Kitabı oku: «The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789», sayfa 17
CHAPTER XX
SHOWING THAT THE REVOLUTION PROCEEDED NATURALLY FROM THE EXISTING STATE OF FRANCE
I propose ere I conclude to gather up some of the characteristics which I have already separately described, and to trace the Revolution, proceeding as it were of itself from the state of society in France which I have already pourtrayed.
If it be remembered that in France the Feudal system, though it still kept unchanged all that could irritate or could injure, had most effectually lost all that could protect or could be of use, it will appear less surprising that the Revolution, which was about virtually to abolish this ancient constitution of Europe, broke forth in France rather than elsewhere.
If it be observed that the French nobility, after having lost its ancient political rights, and ceased more than in any other country of feudal Europe to govern and guide the nation, had, nevertheless, not only preserved, but considerably enlarged its pecuniary immunities, and the advantages which the members of this body personally possessed; that whilst it had become a subordinate class it still remained a privileged and close body, less and less an aristocracy, as I have said elsewhere, but more and more a caste; it will be no cause of surprise that the privileges of such a nobility had become so inexplicable and so abhorrent to the French people, as to inflame the envy of the democracy to so fierce a pitch that it is still burning in their hearts.
If, lastly, it be borne in mind that the French nobility, severed from the middle classes whom they had repelled, and from the people whose affections they had lost, was thus alone in the midst of the nation—apparently the head of an army, but in reality a body of officers without soldiers—it will be understood how that which had stood erect for a thousand years came to perish in a night.
I have shown how the King’s Government, having abolished the franchises of the provinces, and having usurped all local powers in three-quarters of the territory of France, had thus drawn all public affairs into its own hands, the least as well as the greatest. I have shown, on the other hand, how, by a necessary consequence, Paris had made itself the master of the kingdom of which till then it had been the capital, or rather had itself become the entire country. These two facts, which were peculiar to France, would alone suffice, if necessary, to explain why a riot could fundamentally destroy a monarchy which had for ages endured so many violent convulsions, and which, on the eve of its dissolution, still seemed unassailable even to those who were about to overthrow it.
France being one of the states of Europe in which all political life had been for the longest time and most effectually extinguished, in which private persons had most lost the usage of business, the habit of reading the course of events, the experience of popular movements and almost the notion of the people, it may readily be imagined how all Frenchmen came at once to fall into a frightful Revolution without foreseeing it; those who were most threatened by that catastrophe leading the way, and undertaking to open and widen the path which led to it.
As there were no longer any free institutions, or consequently any political classes, no living political bodies, no organised or disciplined parties, and as, in the absence of all these regular forces, the direction of public opinion, when public opinion came again into being, devolved exclusively on the French philosophers, it might be expected that the Revolution would be directed less with a view to a particular state of facts, than with reference to abstract principles and very general theories: it might be anticipated that instead of endeavouring separately to amend the laws which were bad, all laws would be attacked, and that an attempt would be made to substitute for the ancient constitution of France an entirely novel system of government, conceived by these writers.
The Church being naturally connected with all the old institutions which were doomed to perish, it could not be doubted that the Revolution would shake the religion of the country when it overthrew the civil government; wherefore it was impossible to foretell to what pitch of extravagance these innovators might rush, delivered at once from all the restraints which religion, custom, and law impose on the imagination of mankind.
He who should thus have studied the state of France would easily have foreseen that no stretch of audacity was too extreme to be attempted there, and no act of violence too great to be endured. ‘What,’ said Burke, in one of his eloquent pamphlets, ‘is there not a man who can answer for the smallest district—nay, more, not one man who can answer for another? Every one is arrested in his own home without resistance, whether he be accused of royalism, of moderantism, or of anything else.’ But Mr. Burke knew but little of the condition in which that monarchy which he regretted had abandoned France to her new masters. The administration which had preceded the Revolution had deprived the French both of the means and of the desire of mutual assistance. When the Revolution arrived, it would have been vain to seek in the greater part of France for any ten men accustomed to act systematically and in concert, or to provide for their own defence; the Central Power had alone assumed that duty, so that when this Central Power had passed from the hands of the Crown into those of an irresponsible and sovereign Assembly, and had become as terrible as it had before been good-natured, nothing stood before it to stop or even to check it for a moment. The same cause which led the monarchy to fall so easily rendered everything possible after its fall had occurred.
