried to the artillery soldiers : " Why these cannon ? Will you kill your mothers, your wives, and your children ?" " Fear nothing," replied the men, " sooner than against you, these guns shall be levelled against the palace of the tyrant." * Campan, vol. ii. p. 52. CHAPTER XVIII. POACHERS, SMUGGLERS, BEGGARS, BRIGANDS. WHEN we reflect upon all the causes of misery that existed in pre -revolutionary France, should we not expect that many of these half- starved, despised and down-trodden wretches would have been driven by hunger and want to beggary and high-way robbery? Our expectation would prove to be just. Bands of scurvy, mangy, hungry and ferocious vagrants, beggars, smugglers, poach- fers, brigands, swarmed like vermin through the '^country. As early as 1752, there were bands of • fifty or sixty poachers each in the environs of Paris, all armed to the teeth and thoroughly organized, with infantry in the centre and cavalry on the flanks. And they were all the more dangerous and desperate because they knew that the laws against poaching were terrible and relentless. When Attorney- General Terray was hunting in 1777 on his estate in Bourgogne with two officers, seven poachers fired upon the game before their eyes, and then upon them. Terray was wounded, and a ball passed through the coat of one of his companions. The mounted police arrived, but were repulsed by the poachers, who were only overcome by dragoons lo8 POACHERS, SMUGGLERS, BEGGARS, BRIGANDS. from Provins. And who can blame these desper- ate men? In killing their oppressors, were they not avengers of the wrongs of the peasants whose crops were devoured by the game, and who themselves were often shot down by the keepers? When a tax is excessive, a temptation to defraud the government arises ; and this was the case with the exorbitant gabelle, which produced thousands of smugglers and makers of contraband salt. ,We may judge of their number from the fact that 1,200 leagues of inter-provincial custom-house lines were guarded by 50,000 men, of whom 23,000 were non- uniformed soldiers. In the so-called provinces of grande gabelle, agriculture ceased in a belt of coun- try four miles wide on each side of the lines; and the inhabitants consisted of but two classes — customs ofiRcials and smugglers. The higher the tax, the greater the premium on the violation of the law ; and along the border line that separated Brittany from Normandy, Maine, and Anjou, an increase of four sous a pound to the gabelle was sufficient to create an almost incredible accession to the number of smugglers and contraband salt -manufacturers. Brittany being a province of lower taxes than the neighboring ones, its whole border was inhabited by desperate vagabonds and famished outlaws from other parts of the country, whose sole occupation was to collect salt and smuggle it into the adjoining provinces by stealth or by force. And so it was in various parts of the country, at ports, on the bor- ders of provinces, and on the borders of the kingdom. MANDRIN, THE BRIGAND CHIEF. I09 But the gravest symptom of all was that the fmasses of the people sided with the smugglers I against the officials. Daring chieftains of brigands and assassins were the idols of the people. Such was ^^M andrin ; who, at the head of a band of sixty, tra- versed, for more than a year, with contraband articles, the provinces of Franche-Comt6, Lyonnais, Bourbonnais, Auvergne, and Bourgogne ; levied con- tributions on officials, and sold his merchandise in twenty-seven towns, which he entered unresisted. To conquer him, it was necessary to form a camp of 2,000 men before Valence ; and even then he was taken only by treason among his followers. To this day there are families that boast of being his de- scendants, and revere him as a liberator of the pjeople. Such occurrences were infallible signs of the rot- I tenness and approaching dissolution of the old social I system in France. Mercier estimated that there were more than 10,000 highwaymen in- the country, against whom the mounted police of nearly 4,000 men were continually on the march. " Every day," said the provincial assembly of Upper Guyenne, "there are complaints of the ineffective police-force of the rural districts." The absentee lords allowed things to go as they would, and their lands became the refuge of the outlaws of the neighborhood. 'Thus a danger grew out of every abuse, from the • negligent laxity of the feudal lords, as well as from the excessive severity of the royal officials. All the institutions of the Old Regime seemed to multiply outlaws and desperate men. Honest laborers, no POACHERS, SMUGGLERS, BEGGARS, BRIGANDS. ground down beneath the heel of the tax-collector, and despairing of living by work, became beggars and dangerous drones, or even robbers and assassins. In 1764 the government issued decrees, the stringen- cy of which was a sign of the excess of the evil. It was decreed that all those should be regarded as vagabonds and vagrants, and punished as such, who for six months had exercised no profession or trade, and who were without visible means of support, and unable to prove their good character by creditable witnesses. That not merely the vagabonds who tramped through the country should be arrested, but also all beggars who could be even suspected of vagrancy. The penalty was to be three years in the galleys ; nine years for the second offence ; and, for the third, the galleys for life. This was for able- bodied men. For feebler persons, imprisonment, v/as substituted for the slavery of the galleys. In accordance with this law, more than 50,000 beggars were arrested at one time, and as the ordinary pris- ons were not capable of containing them, new ones had to be built. Beggars continued to be arrested from that time until the Revolution ; and their main- tenance cost the government a million a year, in spite of the vileness of the food they received. By an ordinance of 1778, the governrrient police were to arrest, not merely the mendicants whom they chanced to see themselves, but every one who was denounced to them as such, or as a suspicious person. The most respectable citizen was thus at the mercy of his enemies if they accused him to the police, who could throw him into prison with thieves and vaga- RIGOKOUS LA WS AGAINST BEGGAR Y. 1 1 1 bonds without a trial. And this was not merely possible in theory, but actual in fact. For we learn from the intendant of Rennes that he saw in the jail of that town several husbands who had been arrested merely at the request of their wives, and as many wives at the request of their husbands. Chil- dren were imprisoned on the accusations of their step-mothers, and servant-girls on that of their mas- ters — all without the slightest proof of beggary. " There occurred," he says, " not a single judicial decision which gave back liberty to any of the infi- nite number of those who had been unjustly ar- rested." It frequently happened that men were arrested at a distance from the prison or the galley to which they were destined, and that three or four months elapsed, during which they were confined in various prisons on the way. Men and women were huddled together in these prisons, which were filthy hot-beds of vice and disease. And yet, in spite of all its rigor, the law failed to attain its object. " Our towns," said the parliament of Brittany in 1783, "are so peopled with beggars that all projects for stopping mendicancy seem only to have increased it." " The highways," wrote an intendant, "are infested Avith dangerous vagabonds, tramps, and beggars." The make-shift method of arresting beggars was of no avail when the deeper causes of beggary remained untouched. Out of 1,500 inhabitants of Saint-Patrice, 400 lived on alms ; as was the case with three-fourths of the 500 people of Saint-Laurent. These are but two instances by way of example ; and they could be multiplied. In 112 POACHERS, SMUGGLERS, BEGGARS, BRIGANDS. 1787 there were 30,000 laborers in Lyons who lived on charity ; and at Paris, which then contained only 650,000 inhabitants, there were nearly 120,000 indi- gent people in 1791. Under such circumstances what could be done by petty police regulations? It was vain to expect all these men to submit to a death by hunger and cold. During the bitter win- ter of 1788 the forests around Rouen were pillaged in broad daylight, while the entire forest of Bagnferes was felled — the wood being publicly sold by the ma- rauders. And when the riots of the Revolution came, the leaders who headed the infuriate peasants were frequently robbers, gallep-slaves, and assassins. When a certain house in Paris was sacked, it was noticed that, among the forty rioters that were ar- rested, there was scarcely a single one who had not been previously in the hands of "justice," who had not been branded or flogged. In all revolutions the dregs of society rise to the top. Unseen in ordi- nary times, desperate characters issue, in a stormy period, from their garrets and cellars, like rats from th^if ^oles in a sinking ship. CHAPTER XIX. EXTREME CENTRALIZATION. WE have now surveyed the rights and the wrongs of the various classes of French society ; and although, in doing so, we have necessarily caught more than one glimpse of the central government, it will be well to examine more closely its nature and workings. In France the protective spirit — that is, the spirit which leads the many to admire and look up to the few for protection and leadership, and the few to look upon themselves as the natural leaders and pro- tectors of the many — has always been very strong. And although it is a disputed question as to whether its strength in France is due to the inborn nature of the French or to special causes that have arisen in the course of French history, the fact of its strength remains undisputed. Whatever its origin, it is this spirit that produced the veneration and loyalty which the French people have felt by turns for their priests, their nobles, and their kings. It was this spirit to which was due the profound difference be- tween the French rebellion known as the " Fronde," against absolute monarchy, and the simultaneous rebellion in England which led to the death of 114 EXTREME CENTRALIZATION. Charles I. In France, the people, being without the sturdy self-reliance of the English, and unable to shake off their admiration for titled lords, sought their leaders in high-born princes and dukes and marquises and counts, while the leaders of the democratic English rebellion were brewers and tin- kers and tailors and draymen and cobblers. The latter succeeded, while the former failed. Charles I. was beheaded, and James II. dethroned ; but the triumph of Mazarin over the Fronde consolidated the absolute despotism of Louis XIV. Thus, the nobles having lost their political power through the successive blows of Richelieu and Mazarin, abandoned the attempt to recover it ; and thronged, as we have seen, to Versailles, to dispute with each other the honor of handing the King his shirt and his slippers, and of receiving in return the fat sine- cures of the Court. The people, being thus deserted by their natural leaders, began more and more to hate the nobles and their detestable privileges, and to transfer their allegiance to the Crown. And so complete was this allegiance that, for a large por- tion of the reign of Louis XIV., that illustrious des- pot, in spite of all his tyranny, was far more loved than hated. At his death, as already mentioned, the people were almost crazed with joy ; but no one at that time even thought of attacking the institu- tion of monarchy itself. The fearful disasters into which Louis had plunged the country made the peo- ple hate him, at length, as an individual; but the throne itself was still unshaken — at least to all out- ward appearance. Even at a much later time, when THE CABINET. 