Part 18

This state of things did not exist in an equal degree among any other of the civilised nations of Europe, and even in France it was comparatively recent. The peasantry of the fourteenth century were at once oppressed and more relieved. The aristocracy sometimes tyrannised over them, but never forsook them.

In the eighteenth century a French village was a community of persons, all of whom were poor, ignorant, and coarse; its magistrates were as rude and as contemned as the people; its syndic could not read; its collector could not record in his own handwriting the accounts on which the income of his neighbour and himself depended.

Not only had the former lord of the manor lost the right of governing this community, but he had brought himself to consider it a sort of degradation to take any part in the government of it. The central power of the state alone took any care of the matter, and as that power was very remote, and had as yet nothing to fear from the inhabitants of the villages, the only care it took of them was to extract revenue.

A further burden was added. The roads began to be repaired by forced labour only--that is to say, exclusively at the expense of the peasantry. This expedient for making roads without paying for them was thought so ingenious that in 1737 a circular of the Comptroller-General Orry established it throughout France.

Nothing can better demonstrate the melancholy fate of the rural population; the progress of society, which enriches all the other classes, drives them to despair, and civilisation itself turns against that class alone.

The system of forced labour, by becoming a royal right, was gradually extended to almost all public works. In 1719 I find it was employed to build barracks. "Parishes are to send their best workmen," said the ordinance, "and all other works are to give way to this." The same forced service was used to escort convicts to the galleys and beggars to the workhouse; it had to cart the baggage of troops as often as they changed their quarters--a burthen which was very onerous at a time when each regiment carried heavy baggage after it. Many carts and oxen had to be collected for the purpose.

IV.--Reform and Destruction Inevitable

One further factor, and that the most important, remains to be noted: the universal discredit into which every form of religious belief had fallen, at the end of the eighteenth century, and which exercised without any doubt the greatest influence upon the whole of the French Revolution; it stamped its character.

Irreligion had produced an enormous public evil. The religious laws having been abolished at the same time that the civil laws were overthrown, the minds of men were entirely upset; they no longer knew either to what to cling or where to stop. And thus arose a hitherto unknown species of revolutionists, who carried their boldness to a pitch of madness, who were surprised by no novelty and arrested by no scruple, and who never hesitated to put any design whatever into execution. Nor must it be supposed that these new beings have been the isolated and ephemeral creation of a moment, and destined to pass away as that moment passed. They have since formed a race of beings which has perpetuated itself, and spread into all the civilised parts of the world, everywhere preserving the same physiognomy, the same character.

From the moment when the forces I have described, and the added loss of religion, matured, I believe that this radical revolution, which was to confound in common ruin all that was worst and all that was best in the institutions and condition of France, became inevitable. A people so ill-prepared to act for themselves could not undertake a universal and simultaneous reform without a universal destruction.

One last element must be remembered before we conclude. As the common people of France had not appeared for one single moment on the theatre of public affairs for upwards of 140 years, no one any longer imagined that they could ever again resume their position. They appeared unconscious, and were therefore believed to be deaf. Accordingly, those who began to take an interest in their condition talked about them in their presence just as if they had not been there. It seemed as if these remarks could only be heard by those who were placed above the common people, and that the only danger to be apprehended was that they might not be fully understood by the upper classes.

The very men who had most to fear from the fury of the people declaimed loudly in their presence on the cruel injustice under which the people had always suffered. They pointed out to each other the monstrous vices of those institutions which had weighed most heavily upon the lower orders; they employed all their powers of rhetoric in depicting the miseries of the people and their ill-paid labour; and thus they infuriated while they endeavoured to relieve them.

Such was the attitude of the French nation on the eve of the revolution, but when I consider this nation in itself it strikes me as more extraordinary than any event in its own annals. Was there ever any nation on the face of the earth so full of contrasts and so extreme in all its actions; more swayed by sensations, less by principles; led therefore always to do either worse or better than was expected of it, sometimes below the common level of humanity, sometimes greatly above it--a people so unalterable in its leading instincts that its likeness may still be recognised in descriptions written two or three thousand years ago, but at the same time so mutable in its daily thoughts and in its tastes as to become a spectacle and an amazement to itself, and to be as much surprised as the rest of the world at the sight of what it has done--a people beyond all others the child of home and the slave of habit, when left to itself; but when once torn against its will from the native hearth and from its daily pursuits, ready to go to the end of the world and to dare all things.