Never had toleration in religion, never had mildness in authority, never had humanity and goodwill to mankind been more professed, and, it seemed, more generally admitted than in the eighteenth century. Even the rights of war, which is the last refuge of violence, had become circumscribed and softened. Yet from this relaxed state of manners a Revolution of unexampled inhumanity was about to spring, though this softening of the manners of France was not a mere pretence, for no sooner had the Revolution spent its fury than the same gentleness immediately pervaded all the laws of the country, and penetrated into the habits of political society.
This contrast between the benignity of its theories and the violence of its actions, which was one of the strangest characteristics of the French Revolution, will surprise no one who has remarked that this Revolution had been prepared by the most civilised classes of the nation, and that it was accomplished by the most barbarous and the most rude. The members of those civilised classes having no pre-existing bond of union, no habit of acting in concert, no hold upon the people, the people almost instantly became supreme when the old authorities of the State were annihilated. Where the people did not actually assume the government it gave its spirit to those who governed; and if, on the other hand, it be recollected what the manner of life of that people had been under the old monarchy, it may readily be surmised what it would soon become.
Even the peculiarities of its condition had imparted to the French people several virtues of no common occurrence. Emancipated early, and long possessed of a part of the soil, isolated rather than dependent, the French showed themselves at once temperate and proud; sons of labour, indifferent to the delicacies of life, resigned to its greatest evils, firm in danger—a simple and manly race who were about to fill those mighty armies before which Europe was to bow. But the same cause made them dangerous masters. As they had borne almost alone for centuries all the burden of public wrongs—as they had lived apart feeding in silence on their prejudices, their jealousies, and their hatreds, they had become hardened by the rigour of their destiny, and capable both of enduring and of inflicting every evil.
Such was the state of the French people when, laying hands on the government, it undertook to complete the work of the Revolution. Books had supplied the theory; the people undertook the practical application, and adapted the conceptions of those writers to the impulse of their own passions.
Those who have attentively considered, in these pages, the state of France in the eighteenth century must have remembered the birth and development of two leading passions, which, however, were not contemporaneous, and which did not always tend to the same end.
The first, more deeply seated and proceeding from a more remote source, was the violent and inextinguishable hatred of inequality. This passion, born and nurtured in presence of the inequality it abhorred, had long impelled the French with a continuous and irresistible force to raze to their foundations all that remained of the institutions of the Middle Ages, and upon the ground thus cleared to construct a society in which men should be as much alike and their conditions as equal as human nature admits of.
The second, of a more recent date and a less tenacious root, led them to desire to live, not only equal but free.
At the period immediately preceding the Revolution of 1789, these two passions were equally sincere and appeared to be equally intense. At the outbreak of the Revolution they met and combined; for a moment they were intimately mingled, they inflamed each other by mutual contact, and kindled at once the whole heart of France. Such was 1789, a time of inexperience no doubt, but a time of generosity, of enthusiasm, of virility, and of greatness—a time of immortal memory, towards which the eyes of mankind will turn with admiration and respect long after those who witnessed it and we ourselves shall have disappeared. Then, indeed, the French were sufficiently proud of their cause and of themselves to believe that they might be equal in freedom. Amidst their democratic institutions they therefore everywhere placed free institutions. Not only did they crush to the dust all that effete legislation which divided men into castes, corporations, and classes, and which rendered their rights even more unequal than their conditions, but they shattered by a single blow those other laws, more recently imposed by the authority of the Crown, which had deprived the French nation of the free enjoyment of its own powers, and had placed by the side of every Frenchman the Government, as his preceptor, his guardian, and, if need be, his oppressor. Centralisation fell with absolute government.
But when that vigorous generation, which had commenced the Revolution was destroyed or enervated, as commonly happens to any generation which engages in such enterprises—when, following the natural course of events of this nature, the love of freedom had been damped and discouraged by anarchy and popular tyranny, and the bewildered nation began to grope after a master—absolute government found prodigious facilities for recovering and consolidating its authority, and these were easily discovered by the genius of the man who was to continue the Revolution and to destroy it.