115 the first son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette was born, the delight of the people was so great that they congratulated each other upon the street with- out being acquainted, while acquaintances embraced each other for joy. And, indeed, when the States- General opened in 1789, the vast majority of the people, though hating absolutism, still loved the King and were loyal to the Crown ; only a compar- atively small number being radical enough to desire to abolish the name of King. Shrewd observers, like Arthur Young, perceived, it is true, that the whole drift of affairs was in the direction of a repub- lic; but, although the very foundations of absolute monarchy were long since undermined, the people still clung to the word, and loved the shell when the kernel was gone. This love of the people for the King had concen- trated the judicial, executive, and legislative func- tions of the government in the hands of the monarch. The supreme power was wielded, in the name of the King, by the cabinet mir.isters — the most impor- tant of whom was the coniroleur-gdndral ; or, as we should say, the Secretary of the Treasury, except that his power was far greater, and included, in fact, the functions of our Secretary of the Interior. He, and the other members of the cabinet, were usually roturiers, and lacked the pomp and splendor of the nobles. But, though their pretensions were smaller, their political power was all the greater, on account of the very secrecy and silence of their procedure. All internal affairs were under the management of the controleur-gineral. His imme- Il6 ■ EXTREME CENlliALIZATION. diate subordinates were the intendants of the pro- vinces, who, in turn, had under them the subddldguds in the various provincial districts. The intendants were generally recently &rino\A&A parvenus, but the subdeUgu^s were always roturiers. The Scotchman Law once said to the Marquis d'Argenson : " Never should I have believed on hearsay what I saw myself when contrdleur-g^n^ral of finance. Know that this kingdom of France is governed by thirty intendants. You have neither parliament [like the English], nor estates, nor provincial governors [except in name] ; but upon thirty clerks depends the weal or woe, the abundance orsterility of thiscountry." The pomp and pageantry of the great nobles who held the titles of provincial governors was nothing but show — as far as any real political power was concerned. For this was in the hands of the intendants, whom the nobles heartily despised. Each year the contrdleur-g^niral and the cabinet fixed in secret the amount of taxes to be collected in each province; the intendant fixed the amount to be paid by each parish, and enforced the payments of the collectors. In regard to the mili- tary, also, the cabinet and the King were supreme. The cabinet fixed arbitrarily the number of soldiers to be contributed by each province ; the intendant declared how many were to be levied in each parish ; and the subdifiegti^ presided over the drawing of lots, decided who was exempt, designated the soldiers who were permitted to live at their houses, and those who were to be transferred to other places, and finally handed them over to the military authorities. l^HE GO VERNMEN T POLICE. 1 1 7 There was no appeal from his decision except to the intendant, and from him to the cabinet. So, too, with the public works. Except in the few provinces with local legislatures, like that of Lan- guedoc, all public works, even those of entirely local character, were planned and executed by agents of the central government. Even the maintenance of order in the country districts was in the hands of the central power. The mar^chattss/e, or government police, was scattered all over the kingdom, and was everywhere under the orders of the intendants. By the aid of this police, in the absence of regular troops, the intendants arrested vagabonds, tried to repress mendicancy, and put down the riots so fre- quently occasioned by the high price of grain. Never, except in the cities, were the people called upon to relieve the government of this part of its task ; and even there, the intendant chose the men and appointed the ofificers of the town guard. The police regulations of the various judicial bodies {corps de justice) were usually applicable only to one place, and could even there be annulled by cabinet edicts, the number of which was immense. Moreover, the central government not merely ■diminished the feeling of sturdy independence among the people by making futile attempts to aid the poor in times of famine, but it actually pre- tended, with all the arrogance of officialism, to teach them the art of enriching themselves, and even to force them to use particular ways of attaining this end. Numberless edicts compelled the artisans to employ certain methods of manufacturing certain iiS EXTREME CENTRALIZATION. articles ; and, it being impossible for the intendants to enforce the application of all these rules, general inspectors of industry were appointed to traverse the provinces and look after the execution of the de- crees of the would-be omniscient cabinet. And the omniscience of these politicians went so far that they issued edicts prohibiting the cultivation of certain plants in those soils which, according to their infinite wisdom, were unsuited therefor. Vines already planted were actually pulled up by order of the central government. In 1692 municipal elections were for the first time generally abolished. The municipal functions were then made government offices and sold by the King. Louis XIV., indeed, alternately deprived the towns of municipal freedom and sold it back to them at his pleasure. The intendant, together with the oligarchical clique which comprised the town-council and the general assembly of the " notables,"''ruled the town ; while the people, seeing through the thin semblance ofHiberty, lost all interest in munic- ipal affairs. These affairs were all under the con- trol of the royal cabinet. The French towns could neither establish a local tax, nor levy a contribution, nor mortgage, nor sell, nor rent, nor administer their property, nor spend their surplus revenue, without the sanction of a special cabinet-edict issued upon the report of the intendant. The latter was con- sulted upon everything ; and upon everything he had a decided opinion, which he was ever ready to enforce. He regulated even the popular festivals, and ordered, upon occasion, public manifestations ABSOLUTISM OF THE INTENDANTS. 119 of Joy, such as bonfires and tlie illumination of houses. Even the conscience of the people did not fail to receive his paternal care ; and de Tocqueville mentions an intendant who fined several members of a town-guard twenty francs apiece for absenting themselves from the Te Deiim. The utter subjec- tion of the people to the intendant's will may be seen from the fact that the municipal officials cring- ingly called him Monseignetir and Votre Grandeur. Nor did centralization benefit the towns pecuniarily ; for we have already seen how utter was their finan- cial ruin. In the villages, above all, the weight of the cen- tral government's arm was felt with fearful force. According to de Tocqueville, their constitutions in the Middle Ages had been somewhat democratic, and similar to those' of the New England townships. Then they had possessed certain rights with which the seigneur did not interfere ; but in the eighteenth cen- tury these seemingly democratic assemblies were but an empty form. The tax-collector, who was under the immediate orders of the intendant, and the syn- dic, under those of the intendant's subddegu^, were the despotic rulers of the village. Nearly all the more prosperous and enlightened among the inhabi- tants were driven to the towns, as we have seen, until no one remained in the village but a herd of grossly ignorant and stupid peasants. "A village," said Turgot, "is an assemblage of cabins and of inhabi- tants no less passive than they." Centralization in France, as de Tocqueville has shown, was the creation of neither the Revolution i20 EXTREME CENTRALIZATION. nor the Empire, but of the Old Regime.' " Under" the Old R6gime," he says, " as in our time, there was neither city, town, village, nor hamlet in France, neither hospital, factory, convent, nor college which was allowed to have an independent will in its own private affairs, or to administer its own property as it wished. Then, as now, the administration held all the French in tutelage ; and if the insolence of the word had not then been produced, the thing itself, at least, was there." Even in Languedoc the smallest hamlet, hidden away in the valleys of the Cevennes, had no power to make the most minute expenditure without a special permit of the royal cabinet. The judicial tribunals of France were somewhat independent of the King; but he escaped from their jurisdiction, whenever he wished to, by a process called " evocation." That is, he evoked, or took away, any lawsuit he pleased from the ordinary courts, and referred it to a special tribunal appointed by himself for the occasion. The reason given once by a party desiring an evocation is worthy of note. " An ordinary judge," said he, " is bound by fixed rules, which oblige him to Aippress a fact contrary to the law ; but the cabinet can always dispense with the rules for a good purpose." Procedure such as this opened the doors, of course, to a despotism fatal to justice. Two instances will show its nature. An overseer of roads and bridges, charged with the direction of the corvee, was prosecuted by a peasant for maltreatment. The cabinet evoked the case, for the reason that the chief-engineer said as follows in EVOCATION'. 121 a letter to the intendant : "To tell the truth, the overseer is very much to blame ; but that is no rea- son for allowing the affair to take its course in the ordinary courts ; for it is of the greatest importance for the administration of roads and bridges that the usual tribunals should not receive the complaints of the peasants against the overseers of public works. If this example were followed, these works would be interrupted by continual trials, stirred up by the public animosity against the officials." The second instance I will mention is this. In the case of a government contractor, who had arbitrarily taken the materials which he needed from the field of a private person, the intendant reported as follows to the controleur-gen^ral : " It is impossible for me to ex- plain to you with sufficient emphasis how injurious it would be to the interests of the administration to abandon its contractors to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, whose principles can never be recon- ciled with its own." We see, then, that in the France of the Old Regime, the people existed for the sake of the government, not the government for the sake of the people. Centralization had palsied the independence of the individual, and supplanted the old feudal legislation and judicial institutions without absolutely destroy- ing their outward form. The system was best seen in Canada, where feudalism had left scarcely a trace. There could be seen the unmixed centralization. But in the mother country, at the moment when the Revolution burst forth, almost nothing of the old administrative edifice of feudalism was destroyed ; 122 EXTREME CENTRALIZATIO.V. though a new and more modern structure had been built, so to speak, underneath the foundations of the old one. The building of this took place, of course, very gradually, and without any profoundly medi- tated plan ; but it prepared none the less the final downfall of feudalism and the supremacy of the cen- tral power. In times of famine and distress this central power allowed, for a moment, the parlia- ments to administer the government to a certain extent, and permitted them sometimes to make a noise which has left its echo in history. But soon it silently took its place once more, and laid its heavy hand again upon all men and all affairs of the coun- try. Close attention to the conflict between the so- called parliaments and the royal power will recall the fact that the battle was almost always fought for supremacy in matters of policy, and not of admiuis- tration. The quarrels were often concerning new taxes ; that is to say, the two antagonists, the executive and the judiciary departments, disputed the possession of the legislative function of government ; and the nearer the Revolution approached, the more the conflict assumed this character. But until the Revolution actually came, and the National Assem- bly stepped in between the combatants and seized the prize, the Crown was the victor over the judiciary in both judicial and political questions. We have seen how the plan of evocation enabled the King to thwart justice and pervert it to his own ends. But he pos- sessed an even more summary method of disposing of his enemies, and of conferring favors upon his noble and priestly friends ; for the so-called Icttrcs LETTRES DE CACHET. 