Such a nation could alone give birth to a revolution so sudden, so radical, so impetuous in its course, and yet so full of reactions, of contradictory incidents and of contrary examples. Without the reasons I have related the French would never have made the revolution; but it must be confessed that all these reasons united would not have sufficed to account for such a revolution anywhere else but in France.

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FRANÇOIS MIGNET

History of the French Revolution

François Auguste Alexis Mignet was born at Aix, in Provence, on May 8, 1796, and began life at the Bar. It soon became apparent that his true vocation was history, and in 1818 he left his native town for Paris, where he became attached to the "Courier Français," in the meantime delivering with considerable success a series of lectures on modern history at the Athénée. Mignet may be said to be the first great specialist to devote himself to the study of particular periods of French history. His "History of the French Revolution, from 1789 to 1814," published in 1824, is a strikingly sane and lucid arrangement of facts that came into his hands in chaotic masses. Eminently concise, exact, and clear, it is the first complete account by one other than an actor in the great drama. Mignet was elected to the French Academy in 1836, and afterwards published a series of masterly studies dealing with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among which are "Antonio Perez and Philip II.," and "The History of Mary, Queen of Scots," and also biographies of Franklin and Charles V. He died on March 24, 1884.

I.--The Last Resort of the Throne

I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English revolution had begun the era of new governments.

Louis XVI. ascended the throne on May 11, 1774. Finances, whose deficiencies neither the restorative ministry of Cardinal de Fleury, nor the bankrupt ministry of the Abbé Terray had been able to make good, authority disregarded, an imperious public opinion; such were the difficulties which the new reign inherited from its predecessors. And in choosing, on his accession to the throne, Maurepas as prime minister, Louis XVI. eminently contributed to the irresolute character of his reign. On the death of Maurepas the queen took his place with Louis XVI., and inherited all his influence over him. Maurepas, mistrusting court ministers, had always chosen popular ministers; it is true he did not support them; but if good was not brought about, at least evil did not increase. After his death, court ministers succeeded the popular ministers, and by their faults rendered the crisis inevitable which others had endeavoured to prevent by their reforms. This difference of choice is very remarkable; this it was which, by the change of men, brought on the change of the system of administration. The revolution dates front this epoch; the abandonment of reforms and the return of disorders hastened its approach and augmented its fury.

After the failure of the queen's minister the States-General had become the only means of government, and the last resources of the throne. The king, on August 8, 1788, fixed the opening for May 1, 1789. Necker, the popular minister of finance, was recalled, and prepared everything for the election of deputies and the holding of the States.

A religious ceremony preceded their installation. The king, his family, his ministers, the deputies of the three orders, went in procession from the Church of Nôtre Dame to that of St. Louis, to hear the opening mass.

The royal sitting took place the following day in the Salle des Menus. Galleries, arranged in the form of an amphitheatre, were filled with spectators. The deputies were summoned, and introduced according to the order established in 1614. The clergy were conducted to the right, the nobility to the left, and the commons in front of the throne at the end of the hall. The deputations from Dauphiné, from Crépy-en-Valois, to which the Duke of Orleans belonged, and from Provence, were received with loud applause. Necker was also received on his entrance with general enthusiasm.

Barentin, keeper of the seals, spoke next after the king. His speech displayed little knowledge of the wishes of the nation, or it sought openly to combat them. The dissatisfied assembly looked to M. Necker, from whom it expected different language.

The court, so far from wishing to organise the States-General, sought to annul them. No efforts were spared to keep the nobility and clergy separate from and in opposition to the commons; but on May 6, the day after the opening of the States, the nobility and clergy repaired to their respective chambers, and constituted themselves. The Third Estate being, on account of its double representation, the most numerous order, had the Hall of the States allotted to it, and there awaited the two other orders; it considered its situation as provisional, its members as presumptive deputies, and adopted a system of inactivity till the other orders should unite with it. Then a memorable struggle began, the issue of which was to decide whether the revolution should be effected or stopped.

The commons, having finished the verification of their own powers of membership on June 17, on the motion of Sieyès, constituted themselves the National Assembly, and refused to recognise the other two orders till they submitted, and changed the assembly of the States into an assembly of the people.

It was decided that the king should go in state to the Assembly, annul its decrees, command the separation of the orders as constitutive of the monarchy, and himself fix the reforms to be effected by the States-General. It was feared that the majority of the clergy would recognise the Assembly by uniting with it; and to prevent so decided a step, instead of hastening the royal sittings, they and the government closed the Hall of the States, in order to suspend the Assembly till the day of that royal session.