France under the old Monarchy had, in fact, contained a whole system of institutions of modern date, which, not being adverse to social equality, could easily have found a place in the new state of society, but which offered remarkable opportunities to despotism. These were sought for amidst the ruins of all other institutions, and they were found there. These institutions had formerly given birth to habits, to passions, and to opinions, which tended to retain men in a state of division and obedience: and such were the institutions which were restored and set to work. Centralisation was disentangled from the ruins and re-established; and as, whilst this system rose once more, everything by which it had before been limited was destroyed, from the bowels of that nation which had just overthrown monarchy a power suddenly came forth more extended, more comprehensive, more absolute than that which had ever been exercised by any of the French kings. This enterprise appeared strangely audacious, and its success unparalleled, because men were thinking of what they saw, and had forgotten what they had seen. The Dominator fell, but all that was most substantial in his work remained standing; his government had perished, but the administration survived; and every time that an attempt has since been made to strike down absolute power, all that has been done is to place a head of Liberty on a servile body.
Several times, from the commencement of the Revolution to the present day, the passion of liberty has been seen in France to expire, to revive—and then to expire again, again to revive. Thus will it long be with a passion so inexperienced and ill-directed, so easily discouraged, alarmed, and vanquished; a passion so superficial and so transient. During the whole of this period, the passion for equality has never ceased to occupy that deep-seated place in the hearts of the French people which it was the first to seize: it clings to the feelings they cherish most fondly. Whilst the love of freedom frequently changes its aspect, wanes and waxes, grows or declines with the course of events, that other passion is still the same, ever attracted to the same object with the same obstinate and indiscriminating ardour, ready to make any sacrifice to those who allow it to sate its desires, and ready to furnish every government which will favour and flatter it with the habits, the opinions, and the laws which Despotism requires to enable it to reign.
The French Revolution will ever be wrapped in clouds and darkness to those who direct their attention to itself alone. The only light that can illuminate its course must be sought in the times which preceded it. Without a clear perception of the former society of France, of its laws, of its defects, of its prejudices, of its littleness, of its greatness, it is impossible to comprehend what the French have been doing in the sixty years which have followed its dissolution; but even this perception will not suffice without penetrating to the very quick into the character of this nation.
When I consider this people 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; indocile by temperament, yet accepting the arbitrary and even the violent rule of a sovereign more readily than the free and regular government of the chief citizen; to-day the declared enemy of all obedience, to-morrow serving with a sort of passion which the nations best adapted for servitude cannot attain; guided by a thread as long as no one resists, ungovernable when the example of resistance has once been given; always deceiving its masters, who fear it either too little or too much; never so free that it is hopeless to enslave it, or so enslaved that it may not break the yoke again; apt for all things but excelling only in war; adoring chance, force, success, splendour and noise, more than true glory; more capable of heroism than of virtue, of genius than of good sense, ready to conceive immense designs rather than to accomplish great undertakings; the most brilliant and the most dangerous of the nations of Europe and that best fitted to become by turns an object of admiration, of hatred, of pity, of terror, but never of indifference!
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.
I am arrived then at the threshold of this great event. My intention is not to go beyond it now, though perhaps I may do so hereafter. I shall then proceed to consider it not only in its causes but in itself, and I shall venture finally to pass a judgment on the state of society which it has produced.
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER
ON THE PAYS D’ÉTATS, AND ESPECIALLY ON THE CONSTITUTIONS OF LANGUEDOC
It is not my intention minutely to investigate in this place how public business was carried on in each of the provinces called Pays d’États, which were still in existence at the outbreak of the Revolution. I wish only to indicate the number of them; to point out those in which local life was still most active; to show what were the relations of these provinces with the administration of the Crown; how far they formed an exception to the general rules I have previously established; how far they fell within those rules; and lastly, to show by the example of one of these provinces what they might all have easily become.
Estates had existed in most of the provinces of France—that is, each of them had been administered under the King’s government by the gens des trois états, as they were then called, which meant the representatives of the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commons. This provincial constitution, like most of the other political institutions of the Middle Ages, occurred, with the same features, in almost all the civilised parts of Europe—in all those parts, at least, into which Germanic manners and ideas had penetrated. In many of the provinces of Germany these States subsisted down to the French Revolution; in those provinces in which they had been previously destroyed they had only disappeared in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everywhere, for two hundred years, the sovereigns had carried on a clandestine or an open warfare against them. Nowhere had they attempted to improve this institution with the progress of time, but only to destroy and deform it whenever an opportunity presented itself and when they could not do worse.