123 de cachet enabled him to dispense with even the mockery of a trial before a packed court. These were arbitrary warrants of imprisonment or exe- cution, issued by the King, when and against whom he chose. Many of the most illustrious Frenchmen were cast into prison by this terrible agency. Mirabeau, for example, was hurled into the dungeon of Vincennes by his irascible father, in accordance with such a lettre de cachet procured from the King. The danger of being suddenly im- prisoned by some enemy, with influence at Court, hung like the sword of Damocles over every man's head. The following is an instance of the lengths to which despotism could go, at that time, in one of the most civilized countries in the world. Maurice de Saxe, a brilliant general and licentious libertine, fell in love with an actress named Chantilly, who chose, however, to marry Favart, a writer of songs and comic operas, rather than be the paramour of the nobleman. Maurice, who was unaccustomed to repulses of this kind, was astonished at her presump- tion, and applied to the King for a lettre de cachet. This mere application, as Buckle justly remarks, is sufficiently amazing ; but the result was worthy of an oriental despotism alone. Incredible as it may seem, the government of France committed the base atrocity of issuing a warrant by which the wife of Favart was torn from her husband and compelled to submit to the embraces of the infamous Maurice. The bare recital of such things as this, even at our distant day, is enough to cause men's blood to boil. What wonder, then, that, at last, the very names 124 EXTREME CENTRALIZATION. of noble and King became hateful to the French ! What wonder that the people, maddened by the wrongs and insults heaped upon them, leaped, at last, like tigers, upon their oppressors, and deluged the land with their blood ! What wonder that the good-natured fool, Louis XVI., had to pay upon the scaffold the penalty of the despotic crimes of his predecessors ! Those who bemoan with sentimental tears the fate of Marie Antoinette should remember the fate of the wife of Favart ; and those who are ever so ready to charge the great French people with fickleness and blood-thirsty cruelty should remem- ber the insufferable wrongs which they so long had to endure, and should wonder, not so much at the terrible violence of the Revolution, as at the unpar- alleled patience by which it was so long delayed. Before leaving the subject of the absolute power of the central government it would be well to take a glance at Paris, the overshadowing importance of which was a symptom, a result, and a cause of central- ization. In no other modern country had the capital obtained so enormous an influence as in France. Like ancient Rome, Paris almost deserved to give its name to the country. " France," said Mon- tesquieu, " is Paris, together with that part of the country which Paris has swallowed up." At the time of the Fronde, says de Tocqueville, Paris was merely the largest city in France. In 1789 it was France itself. Local liberty had all but disappeared ; the symptoms of an independent life in the prov- inces had almost ceased, and their characteristic features had become confused. Europe was amazed PREPONDERANCE OF PARIS. 125 during the Revolution to see the French abolish the old historic names of their provinces, and cut up the country into so-called departments, with new boundary lines. It is the first time, said Burke, that men have been seen to mutilate their country in so barbarous a manner. And, indeed, what Englishman would dream of abolishing Yorkshire, and Kent, and Northumberland, not to speak of Wales and Scotland, and of dividing the country up into new and artificial departments? Or what American would- consider for a moment a proposition to wipe out entirely the names and boundaries of Mas- sachusetts and Virginia, and the rest of the States? In Virginia, even such names of counties as King William and Princess Anne were retained, although the Virginians fought against the English Crown and established a republic. For, in America and England, the states and shires are not mere fractions of the whole, but political organisms with a life of their own. In France, on the contrary, this life had been so crushed by the baleful influence of extreme cen- tralization that the dismemberment, so deplored by Burke, of Normandy, and Provence, and Burgundy and the rest, was merely the dissection of corpses, and not the mutilation of living beings. Arthur Young was struck with wonder at the dull and list- less appearance of the provincial towns, while Paris was thrilling with life. That city, though then con- taining but 650,000 inhabitants, was not merely the political centre of France, but the intellectual centre of Europe. The people in the lesser towns seemed scarcely to have opinions of their own, but looked to 126 EXTREME CENTRALIZATION. the centre for everything. Arthur Young was in Nancy * when the ominous news arrived that the King had dismissed Necker from the ministry and ordered him to quit the country. The people of Nancy were considerably excited at the news ; but upon asking different persons what they intended to do, Young always received the reply : " We are only a provincial town, and must wait to see what they will do in Paris." Moreover, Paris was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the country, not merely a city of commercial exchange, of con- sumption and pleasure, but had also become a city of manufactures — an ominous fact ; for with the factories came an increased number of laborers — that is, of the poor and desperate class. In the sixty years that preceded the Revolution the population of the city, as a whole, increased by hardly a third, while the number of laborers more than doubled. Thus, Paris had become the mistress of France ; and the army of sans-culottes was rapidly assembling that were destined to make themselves masters of Paris. The fatal effects of centralization, we see, were manifold. Law-making being subject to the mo- mentary and ■ arbitrary caprice of the King and Cabinet, the laws were changed so incessantly that at length all law f necessarily fell into contempt. And when this condition of things could be borne no longer, the people arose, punished their law-givers, * Young, pp. 404-405. f De Tocqueville, pp 102-103. PREPONDERANCE OF PARIS. iz? and took the law into their own hands. So long as Paris was on the side of the government, its pre- ponderating influence was of immense advantage to the King; but when the metropolis threw its vast weight into the opposite scale, the days of the Old Regime were numbered. CHAPTER XX. INTELLECTUAL DECLINE UNDER LOUIS XIV. ONE part of my task is done. I have endeavored to lay before the reader's eyes at least a partial picture of pre-revolutionary France. I have sketched the privileges of the King, the nobles, the priests, and the richer bourgeois, and the misery of the peasants and the populace of the cities. The cen- tralization and consequent tyranny of the govern- ment have also been passed in review. It remains to trace the steps by which the nation, which for centuries had shown a more loyal devotion to its monarchs than almost any other in Europe, came to hate the name of King and to adore the word Re- public ; by which the nation that had always been conspicuous for the gulf between its different social classes came to worship equality ; by which the nation that had led the crusades, and always been conspicuous for religious zeal, became a nation of sceptics and atheists; by which, in short, there gradually took place in France an immense intel- lectual revolution, of which the outburst of 1789 was merely the outward and visible sign. At the death of Louis XIV., France lay prostrate and exhausted. The people breathed freely once THE PARLIAMENTS. 129 more at the glad tidings that the old tyrant was dead ; and there followed a sudden reaction against the tyranny and religious hypocrisy of the Court. Grosser spirits sought in license a recompense for the slavery they had endured. But in more elevated natures there arose a longing, first, for liberty of thought, and, later on, for liberty of action. How was that longing to be gratified ? What were the means of opposition in France to such tyranny as that which drove more than half a million Hugue- nots to seek refuge in other lands? The judicial tribunals called parliaments were or- ganized bodies capable of some resistance; but they contended much less for the liberty of the people than for the selfish interests and privileges of their own class. Moreover, their power of resistance was exceedingly small. They had the right to register, or to protest against, the edicts of the government ; but if the King especially desired the registration he appeared in person before the parliaments, which, in this case, seldom dared to disobey his commands. If they did, he could rid himself of their obstruction by dissolving them, or exiling them to some distant town. In England there was a great legislative body representing the commons as well as the nobility and clergy. There was a tolerably free press, free debates in Parliament, and great public meetings with popular discussion. There was also a Bill of Rights, a Habeas Corpus act, and trial by jury. All these things in England were so many means of organized legal resistance to tyranny, deeply rooted in the traditions of the country. 130 INTELLECTUAL DECLINE UNDER LOUIS XIV. They were not mere empty forms, but had signally shown their strength in the execution of one King and the dethronement of another. But in France all these things were lacking. The people possessed 710 orga7i of resistance. All during the eighteenth century, as we know, there were local uprisings and bread-riots of famished and desperate men. But, there being no free institutions around which the people could rally, as in England, these local dis- turbances were easily crushed by the government. — One means of effective resistance, and one alone, remained to the lovers of freedom in France. That means was literature, with its auxiliary, conversation, in the brilliant salons of the time. But where was a literature to be found in France at the death of Louis XIV., that was suited to the needs of the new generation, growing up in hatred of ecclesiastical tyranny? Where was there any literature of value in France at that time? Where were the results of the much eulogized munificence of Louis the so-called Great in " protecting " and " fostering " literature ? Who now remembers Cam- pistron. La Chapelle, Ducerceau, Dancourt, Dan- chet, Catrou, Chaulieu, Vergier, and the rest of the wretched scribblers whose names were then the most illustrious in French letters ? The protective spirit, carried by Louis into literature, had produced its natural results. In an age when the belief in the divinity supposed to hedge a King had not yet been dispelled, it was easy for the vain and pompous Louis to persuade the people that he was the supreme arbiter of literary taste. Hence authors PASSING AWAY OF GREA T WJU7^ERS. 13 1 strove, above all things, to obtain the commendation of the King and his Court; and manliness and originality in literature gave place to cringing servility and flattery. Long before Louis died, all the greatest writers who had grown up and flourished in the preceding generations had passed away. Before the fostering care of the great King had pro- duced the whole of its disastrous effects, France had brought forth, in the mathematics, such men as Pascal, Descartes, Fermat, Gassendi, and Mer- senne ; in anatomy, as Pecquet and Riolan ; in practical medicine, as Fernel and Joubert ; in sur- gery and osteology, as Ambroise Par^ ; in pathology, as Baillou ; in zoology, as Belon and Rondelet; in chemistry, as Rey ; in philosophy, as Descartes and Malebranche ; in belles lettres, as Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine, La Bruyere and La Rochefoucauld ; in painting, as Poussin, Lesueur, Claude Lorraine and Le Brun ; in sculpture, as Puget; and in architecture, as Perrault and Mansart. All this was changed before Louis XIV. died. Even art and belles lettres had sunk to the lowest ebb ; while in science scarcely a single discovery worthy of mention was made during his whole reign. Louis fostered astronomy by building a splendid ob- servatory, but France added nothing to that science during his rule. While just across the channel Sir Isaac Newton produced his immortal Principia, and gave to the world the sublime theory of gravitation, the French intellect had become so stupefied by the benumbing inflluence of centralization and pro- tection that no French astronomer adopted New- 132 INl^ELLECTUAL DECLINE UNDER LOUIS XIV. ton's views until 1732; which was forty-five years after their publication. In anatomy and the other branches of scientific and practical medicine France accomplished nothing for two or three generations. The practice of medicine in Paris was notoriously inferior to that in London and the chief cities of Germany and Italy, while in the French provincial towns the grossest ignorance prevailed even among the best physicians. Addison, for example, wrote from Blois in 1699: "I made use of one of the physicians of this place, who are as cheap as our English farriers and generally as ignorant." In zoology and botany, too, nothing was accomplished in France during that fatal reign. In the previous reign, Rey had anticipated some of the great dis- coveries of Lavoisier in chemistry; but his writings were totally forgotten during the Great Louis' reign ; and the famous experiments of Boyle were unknown in France for more than forty years after their pro- mulgation in England. " The truth is," says Buckle, " that in these, as in all matters of real importance, in questions requir- ing independent thought, and in questions of prac- tical utility, the age of Louis XIV. was an age of decay : it was an age of misery, of intolerance, and oppression ; it was an age of bondage, of ignominy, of incompetence." " In that time, as in all others, the misery of the people and the degradation of the country followed the decline of the national in- tellect ; while this last was, in its turn, the result of the protective spirit, — that mischievous spirit which weakens whatever it touches." And " nothing but PROSTRATION OF THE COUNTRY. 1 33 the amazing energy of the French people could have enabled them to rally, as they afterwards did, from the effects of so enfeebling a system. But though they rallied, the effort cost them dear. The strug- gle," as we know, " lasted two generations, and was only ended by that frightful Revolution which formed its natural climax." The tinsel splendor of the Court of Louis XIV. was all that the French possessed to recompense them for their torpidity of mind and servility of spirit. " There was no popu- lar liberty ; there were no great men ; there was no science ; there was no literature ; there were no arts." CHAPTER XXI. INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND UPON FRANCE. AND when the tyrant died and the reaction came, where were the rising generation in France to find the intellectual aliment which they craved ? Where but in the country of Newton and of Locke? Buckle has given, in his twelfth chapter, the results of his profound investigation of that junction of the French and English intellects which he declares to be " by far the most important fact in the history of the eighteenth century." During the earlier parts of Louis XIV. 's reign, when his wars were suc- cessful and he threatened to overwhelm the rest of Europe, the French, puffed up with vanity, and adoring themselves in the person of their gaudy monarch, looked down with scorn upon the English — a people so barbarous as to kill one king and depose another. In his life of Cromwell, Carlyle quotes Saumaise as declaring the English to be "more savage than their own mastiffs." Another French writer called them " rebel barbarians." Patin compared them to the Turks, and said that they would probably hang their next king. Madame de Maintenon spoke of the " ferocity of the Eng- lish," and declared that she hated them as much as FRENCH IGNORANCE OF ENGLAND. 135 she did the common people. The dislike and con- tennpt felt by the French for the English were, indeed, so absurdly extreme, that an attempt was made in 1679 to discredit bark as a medicine because it was an " English remedy "; and at the end of the seventeenth century Parisians argued against the introduction of coffee as a beverage because the English liked it. So far from the laws, customs, and literature of England having any influence upon the French, it was the English who, in the field of poetry at least, imitated the French in the time of Pope, Dryden and the other writers of the so-called Augustan age. At the close of the seventeenth century it is doubtful if the English language was known to even half a dozen French- men in either literature or science. When the English poet Prior arrived as ambassador at the French court, no one in Paris was aware that he had written poetry; and Boileau was even ignorant, until informed by Addison, that the English had any good poets. It is actually said that Milton's " Paradise Lost " was not even heard of in France for fifty years after its appearance. Ignorance begets prejudice ; and the French, being totally ignorant concerning their insular neighbors, re- garded them as a mere horde of turbulent savages, entirely unworthy the attention of so polished and civilized a people as themselves. But the bitter defeats that the French suffered at the hands of Marlborough and Prince Eugene aroused a suspicion in their minds that perhaps, after all, other nations besides themselves possessed 136 INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND UPON FRANCE. some merit ; and the frightful tyranny of Louis XIV. made them also suspect, at length, that possibly despotism has its drawbacks, and that a govern- ment by princes and bishops is not the best possi- ble for a civilized country. Between the death of Louis in 1715 and the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 a stupendous change took place. At the beginning of this period it would have been ex- tremely hard to find a Frenchman who had been to England or knew the English language. At the end of it, it would have been equally difficult to find an educated man in France who was ignorant of English and England. When the great reaction against the protective . spirit began, the foremost thinkers, first, and then their followers, the educated classes, turned their eyes with respect, and then with admiration and enthusiasm, to the country where greater freedom of thought and action pre- vailed than anywhere else, at that time, in the world. There was scarcely a single eminent Frenchman, during the two generations which preceded the Rev- olution, who did not either know English or go to England ; and many of them did both. Buffon, the naturalist, Brissot, Helv^tius, Jussieu, Lalande, Morellet, Mirabeau, Raynal, Roland and his celebrated wife, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and many others among the ablest Frenchmen of the time thronged eagerly to London. Voltaire de- voted himself with ardor to the study of English literature, from which he drew much of the material used by him with such prodigious effect. Cousin, in his " History of Philosophy," says : "The real king VOLT A IRE A PUPIL OF THE ENGLISH. 137 of the eighteenth century was Voltaire; but Vol- taire, in his turn, was a pupil of the English. Before Voltaire becanne acquainted with England through his travels and his friendships, he was not Voltaire, and the eighteenth century was still undeveloped." He it was who first diffused in France a knowledge of the Newtonian natural philosophy, which then rapidly superseded that of Descartes. Cousin de- clares Locke to have been the true teacher of Vol- taire, who recommended his writings to the French, and was untiring in his praise. Locke's writings soon became popular, and supplied to Condillac many of the materials for his system of metaphysics, and to Rousseau for his theory of education. Vol- taire was also the first Frenchman to study the works of Shakespeare, though he afterward endeavored to diminish what he regarded as the exaggerated ad- miration paid to them by his countrymen. So pro- found, indeed, was Voltaire's knowledge of English literature, that he was acquainted not only with the works of the great masters, but also with those of minor poets like Butler, theologians like Tillotson, metaphysicians like Berkeley, and other writers such as Shaftesbury, Chubb, Garth, Mandeville, and Woolston. And so with other great Frenchmen. Montesquieu had the English government in mind when he wrote his political philosophy, and imbibed in England many of his principles. The famous naturalist Buffon began his career as an author by translating Newton and Hales. Diderot was a pas- sionate admirer of the novels of Richardson, and took the ideas of several of his plays from English 138 INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND UPON FRANCE. dramatists. His philosophic arguments were largely borrowed from Shaftesbury and Collins, and his first book was a translation of Stanyan's " History of Greece." Helv^tius drew many of the views in his celebrated work, " On the Mind," from Mandeville, and never grew tired of praising the English people. He frequently quotes the authority of Locke, whose opinions scarcely any Frenchman in the age of Louis XIV. would have dared to approve. The writings of Bacon had been previously but little known in France ; but they were now translated, and the classification of the human faculties, contained in them, became the basis of the celebrated Encyclo- pzedia, at the head of which were Diderot and d'Alembert. In thirty-four years the " Theory of Moral Sentiments " of Adam Smith was translated three times by three different Frenchmen; and when the same great author's " Wealth of Nations," the corner-stone of Political Economy, appeared, Morel- let immediately began to turn it into French, but was prevented from publishing his translation be- cause, before he could do so, another one appeared in a French periodical. The " Commentaries " of Blackstone were translated by Coyer, and the " Po- litical Discourses " of Hume by Le Blanc, who also wrote a special work upon the English. A large portion of the numerous writings of Baron d'HoI- bach, whose famous dinners in Paris brought to- gether the most illustrious men of the age, consisted of translations from the English ; and, in fact, Frenchmen of all tastes and of the most opposite pursuits were agreed in their immense admiration IMMENSE ADMIRA TION FOR ENGLAND. 139 for English literature. Poets, mathematicians, histo- rians, naturalists, philosophers, essayists, anatomists, physiologists, philologists, antiquaries, all seemed to agree as to the necessity of studying a language and a people on whom their fathers had not deigned to waste a thought except in contempt. To mention but a very few among the long list which Buckle gives, the English language was known to mathema- ticians like Montucla, d'Alembert, and Lalande ; to anatomists, physiologists and medical writers such as Bichat, Cabanis, and Pinel; to naturalists besides BufTon, such as Haiiy and Rome de Lisle ; to phil- ologists and historians like de Brosses and Volney ; to various poets and dramatists and many miscel- laneous writers. In fact, Le Blanc, who wrote less than thirty-five years after the death of Louis XIV., says : " We have placed English lately in the rank of the learned languages ; even our women learn it, and have dropped Italian to study the tongue of this philosophic people." And not merely the great writers who prepared the way to the Revolution — the actors themselves in the terrible drama were also familiar with English. Carra, Dumouriez, Lafayette, Lanth^nas, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, Mirabeau, Mounier, Le Brun, Brissot, Madame Roland, Con- dorcet, and the Duke of Orleans, nicknamed .^^«/zV/, were all acquainted with the Engh'sh language. Marat was such a master of English that he actually wrote two books in it ; one of which, entitled " The Chains of Slavery," was afterwards translated into French. Mirabeau translated Watson's "History of Philip II.," and also parts of Milton, especially 14° INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND UPON FRANCE. the democratic passages. He was a profound stu- dent of the English constitution, and is said to have delivered, as his own, in the National Assembly, por- tions of the speeches of Burke. " In London," says Lamartine, " the Duke of Orleans acquired a taste for liberty. From there he brought to France his habits of insolence toward the Court, his appetite for popular agitation, his scorn for his own rank, and his familiarity with the vulgar herd." Such was the admiration felt by the French of that great age for the people whom so shortly before they had either ignored or despised. Before the reign of Louis XIV. France had produced great men. " But it is an unquestionable fact," says Buckle, " and one melancholy to contemplate, that during the sixty years which succeeded the death of Descartes, France had not possessed a single man who dared to think for himself. Metaphysicians, moralists, historians, all had become tainted by the servility of that bad age. During two generations, no Frenchman had been allowed to discuss with freedom any question either of politics or of religion. The consequence was, that the largest intellects, ex- cluded from their legitimate field, lost their energy ; the national spirit died away; the very materials and nutriment of thought seemed to be wanting. No wonder, then, if the great Frenchmen of the eigh- teenth century sought that aliment abroad which they were unable to find at home. No wonder if they turned from their own land, and gazed with ad- miration at the only people who, pushing their in- quiries into the highest departments, had shown the POLITICAL LIBEkTV IN ENgLANL). 