In France, in 1789, these States only existed in five provinces of a certain extent and in some insignificant districts. Provincial liberty could, in truth, only be said to exist in two provinces—in Brittany and in Languedoc: everywhere else the institution had entirely lost its virility, and was reduced to a mere shadow.
I shall take the case of Languedoc separately, and devote to it in this place a closer examination.
Languedoc was the most extensive and the most populous of all the pays d’états. It contained more than two thousand parishes, or, as they were then called, ‘communities,’ and nearly two millions of inhabitants. It was, besides, the best ordered and the most prosperous of all these provinces as well as the largest. Languedoc is, therefore, the fairest specimen of what provincial liberty might be under the old French monarchy, and to what an extent, even in the districts where it appeared strongest, it had been subjected to the power of the Crown.
In Languedoc the Estates could only assemble upon the express order of the King, and under a writ of summons addressed by the King individually every year to the members of whom they were composed, which caused one of the malcontents of the time to say, ‘Of the three bodies composing our Estates, one—that of the clergy—sits at the nomination of the King, since he names to the bishoprics and benefices; and the two others may be supposed to be so, since an order of the Court may prevent any member it pleases from attending the Assembly, and this without exiling or prosecuting him, by merely not summoning him.’
The Estates were not only to meet, but to be prorogued on certain days appointed by the King. The customary duration of their session had been fixed at forty days by an Order in Council. The King was represented in the Assembly by commissioners, who had always free access when they required it, and whose business it was to explain the will of the Government. The Assembly was, moreover, strictly held in restraint. They could take no resolution of any importance, they could determine on no financial measure at all, until their deliberations had been approved by an Order in Council; for a tax, a loan, or a suit at law they require the express permission of the King. All their standing orders, down to that which related to the order of their meetings, had to be authorised before they became operative. The aggregate of their receipts and expenditure—their budget, as it would now be called—was subjected every year to the same control.
The Central Power, moreover, exercised in Languedoc the same political rights which were everywhere else acknowledged to belong to it. The laws which the Crown was pleased to promulgate, the general ordinances it was continually passing, the general measures of its policy, were applicable there as well as in the rest of the kingdom. The Crown exercised there all the natural functions of government; it had there the same police and the same agents; there, as well as everywhere else, it created numerous new public officers, whose places the province was compelled to buy up at a large price.
Languedoc was governed, like the other provinces of France, by an Intendant. This Intendant had, in each district, his Sub-delegates, who corresponded with the heads of the parishes and directed them. The Intendant exercised the tutelage of the administration as completely as in the pays d’élection. The humblest village in the gorges of the Cevennes was precluded from making the smallest outlay until it had been authorised by an Order of the King’s Council from Paris. That part of the judicial administration which is now denominated in France the contentieux administratif, or the litigated questions referred to the Council of State, was not only not less, but more comprehensive than in the remainder of France. The Intendant decided, in the first instance, all questions relating to the public ways; he judged all suits relating to roads; and, in general, he pronounced on all the matters in which the Government was, or conceived itself to be, interested. The Government extended the same protection as elsewhere to all its agents against the rash prosecutions of the citizens whom they might have oppressed.
What then did Languedoc possess which distinguished it from the other provinces of the kingdom, and which caused them to envy its institutions? Three things sufficed to render it entirely different from the rest of France.
I. An Assembly, composed of men of station, looked up to by the population, respected by the Crown, to which no officer of the Central Power, or, to use the phraseology then in use, ‘no officer of the King,’ could belong, and in which, every year, the special interests of the province were freely and gravely discussed. The mere fact that the royal administration was placed near this source of light caused its privileges to be very differently exercised; and though its agents and its instincts were the same, its results in no degree resembled what they were elsewhere.
II. In Languedoc many public works were executed at the expense of the King and his agents. There were other public works, for which the Central Government provided the funds and partly directed the execution, but the greater part of them were executed at the expense of the province alone. When the King had approved the plan and authorised the estimates for these last-mentioned works, they were executed by officers chosen by the Estates, and under the inspection of commissioners taken from this Assembly.