14! same fearlessness in politics as in religion ; a people who, having punished their kings and controlled their clergy, were storing the treasures of their experience in that noble literature which never can perish, and of which it can be said in sober truth, that it has stimulated the intellect of the most dis- tant races, and that, planted in America and in India, it has already fertilized the two extremities of the world." The French Revolution was " essentially a reac- tion against that protective and interfering spirit which reached its zenith under Louis XIV., but which, centuries before his reign, had exercised a most injurious influence over the national prosper- ity." Much of " the impetus," however, "to which the reaction owed its strength, proceeded from En- gland "; and English literature "taught the lessons of political liberty, first to France, and through France to the rest of Europe." Lerminier says of England in his " Philosophy of Law": "This cele- brated island gives Europe lessons in political lib- erty ; in the eighteenth century it was the school for all the thinkers of Europe." The first Frenchmen in that century that turned their attention to En- gland were amazed at the boldness with which, in that country, political and religious questions of the deepest moment were discussed — questions which no Frenchman of the preceding age had dared to broach. With wonder they discovered in England a compar- ative freedom of the public press, and saw with as- tonishment how in Parliament itself the government of the Crown was attacked with impunity, and the 142 WFLUEMCE OF ENGLAND UPON FRANCE. management of its revenues actually kept under control. To see the civilization and the prosperity of England increasing, while the power of the upper classes and the King diminished, was to them a rev- elation. "The English nation," says Voltaire, "is the only one on earth which, by resifeting its kings, has succeeded in diminishing their power." " How I love the boldness of the English ! How I love men who say what they think!" "The English," says Le Blanc, " are willing to have a King, provided they are not obliged to obey him." The immediate ob- ject of their government, says Montesquieu, is polit- ical liberty; they possess more freedom than any republic ; and their system is in fact a republic dis- guised as a monarchy. " Property is in England a thing sacred," wrote Grosley, " which the laws pro- tect from all encroachment, not only from engineers, inspectors, and other people of that stamp, but even from the King himself." Mably says in his " Observa- tions on the History of France": "the Hanoverians are only able to reign in England because the people are free, and believe they have a right to dispose of the Crown. But if the kings were to claim the same power as the Stuarts, if they were to believe that the Crown belonged to them by divine right, they would be condemning themselves, and confessing that they were occupying a place which is not their own." England, said Helvetius, is a country where the people are respected, a country where each cit- izen has a part in the management of affairs, where men of genius are allowed to enlighten the public upon its true interests. And Brissot, who had THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION. 143 specially studied the subject, exclaimed with enthu- siasm : "Admirable constitution! which can only be disparaged either by men who know it not, ox else by those whose tongues are bridled by slavery." A volume could be filled with similar extracts; but these are sufficient to show the immense admira- tion for England which suddenly sprang up in France. CHAPTER XXII. PERSECUTION OF FRENCH WRITERS. THE results were of prodigious importance. For the thinkers of France, stimulated by the ex- ample of England into a passionate love of intel- lectual progress and liberty, soon came into collis- ion with the governing and privileged classes. This opposition was a necessary and healthy reaction against the spirit of servility that prevailed under Louis XIV., and would have been highly beneficial if the government had met it in a spirit of media- tion and reform. But, unfortunately for themselves and for France, the nobles and the clergy had been too long accustomed to their privileges and vast social predominance to allow mere men of letters to attack with impunity their arrogant pretensions. Hence it was that, when the great French thinkers of the time attempted to imitate the fearless spirit of their English neighbors, and to discuss freely those great questions of religion and government which are a source of such undying interest to man, the clergy and their allies, the nobles, were roused into hatred and anger, and used their immense influ- ence with the government to bring about that "cru- sade against knowledge " which Buckle calls th^ SUFPKESSION OF BOOKS. 145 " second principal precursor of the French Revolu- tion." And few, who have not read Buckle, can form an adequate idea of the extreme to which this persis- tent persecution of every man who presumed to think for himself was carried. Not that men were actually killed or burned at the stake for unorthodox political or religious views. Such radical persecu- tion as this might possibly have crushed dW thought, and have staved off the Revolution indefinitely, as the Inquisitors crushed Protestantism in Spain, and Calvin Catholicism in Geneva. Such was not the case. The enemies of knowledge in the France of the eighteenth century no longer possessed the fer- vid convictions of genuine fanatics, and resorted, therefore, not to the persecution that crushes and annihilates, but to that which irritates and arouses to more determined resistance than ever. The writers of that time, like the fabled Antseus, who rose with tenfold strength from his mother, Earth, each time that Hercules hurled him to the ground, gathered new force of intellect and will from each persecution. Whole editions of their works might be burnt or otherwise suppressed, but others were surreptitiously printed and eagerly read by thousands in whom a new thirst for knowledge and liberty had arisen. It is difficult to exaggerate the indignation which must have been felt by those brilliant writers at the systematic oppression which they had to en- dure at the hands of their ignorant and often vicious enemies. Buckle estimates that at least nine out of every ten authors, who wrote during the seventy 146 PERSECUTION OF FRENCH WRITERS. years following the death of Louis XIV., suffered some grievous injury from the government, and that a majority of them were actually thrown into prison. In fact — he goes on to say — this would be under- stating the case. For it is very doubtful if one literary man in fifty escaped with entire impunity. Scarcely a single Frenchman of that age, whose writings still survive, failed to meet with some pun- ishment or other from the rulers of France. Among those who suffered either confiscation of property, or imprisonment, or exile, or fines, or the suppres- sion of their works, or the ignominy of being com- pelled to recant what they had written, we find, among a host of others, the names of Beaumarchais, Berruyer, Bougeant, Buffon, d'Alembert, Diderot, Duclos, ■ Freret, Helv^tius, La Harpe, Linguet, Mably, Marmontel, Mercier, Montesquieu, Morellet, Raynal, Rousseau, Suard, Thomas, and Voltaire. To suppose that all these illustrious men deserved such treatment would be ridiculous, even if we had no proofs to the contrary. But we have the proofs. Knowing the accusations which were made against them and the punishments that were inflicted, we can compare the two and see whether the latter were just. Soon after the death of Louis XIV. Voltaire was falsely charged with having written a libel on that King, and confined for twelve months, without the pretense of a trial, in the Bastille. Having thus expiated an entirely imaginary crime, he was delib- erately insulted one day at the table of the Duke de Sully by the Chevalier de Rohan Chabot, one of VOLTAIRE BE A TEN AND IMPRISONED. 147 those arrogant and dissolute nobles with whom Paris at that time teemed. The Duke, probably thinking it a sufficient honor for a mere poet and philoso- pher to be even noticed by a man of his own ex- alted rank, took no notice of the outrage inflicted upon his guest ; but, as Voltaire retorted with one of those stinging strokes of flashing wit which made him the terror of his enemies, the noble chev- alier determined to chastise him for his presump- tion. He caused Voltaire to be seized and beaten by ruffians in the streets of Paris, he himself stand- ing by to regulate the number of blows. Still more : he not only refused to accept Voltaire's challenge to a duel, but actually obtained a lettre de cachet, or arbitrary warrant, by which the latter was again imprisoned for six months in the Bastille and then ordered to quit the country. Upon his return he wrote his first historical work, the well-known biog- raphy of Charles XII. of Sweden. This book con- tains no attack whatever upon either Christianity or the French government. It is in fact so absolutely harmless, and such a model of pure style, that we use it in our schools to teach boys French. But the all-seeing eye of government detected some imaginary fault in the book ; and although permis- sion was granted, at first, to publish it, the authori- ties withdrew their permission after it was printed, and forbade its circulation. His next work,the " Phil- osophic Letters" on the English people, was much more important than the life of Charles XII., and met with signal success ; but, as he employed in it the arguments of John Locke against innate ideas, 148 FERSECUTION OF FRENCH WRITERS. the rulers of France determined to rebuke the nov- elty ; and, though just as ignorant of innate as of all other ideas, ordered Voltaire to be again ar- rested and his work to be burned by the common hangman. Which one of us can blame Voltaire for resisting, with all the intellectual force at his com- mand, the despotic treatment which he received ? Those who reproach this great man and his great contemporaries with having frivolously attacked the existing order of things, and wantonly pulled down the old edifice of society, must either be igno- rant of the intolerable wrongs which they had to suffer, or be incapable of seeing the palpable truth that, when a building is rotten and shaky, and threatens ruin to all its occupants, it should be pulled down. It is, indeed, a lamentable proof of the influence of empty phrases and of mere words upon men's minds, that so many have supposed they had conclusively proved the baneful influence of Voltaire when they had shown that he was not a builder-up but merely a puller-down. As a matter of fact, he was by no means a mere iconoclast ; but, even if he had been, how would that prove his labors any the less beneficial to his age ? As if the pulling down of a rotten edifice were not the nec- essary and indispensable condition of building up a new one in its place ! As if the surgeon, who am- putates a mortified limb and saves a man's life, con- fers no benefit, and is even to blame, because una- ble to make a new limb in place of the old ! Still more : as if the surgeon who removes a foul and hideous tumor is to blame, because he neither wishes THE ENCYCLOPEDIA. 1 49 nor is able to create another in its place ! Voltaire was the chief social surgeon of France in the eigh- teenth century. He had no hesitation in using the lance and scalpel of his intellect to lop off the tumors and cancers of society wherever he saw them. But he did more than this. He strove to add in many ways to the sum of positive knowl- ledge. Among other things he desired to acquaint his countrymen with the wonderful discoveries of Newton ; and prepared, accordingly, an account of the labors of that mighty thinker. But here, too, the beneficent rulers of France interposed and for- bade the publication of the work. As if instinctively aware that their only hope of continued safety was in the ignorance of the people, they obstinately opposed every form of knowledge. Several eminent men — at their head Diderot and d'Alembert — undertook to publish on a grand scale that celebrated Encyclopaedia, which was to contain the essence of all branches of science and art. But this splendid and, at that time, novel scheme, was at first discouraged, and then prohib- ited by the government. Such, in fact, was the fate of nearly every book of value in that tyrannical age. The reasons given for suppressing books would often appear silly or absurd, but for the grave re- sults of the suppressions. In 1770 Imbert translated Clark's " Letters on Spain "; but the book was imme- diately suppressed because it contained a few re- marks concerning the passion for hunting of the Spanish King, Charles III., which were considered disrespectful to Louis XV., whowasalso addicted to ISO PERSECUTION OF FRENCH WRITERS. that sport. Before this, that same vicious and pro- fligate monarch had compelled the French Acade- my to expel La Bletterie for the perfectly truthful assertion that the great Roman Emperor Julian, in spite of his preference for the Roman religion, was not destitute of all good qualities. This punish- ment was comparatively mild ; for Freret, an emi- nent scholar, was thrown into the Bastille for ex- pressing the opinion that the earliest Prankish chiefs had received titles from the Romans. The amiable and accomplished Lenglet du Fresnoy re- ceived still severer treatment ; for he was cast four times into that same notorious prison, the only known pretext being that upon one of these occa- sions he published a supplement to the French history of de Thou. At the risk of being tedious I will give still other examples. For concrete facts often make a more forcible impression than mere generalized state- ments. Rousseau was threatened with imprisonment, was driven from his country, and his works were publicly burned. The famous work of Helvetius " On The Mind " was suppressed and burned by the common hangman, while the author was forced to retract his opinions. This, too, was the fate of Buffon, some of whose geological views, now known to be accurate, were offensive to the clergy. The learned work of Mably on the " History of France," which the con- servative Guizot has thought worth while to re- publish in our own century, was suppressed as soon as it appeared. Raynal's " History of the Indies" , BURNING OF BOOKS. 151 was given up to the flames and the author ordered to be arrested. Lanjuinais, in his work on the Emperor Joseph II., not only championed religious toleration, but also the abolition of slavery. The authorities, therefore, after declaring the book to be "seditious" and "destructive of all subordination," condemned it to be burned. Marsy's " Analysis of Bayle" was suppressed, and the author imprisoned. Linguet's " History of the Jesuits" was burned, his journal was suppressed, as were also his " Political Annals," and he himself was hurled into that accursed receptacle of great men, the Bastille. For writing a work on the Philosophy of Nature, Delisle de Sales was sentenced to perpetual exile, and his property was confiscated. The treatise by Mey, on French law, was suppressed ; and that of Boncerf, on feudal law, was burned. Burning was the lot of the " Memoirs of Beaumarchais," and suppression of La Harpe's " Eulogy on F^nelon." Duvernet was seized and thrown into the Bastille, even before the manuscript of his " History of the Sorbonne " could be published. Suppression or prohibition was also the fate of de Lolme's work on the English Consti- tution ; the "Letters of Gervaise"; the " Disserta- tions of Courayer"; the " Letters of Montgon " ; the " History of Tamerlane," by Margat ; Cartaud's " Essay on Taste "; the " Life of Domat," by Provost dela Jann^s; the" History of LouisXI." by Duclos; the " Letters of Bargeton "; Grosley's " Memoirs on Troyes"; Reboulet's " History of Clement XI."; Genard's "School of Man"; Garlon's "Thera- peutics"; Louis' thesis on Generation; Jousse's is- PERSECUTION OF FRENCH WRITERi,. " Treatise on Presidial Jurisdiction "; the " Ericie " of Fontanelle ; the "Thoughts" of Jamin ; the " History of Siam," by Turpin ; the " Eulogy on Marcus Aurelius," by Thomas ; the financial works of Darigrand and Letrosne ; Guibert's " Essay on Military Tactics "; Boucquet's Letters ; and Coquereau's " Memoirs of Terrai." Such wholesale destruction of property, however, was merciful in comparison with the treatment re- ceived by other literary men. Desforges, for ex- ample, who wrote against the arrest of the Pretender to the English throne, was, on that account, arrested himself, and buried for three years in a dark dungeon, eight feet square. In 1770, Audra, a professor in Toulouse, and a man of some reputation, published the first volume of an abridgment of general history. But the Archbishop of Toulouse at once condemned the work and deprived the author of his professor- ship ; who, seeing the labor of his life rendered use- less, and himself held up to public opprobrium, was unable to survive the blow. Seized with apoplexy, he died within twenty-four hours. Marmontel, Morel- let, and Diderot were also among the victims of that insane folly with which the government of France persecuted literary men. A friend of Marmontel showed him the manuscript of apleasant satire he had written on the Duke d'Aumont, and Marmontel re- peated it to a few acquaintances. At this the Duke, who heard of it, was indignant, and called upon him to tell the name of the author. And, because he re- fused to betray his friend, Marmontel was seized and thrown i\^to the Bastille. And even after his libera- MORELLET AND DIDEROT IMPRISONED. IS3 tion he was deprived of the right to publish the Mercure, upon which he mainly depended for his living. The case of Morellet was similar. In reply- ing, in a little satire, to Palissot, a scribbler who had ridiculed in a comedy some of the greatest French- men then living, Morellet made a harmless allusion to a patron of Palissot, the Princess de Robeck. The Princess' name was not even mentioned, but Morellet was confined for several months in the Bastille. The first work which Diderot wrote, after those which were translations from the English, was his " Philosophic Thoughts." It was burned by the common hangman. A few years later he wrote another book, in which he said that people born blind have some ideas that are different from those of people possessed of sight. This assertion, though highly probable, seemed dangerous to the sage rulers of the country. " Whether," says Buckle, "they suspected that the mention of blind- ness was an allusion to themselves, or whether they were merely instigated by the perversity of their temper, is uncertain ; at all events, the unfortunate Diderot, for having hazarded this opinion, was arrested, and, without even the form of a trial, was confined in the dungeon of Vincennes. The na- tural results followed. The works of Diderot rose in popularity ; and he, burning with hatred against his persecutors, redoubled his efforts to overthrow those institutions, under shelter of which such mon- strous tyranny could be safely practised." So great, indeed, was the madness of those in power, that, by making every able man in the 154 FEKSECU'JION OF FRENCH WRITERS. country a personal enemy, they at length arrayed the entire intellect of France against the govern- ment, and made the Revolution a matter of neces- sity. For, if ever there existed a state of society likely to madden men to desperation, France in the eighteenth century was in that state. The masses lived in wretchedness and poverty, and were held down by merciless laws, enforced with barbarous cruelty. The clergy, the nobles, and the Crown held supreme, irresponsible control over every man's liberty ; they prohibited and burned the literature "of the country, and plundered, imprisoned, and exiled the authors. Arrogant from long possession of power, they thought only of the present, and took no heed of the future. They " saw not that day of reckon- ing, the bitterness of which they were soon to ex- perience." They even made futile attempts and im- practicable laws to deprive literature of even that little freedom which it still possessed. Having in 1764 forbidden any work to be published in which questions of government were discussed ; having in 1767 made it a capital offence to write a book likely to excite the public mind ; having decreed still ear- lier the same penalty of death against any one who attacked religion, as also against all who spoke of matters of finance, — having done all this, the men who ruled France contemplated, but a short time be- fore the catastrophe, a still more sweeping measure. Only nine years before the Revolution, when no power in France could have saved the institutions of the country, the government was so ignorant of the volcano upon which it stood, that the advocate-general REBELLION THE REMEDY. I5S actually proposed to doawaywith all the publishers, and allow no books to be printed except by a press to be paid, appointed, and controlled by the govern- ment. If we make the extravagant supposition that such a proposal could really have been carried into effect, the greatest men in France would have been reduced either to silence or to servile advocacy of governmental views ; and the ruin of the country would have been complete. For, in France, as we have seen, literature was the only means of resis- tance to despotism, the only hope of liberty. This must be borne in mind when we attempt to estimate the character of the great French thinkers of the eighteenth century, who so often are accused of friv- olity in their efforts to break down the institutions under which they suffered. They, as well as the masses, were cruelly oppressed by the Church, the aristocracy and the Crown ; and undoubtedly they were right to retaliate. /"There can be no doubt," says Buckle with justice, " that rebellion is the last remedy against tyranny, and that a despotic sys- tem should be encountered by a revolutionary liter- ature. ) The upper classes were to blame, because they struck the first blow ; but we must by no means censure those great men, who, having defended themselves from aggression, eventually succeeded in smiting the government by whom the aggression was originally made." In Buckle's opinion it was possible, by the con- cession of large and comprehensive reforms, during the first half of Louis XV.'s reign, to avert the Revo- lution. But towards the middle of the century 156 PEKSECUrlOl^ OFFRENCIf WRITERS. things began to change ; and the attacks which, be- fore, had been directed almost exclusively against the despotism of the Church, began to turn against the State itself. And, in a few years, the spirit of the people became so radically democratic that it was scarcely possible even to delay a revolution which, before, might possibly have been averted. When this, " the second epoch of the eighteenth cen- tury," had been fairly entered, the revolutionary movement became irresistible. In vain did the gov- ernment novi begin to grant some reforms. In vain was the power of the clergy diminished, and the order of Jesuits suppressed. It was in vain that the ill- starred Louis XVI. now called to his counsels re- formers like Malesherbes, Turgot, and Necker. It was in vain to promise the equalization of taxes, the abolition of the worst abuses) and the repeal of the most obnoxious laws. " It was even in vain that the states-general were summoned ; and that thus, after the lapse of one hundred and seventy years, the people were again admitted to take part in the management of their own affairs. All these things were in vain, because the time for treaty had gone by, and the time for battle had come." No mere reforms could now have averted the deadly struggle. " For," to use the language of that great historian whom I have so frequently quoted, " the measure of that age was now full. The upper classes, intoxi- cated by the long possession of power, had provoked the crisis ; and it was needful that they should abide the issue. There was no time for mercy ; there was no pause, no compassion, no sympathy. The only ATROCITY OF THE REVOLVTIOM. 157 question that remained was, to see whether they who had raised the storm could ride the whirlwind ; or, whetlier it was not rather likely that they should be the first victims of that frightful hurricane, in which, for a moment, laws, religion, morals, all per- ished, the lowest vestiges of humanity were effaced, and the civilization of France not only submerged, but, as it then appeared, irretrievably ruined." • CHAPTER XXIII. RATIONALISTIC MOVEMENT IN EUROPE. IT has been mentioned above, in a casual way, that the attacks of the French writers were directed first against the Church, but not till the middle of the century against the State. It will be necessary to explain the reason of this, and to trace the steps of the religious and political opposition. But, be- fore doing so, it would be well to take a brief view of the writings of those English authors whose ideas, transplanted to France, had such a prodigious influence in hastening the Revolution. And in order to prepare the way for a scientific view of these writ- ings, we should first take a glance at the general movement of religious thought in Europe as a whole. Religions, like empires and political systems, like all other human institutions, arise, flourish, and de- cay. Their names may remain the same through centuries ; but their tenets, and, most of all, the in- terpretation and practical effect of these tenets, undergo a constant change. The Greek religion of the Homeric age of simple faith and unquestioning credulity was infinitely removed from the philo- sophic creeds of Plato and Aristotle. The Moham- SAINT SIMEON STYLITES. 159 medanism of the " Sick Man " of modern Turkey is practically — whatever it may be in theory — a far different religion from that which fired the hearts of the men who swept like a tornado, eastward from Arabia to India, westward from Arabia to Spain and the confines of France ; a creed of far less intense fatalism than at the time when the Turks were the terror of all Europe. The word " Christianity," too, is only the common name which we use to designate phases of realized religious belief, which, in differ- ent ages, have been just as dissimilar as though we should call them by different names. How absolutely different, for example, was the age of asceticism, when self-maceration and filth in the deserts of Syria and Egypt were the ideals and the practice of thousands of Christians, from the poetic and chivalrous age of the crusades! In the one age, celibacy was the highest virtue, and women were regarded as an abomination and a curse. In the other, they were almost worshipped by their knightly admirers, and treated with a deference which sometimes degenerated into farcical absurd- ity. In the one age, the loathsome penances of Saint Simeon Stylites were regarded with boundless admiration by the Christian world. For a whole year, we are told, he stood upon one leg, the other being covered with disgusting ulcers. His biog- rapher stood by his side to replace the worms which fell from the sores, while the saint said to the worms: " Eat what God has given you." For thirty years this famous saint is said to have stood upon the summit of a pillar, sixty feet high, ever and anon l6o RATIONALISTIC MOVEMENT IN EUROPE. bending his body almost to his feet in prayer. Thou- sands of pilgrims of high and low degree thronged to do him homage ; a concourse of prelates followed him to his grave; and the general voice pronounced him the highest model of a Christian saint. No matter if his ascetic exploits are grossly exaggerated by his biographers. The Christian world believed it all and admired it. But how different a picture is this from that other age when all Christendom rang with applause of the savage manliness and brutal heroism of the Lion-Hearted Richard and his brother Crusaders ! Simeon Stylites and Richard Coeur de Lion ! What a contrast ! How different, too, is the polytheism of the Middle Ages from the rationalistic deism of the eighteenth century ! How different, again, the mild benevolence and compara- tive toleration of our own time, from the grim fero- city of Calvin and John Knox, or the merciless fanaticism of the Inquisitors of Spain ! Most of us, it seems, are in the habit of thinking of Christianity as a definite creed that has lasted now for many centuries. But upon closer examina- tion we find a perpetual change. Not even the Bible has always been exactly the same ; for the Latin Vulgate of the Catholics differs considerably from the various translations from the Greek and Hebrew which Protestants use. But even if this were not so, the greatest differences in realized belief — in the belief which is actually and concretely present in the mind — would still have existed in the different ages and nations of Christendom, as well as in the differ- ent individuals of the same nation and the same age. MAR TIN L UTHER. 