III. Lastly, the province had the right of levying itself, and in the manner it preferred, a part of the royal taxes and all the rates which were imposed by its own authority for its own wants.
Let us see the results which Languedoc continued to extract from these privileges: they deserve a minute attention.
Nothing is more striking in the other parts of France—the pays d’élection—than the almost complete absence of local charges. The general imposts were frequently oppressive, but a province spent nothing on itself. In Languedoc, on the contrary, the annual expenditure of the province on public works was enormous; in 1780 it exceeded two millions of livres.
The Central Government was sometimes alarmed at witnessing so vast an outlay. It feared that the province, exhausted by such an effort, would be unable to acquit the share of the taxes due to the State; it blamed the Estates for not moderating this expenditure. I have read a document, framed by the Assembly, in answer to these animadversions: the passages I am about to transcribe from it will depict, better than all I could say, the spirit which animated this small Government.
It is admitted in this statement that the province has commenced and is still carrying on immense public works; but, far from offering any apology for this proceeding, it is added that, saving the opposition of the Crown, these works will be still further extended and persevered in. The province had already improved or rectified the channel of the principal rivers within its territory, and it was then engaged in adding to the Canal of Burgundy, dug under Louis XIV., but already insufficient, a prolongation which, passing through Lower Languedoc, should proceed by Cette and Agen to the Rhone. The port of Cette had been opened to trade, and was maintained at great cost. All these expenses had, as was observed, a national rather than a provincial character; yet the province, as the party chiefly interested, had taken them on itself. It was also engaged in draining and restoring to agriculture the marshes of Aigues-Mortes. Roads had been the object of its peculiar care: all those which connect the province with the rest of the kingdom had been opened or put in good order; even the cross-roads between the towns and villages of Languedoc had been repaired. All these different roads were excellent even in winter, and formed the greatest contrast with the hard, uneven, and ill-constructed roads which were to be found in most of the adjacent provinces, such as Dauphiny, Quercy, and the government of Bordeaux—all pays d’élection, it was remarked. On this point the Report appeals to the opinion of travellers and traders; and this appeal was just, for Arthur Young, when he visited the country ten years afterwards, put on his notes, ‘Languedoc, pays d’états: good roads, made without compulsory labour.’
‘If the King would allow it,’ this Report continued, ‘the States will do more: they will undertake the improvement of the crossroads in the villages, which are not less interesting than the others. For if produce cannot be removed from the barns of the grower to market, what use is it that it can be sent to a distance?’ ‘The doctrine of the States on questions of public works has always been,’ they say, ‘that it is not the grandeur of these undertakings but their utility that must be looked to.’ Rivers, canals, roads which give value to all the produce of the soil and of manufactures, by enabling them to be conveyed at all times and at little cost wherever they are wanted, and by means of which commerce can penetrate to every part of the province—these are things which enrich a country, whatever they may cost it. Besides, works of this nature, undertaken in moderation at the same time, in various parts of the country, and somewhat equally distributed, keep up the rate of wages, and stand in lieu of relief to the poor. ‘The King has not needed to establish charitable workhouses at his cost in Languedoc, as has been done in other parts of France,’ said the province, with honest pride; ‘we do not ask for that favour; the useful works we ourselves carry on every year supersede such establishments, and give to all our people productive labour.’
The more I have studied the general regulations established by the States of Languedoc, with the permission of the King (though generally not originating with the Crown), in that portion of the public administration which was left in their hands, the more I have been struck with the wisdom, the equity, and the moderation they display; the more superior do the proceedings of the local government appear in comparison with all I have found in the districts administered by the King alone.
The province was divided into ‘communities’ (towns or villages); into administrative districts, called dioceses; and, lastly, into three great departments called stewardries. Each of these parts had a distinct representation, and a little separate government of its own, which acted under the guidance either of the Estates or of the Crown. If it be a question of public works which interest one of these small political bodies, they are only to be undertaken at the request of the interested parties. If the improvements of a community are of advantage to the diocese, the diocese contributed to the expense in a certain proportion. If the stewardry was interested, the stewardry contributed likewise. So again these several divisions were all to assist the townships, even for the completion of undertakings of local interest, if they were necessary and above its strength, for, said the States frequently, ‘the fundamental principle of our constitution is that all parts of Languedoc are reciprocally bound together, and ought successively to help each other.’