1 6 1 For this realized belief depends, not so much upon that which is written upon parchment or printed upon paper, as upon the character of the individual as modified by the spirit of the age in which he lives. No matter though the written tenets remain the same, they are interpreted differently by differ- ent ages, different nations, and different men. For the practical belief of a time is a product of the time ; and, like its literature, its science, its art, its government, its laws, and its social customs, is a manifestation of the whole mental character of the time. And when this general mental character un- dergoes a change, the realized religion changes also. Whatever names we may use, the religion of a child is no longer the same, when the child has become a youth, and the youth a man. So, too, with a nation, which has its periods of infancy, youth, manhood, and old age, with a religious belief correspond- ing to each. And so, too, with Christendom as a whole. For our present purpose we need go no further back than the great religious revolution of the six- teenth century. It is a melancholy fact that some of the greatest moral characters in history have been the leaders of movements, the deeper significance of which they themselves misunderstood. Martin Luther was a grand type of the popular leader, with depth of conviction and manly vigor of purpose — a man of stupendous force of will. And yet, if he could now rise up from his grave, and see what kind of religious belief, in Germany and in Europe at large, has issued from l62 RATIONALISTIC MOVEMENT IN EUROPE. the Reformation led by himself, he would be per- fectly amazed. Not knowing the true nature of the causes which produced the great popular upheaval, of which he himself was but the instrument, he was also ignorant of what its ultimate results would be. In the beginning, he supposed himself to be merely inaugurating a purification of the morals of the Church, and the removal of the abuses that had sprung up. But instead of doing merely this, and instead of strengthening the Church by reform, he lived to see it split by revolution, and himself com- pelled to be the founder of a sect. Still more : he saw other sects, opposed in many respects to his own, spring up. But what he failed to see was that the Reformation was not simply an attempt at moral purification, and a religious revival, but was, in its deeper significance, a sign that the European intellect was emerging from its age of faith to its age of reason, a violent external symptom that men had reached that stage of intellectual development when they were no longer willing, in religious mat- ters, to cling with blind faith to the apron-strings of the hierarchy, but were determined, thenceforth, to base their religious beliefs, not simply upon faith in the clergy, but upon individual judgment. It is true that Luther soon forgot that his rebellion against the authority of the Church could only be justified by asserting the right of every man to choose his own religion for himself; and that, after defying the human pope, he endeavored, in the Confession of Augsburg, to set up a paper one in- stead. Calvin, too, forgetful that he had preached DEFlMiriON OF RA TIONALISM. 163 toleration when he needed it for himself, burned Servetus and ruled Geneva with a sway more abso- lute than ever a pope had done. But, in spite of these logical inconsistencies, which were due to the abnormal excitement and fanaticism of the time, the Reformation was none the less a stupendous outburst of the spirit of rationalism, in the sense in which Lecky uses the term. That is to say : it was an outburst of a " certain cast of thought, or bias of reasoning," which, in spite of brief reactionary fluctu- ations, has ever since been gaining strength in Europe ; a general intellectual tendency, which leads men " to subordinate dogmatic theology to the dic- tates of reason and of conscience, and, as a neces- sary consequence, greatly to restrict its influence upon life "; which " predisposes men, in history, to attribute all kinds of phenomena to natural rather than miraculous causes ; in theology, to esteem suc- ceeding systems the expressions of the wants and aspirations of that religious sentiment which is planted in all men ; and, in ethics, to regard as duties only those which conscience reveals to be such," Whether this tendency be for good or for evil is a matter for every man to decide for himself ; but that the tendency exists, and has been in- creasing, on the whole, since the eleventh or twelfth century is an undoubted fact. During the Middle Ages theology deeply imbued every department of life, and was the pursuit of nearly every single thinking man. Science and art were merely her handmaids, and even kings submitted to being stripped naked and flogged by monks to atone for l64 RATIONALISTIC MOVEMENT hV EUROFh. acts of resistance to priestly authority. Such things were perfectly natural then ; but the spirit of rationalism has since produced a mighty change ; and, in our time, the bare hint that the Emperor William or President Cleveland could possibly imi- tate Henry II. of England, and voluntarily submit to be flogged by either a Catholic priest or a Pro- testant minister, would be received with a universal guffaw. During the Middle Ages and the first cen- turies of modern times it was implicitly and almost universally believed that miracles of various kinds were every-day occurrences. Thousands and tens of thousands of unhappy women and men were tor- tured and burnt at the stake for witchcraft during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. For the imaginary crimes of devouring whole flocks of sheep and riding through the air on broomsticks, these wretched beings were tried and condemned to a horrible death by the ablest and most upright judges in Christendom. For, we must remember, the belief was not confined to the ignorant and un- educated, but was shared by Lord Bacon, and most probably by Shakespeare. Sir Thomas Browne de- clared that those who doubted witchcraft were not simply infidels but atheists ; and Richard Baxter, in speaking of Cotton Mather's account of witchcraft in Massachusetts, said that "that man must be a very obdurate Sadducee who would not believe it." Before the seventeenth century scarcely a single voice was lifted in Europe against this hideous superstition ; and miracles of other kinds were also believed to be of constant occurrence. To give but a single example CESSATION OF RELIGIOUS WARS. 165 among thousands: StoefHer, a noted astronomer and professor in Tubingen, who first pointed out the way to remedy the errors in the JuHan calendar, predicted in 1524 that in that year the world would again be overwhelmed by a deluge. Such a predic- tion by so able and eminent a man sounds strange to our ears; but what seems stranger still is that the credulity of the time was so great that Stoeffler's prediction spread immense consternation through Europe, that many people living on the sea or on rivers abandoned their homes in terror, that nu- merous plans of rescue were proposed, and that the inhabitants of Toulouse actually built an ark to save themselves from the coming disaster. Such was the " cast of thought " at that day ; and it is unnecessary to prove the evident fact that since then a vast change has come over the intellectual tendencies of Europe. The great religious revolution may be said to have lasted until the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. But since then the- ology has ceased to be the dominant force in literature. Religious wars and religious persecution, and even religious intolerance, except in a mild form, have ceased; and hundreds of subjects besides theology now divide the attention of the able men of the world. In the last part of the seventeenth century, and occasionally still earlier, the rationalistic spirit, which had seemingly, but only seemingly, been overwhelmed in the rivers of blood that had flowed in theological strife, began to show its ten- dencies with renewed force. Already at the end of the sixteenth century Hooker, in his " Ecclesiastical 1 66 RATIONALISTIC MOVEMENT IN EUROPE. Polity," had declared that even the opinions of the Fathers of the Church could not be accepted if they clashed with reason. " For men to be tied and led by authority," he says, and . ..." to follow, like beasts, the first in the herd, they know not nor care not whither: this were brutish Com- panies of learned men, be they never so great and reverend, are to yield unto Reason." He added, however, that the reason of individuals should yield to the reason of the Church as expressed in great councils. But Chillingworth, who wrote his " Religion of Protestants " a generation later, went still further than Hooker, and declared that not merely the Fathers, but even the councils, must yield to reason. In deciding the relative credibility of Catholicism and Protestantism he says that each man is to obey not faith but reason. " For my part," he declares, " I am certain that God hath given us our reason to discern between truth and falsehood ; and he that makes not this use of it, but believes things he knows not why, I say it is by chance that he believes the truth, and not by choice ; and I cannot but fear that God will not accept of this sacrifice of fools." Chillingworth's work was immensely successful, and hastened the movement of which it was itself a symptom. Its fundamental principle — the authority of private judgment in matters of belief — was adopted by the leading English controversialists of the seventeenth century, such as Hales, Owen, Jeremy Taylor, Burnet, Tillotson, Glanvil, and Locke ; and the practical side of the tendency was seen in the split of the Anglican MONTAIGNE AND CHARRON. 167 Church into numberless dissenting sects, among which the Independents carried the principle near- est to its logical extreme. In France, Montaigne, who wrote his Essays some years before the proclamation of the Edict of Nantes in 1598, was the first to show clear symptoms in his works of the sceptical spirit. He probably recognized the existence of religious truths, but was sceptical as to the possibility of the human intellect's deciding which among the many religions of the world was the true one. A few years after Mon- taigne, Charron wrote his work " De la Sagesse," or "Treatise on Wisdom," in which the influence of the new rationalistic spirit is still more plainly seen. For in it the author attempts, for the first time in a modern language, to erect a system of ethics without the aid of theology. He tells his countrymen that their religion is the accidental result of their birth and education, and that, if they had been born in a Mohammedan country, they would have been as firm believers in Mohamme- danism as they then were in Christianity. Hence, he added, " we should rise above the pretensions of hostile sects, and, without being terrified by the fear of future punishment, or allured by the hope of future happiness, we should be content with such practical religion as consists in performing the duties of life ; and, uncontrolled by the dogmas of any parti- cular creed, we should strive to make the soul retire in- ward upon itself, and by the efforts of its own contem- plation admire the ineffable grandeur of the Being of beings, the supreme cause of all created things." l68 RA TIONALISTIC MOVEMENT fJV EtjROfE. Such w&xe the opinions which Charron published in 1601 ; and the same spirit of toleration became more and more prevalent as the seventeenth century- advanced, as was signally shown in the policy of Richelieu, who, though a Catholic Cardinal, respected the religiotis liberty of the Huguenots, while crush- ing their centrifugal political tendency. And while Richelieu was carrying the spirit of rationalism into practical politics, the greatest of French thinkers, Descartes — not to mention his important contribu- tions to mathematics and physical science — was effecting an imrfiense revolution in the modes and attitude of thought. Great as a creator, he was far greater as a destroyer; and, in this respect, "was the true successor of Luther, to whose labors his own were the fitting supplement." "What Luther had commenced in religion," says Lerminier, " the quick and active French genius carried into philoso- phy ; and it may be said, to the joint glory of Ger- many and of France, that Descartes is the eldest son of Luther." Descartes, a deeply religious man, endeavored to give a demonstration of the existence of God ; not, however, by appealing to the Bible or the Church, but by his unaided reason. He was, in fact, the founder of that modern school of metaphysics, which, appealing to the reflective consciousness of the individual, has, in spite of its many absurdi- ties, so greatly stimulated the European mind to thought. His great work on Method he wrote in French, and not in Latin, because, as he said, he expected his opinions to be more justly estimated DESCARTES. 169 by those who employed their native and unaided reason than by those who only pin their faith to ancient books. This confidence in the unaided power of the reason, as we now know, was over- weening, though sublime. So striking an example of the power which the spirit of rationalism had now gained is, however, well worthy of mention. So far from relying on the traditions of the past, and accepting the opinions of his ancestors as infalli- ble, the bold and inquisitive mind of Descartes led him to begin the search for truth by uprooting and rejecting all his old opinions except the one which he said it was impossible to reject, the belief in his own existence. When I set forth, he tells us, in the pursuit of truth, I found that the best way was to reject everything I had hitherto received, and pluck out all my old opinions, in order that I might lay the foundation of them afresh. . . . We must not pass judgment upon any subject which we do not clearly understand ; for, even if such a judgment be correct, it can only be so by accident. Our memory is filled with prejudices, and there are too many of us — said Descartes, a few years after the close of those frightful religious wars, of which the massacre of St. Bartholomew is the most famous incident — who "believe themselves religious, when, in fact, they are bigoted and superstitious; who think them- selves perfect because they %o much to church, repeat many prayers, wear short hair, fast, and give alms. These are the men," he says, " who imagine themselves such friends of God, that nothing they do displeases him, that their passions fill them with 17° RATIONALISTIC MOVEMENT IN EUROP£. zeal for the commission of enormous crimes, as the betrayal of cities, the murder of princes, the exter- mination of nations, solely because they refuse to accept their opinions." The policy of Richelieu and the philosophy of Descartes had prodigious influence in increasing that rationalistic spirit of which they themselves were the most striking products. That spirit soon pervaded all departments of thought, and grew stronger and stronger until, quelled for a time by the tyranny of Louis XIV., it burst forth after his death with all the more violence. In Germany, too, when the religious wars were over, and men were wearied out with theological disputes, that same spirit which, before, had pro- duced the Reformation, rose again from the chaos of the sanguinary struggle. Mild and inoffeneive sects like the Pietists arose, and individual thinkers began to break down the old traditions and pave the way for new systems. Leibnitz was the author of a philosophy, and endeavored to persuade the Protestants and Catholics to cease their controver- sies and unite Christendom once more. Francke's lectures on the New Testament at Leipsic so irri- tated the theologians of that university, who regarded themselves as the infallible guardians of orthodoxy, that he was driven from his chair. Thomasius also, who enraged the pedants of Leip- sic by lecturing in German instead of in Latin, and the theologians by his rationalism, was driven from the university amid the tolling of bells. At the head of a band of admiring students, imbued with THOMASIVS, FRANCKE AND PUFENDORF. I7I the new spirit, he went to Halle, where he and Francke became professors at the new university, which was founded for them by the King of Prussia, and which, during the following century, was the headquarters for freedom of thought in Germany. So powerful was the new tendency, that the work of Thomasius against witch-burning had the effect of soon making most tribunals ashamed to try a person for sorcery. Pufendorf also aroused the anger of the theologians, especially in Saxony, by attacking ecclesiastical dogmas and the authority of Aristotle as interpreted by scholasticism. But the anger of theologians was in vain. Whether for good or for evil, the spirit of rational- ism advanced in Europe with resistless force. Tem- porary reactions in this or that country took place, as a matter of course ; but these were but the eddies of an ever-moving stream. In France, as we have seen, the onward movement was checked during the reign of Louis XIV. ; and we now have to pass in re- view the English authors whose writings gave a new impetus to French rationalism after the despot's death. CHAPTER XXIV. ENGLISH DEISTS AND OTHER WRITERS. AND, first, let us look at Sir Isaac Newton, and inquire what effect his discoveries were likely to have upon a people who had been so tyrannized over by the clergy as the French during the reign of Louis XIV. With the details of his discoveries we are, of course, not here concerned, but only with their general nature. Newton placed the roof and spire upon that grand astronomical edifice of which Copernicus had laid the foundation and Kepler had built the walls. Copernicus discovered that the earth and the other planets move around the sun ; Kepler, that they move in elliptical orbits according to certain laws ; and Newton, that the force which causes these vast bodies to move in interstellar space according to these laws is the identical force which causes an apple, when detached from its twig, to fall to the ground. We of the latter part of the nineteenth century, who have heard this doctrine since childhood, might at first be at a loss to see how its promulgation in France could have aided the literary men in their attack upon the Church. Having heard, perhaps, of but one theologian in our own day who denies the Newtonian theory, and asserts that " the sun do move" around the earth, THE COPERNICAN THEORY. 173 viz., that famous divine of color, the Rev. John Jasper, of Richmond, Va., we can hardly appreciate the fact that there was once a time when the over- whelming majority of the clergy of all denominations denounced, as a damnable error, that doctrine which to us is a truism. But if we can succeed in placing ourselves in the mental attitude of that age, we must readily perceive the reason of the oppo- sition. Before the time of Copernicus it was the almost universal opinion that the earth was the chief central body of the material universe. The earth appeared so vast in comparison with those appar- ently minute specks of light in the sky, which seemed to revolve around it each day, that it was perfectly natural to conclude, in the imperfect state of astronomical knowledge at that time, that the earth was the really important body, and that the sun, moon, and stars had been created solely for the purpose of giving light to man, the ruler of the earth. To the mediaeval mind, man appeared the central figure of the universe, for whose especial benefit everything else had been created. These opinions being intimately connected with the theology of that time, it is evident that the enunci- ation of the doctrine of Copernicus must have fallen like a thunderbolt into the theological camp. The discovery that man, so far from being the all-impor- tant factor of the universe, was merely the inhabit- ant of an infinitesimal pellet revolving about a sun, which itself was but one among myriads of others in infinite space, must have been a shock so rude to the old-established beliefs that we can now scarcely 174 ENGLISH DEISTS AND OTHERS. form a conception of its force. It must have shaken, to no small extent, that doctrine of final causes which is so bound up with theology. The Church condemned the Copernican theory ; and Galileo, who accepted it, was confined in the dungeons of thfe Inquisition, and compelled to recant. The additional discoveries, too, of Kepler and Newton, that the planets moved, not capriciously, but accord- ing to fixed laws in obedience to the constant and invariable force of gravitation, struck a severe blow at the current theology. For men had been in the habit of attributing almost every striking and imposing phenomenon to the direct and immediate interposition of supernatural beings, either angels, devils, witches, saints, the Virgin, or God himself. Such things as comets, eclipses, storms, pestilences, and famines were believed to be visitations of Provi- dence or of Satanic power. In the tenth century a whole army was put to ilight by an eclipse of the sun ; all Europe has more than once been thrown into frantic terror by a comet or an eclipse ; and the mediaeval clergy never failed to use such oppor- tunities to exhort the peoplejio a still more absolute obedience to their commands. When, therefore, science announced that eclipses were perfectly simple occurrences, in no way the immediate result of supernatural interposition ; and when Halley demonstrated that even comets obey the inexorable and all-pervading force of gravity, the clergy of that time felt instinctively that a deadly blow was being aimed at their prerogatives and power. The whole force of habit, associations, and education led them THE NEWTONIAN PHILOSOPHY. 1 75 to oppose with all their might the new astronomical views. But all was in vain. Their total defeat in this, and in their efforts to uphold the belief in witch- craft, are two of the most striking proofs of the triumphant advance of that rationalistic spirit, Iso deeply deplored by some, so joyfullj^ greeted by others. Evidently the relegation of such important and striking phenomena as the motions of the heavenly bodies from the realm of immediate divine and Satanic influence to the domain of physical law was an immense curtailment of the sphere of theo- logical activity. Since the establishment of the theory of gravitation on a firm scientific basis, no one any longer dreams of praying to be delivered from the baleful influence of a comet or an eclipse. But the clergy of that time bitterly opposed the men who first discovered that these things are sub- ject to physical laws ; and we may well imagine that the doctrines of Newton, as popularized by the master-pen of Voltaire, proved a powerful weapon against the hierarchy in France. Not that Newton was aware, any more than Luther, of the ultimate tendency of his work. Though himself a religious man, he was ignorant of the fact that his discoveries would weaken the influence of the clergy. Yet such was the case. " When we consider," says Vol- taire, * " that Newton, Locke, Clarke, Leibnitz would have been persecuted in France, imprisoned at Rome, burnt at Lisbon, what must we think of * Oiuvres de Voltaire, Paris, 1836, vol.'vi. p. 742. 1)6 ENGLISH DEISTS AND OTHERS. the human reason ? In this age was reason born in England." Locke, too, though himself a believer in Christian- ity, failed to see the anti-clerical tendency of the philosophical views in his " Essay on the Human Understanding." Stillingsfleet, however, the Bishop of Worcester, with all the keen-sightednessof a theo- logian in detecting heresy, saw their tendency clearly and carried on a literary controversy with Locke. The latter denies, in this famous essay, the existence of innate ideas, and endeavors to show that all our knowledge and ideas proceed from two sources alone — sensation from without, and reflection from within. What use was subsequently made of this theory by Condillac and Helv^tius we shall here- after see. The writings of Locke show all those rationalistic tendencies that have been mentioned. A follower of the Baconian inductive philosophy, Locke did much to break down the traditions of the past. " It was from the writings of Locke and Bacon," says a living historian,* " that Voltaire and his followers drew the principles that shattered the proudest ecclesiastical fabrics of Europe, and it is against these philosophers that the ablest defenders of mediaeval theology have exhibited the most bit- ter animosity." De Maistre, for example, the great apostle of the Catholic reaction of this century, as- sures us that," in the study of philosophy, contempt for Locke is the beginning of wisdom." Bacon he calls a charlatan, and says that his " Novum Orga- * Lecl