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The works executed by the province were to be carefully prepared beforehand, and first submitted to the examination of the lesser bodies which were to contribute to them. They were all paid for: forced labour was unknown. I have observed that in the other parts of France—the pays d’élection—the land taken from its owners for public works was always ill and tardily paid for, and often not paid for at all. This was one of the great grievances complained of by the Provincial Assemblies when they were convoked in 1787. In some cases the possibility of liquidating debts of this nature had been taken away, for the object taken had been altered or destroyed before the valuation. In Languedoc every inch of ground taken from its owner was to be carefully valued before the works were begun, and paid for in the first year of the execution.
The regulations of these Estates relating to different public works, from which these details are copied, seemed so well conceived that even the Central Government admired, though without imitating them. The King’s Council, after having sanctioned the application of them, caused them to be printed at the Royal press, and to be transmitted to all the Intendants of France as a document to be consulted.
What I have said of public works is à fortiori applicable to that other not less important portion of the provincial administration which related to the levy of taxes. In this respect, more particularly, the contrast was so great between the kingdom and the provinces that it is difficult to believe they formed part of the same empire.
I have had occasion to say elsewhere that the methods of proceeding used in Languedoc for the assessment and collection of the taille were in part the same as are now employed in France in the levy of the public taxes. Nor shall I here revert to this subject, merely adding that the province was so attached to its own superior methods of proceeding, that when new taxes were imposed by the Crown, the States of Languedoc never hesitated to purchase at a very high price the right of levying them in their own manner and by their own agents exclusively.
In spite of all the expenses which I have successively enumerated, the finances of Languedoc were nevertheless in such good order, and its credit so well established, that the Central Government often had recourse to it, and borrowed, in the name of the province, sums of money which would not have been lent on such favourable terms to the Government itself. Thus Languedoc borrowed, on its own security, but for the King’s service, in the later years of the monarchy, 73,200,000 livres, or nearly three millions sterling.
The Government and the Ministers of the Crown looked, however, with an unfavourable eye on these provincial liberties. Richelieu had first mutilated and afterwards abolished them. The spiritless and indolent Louis XIII., who loved nothing, detested them; the horror he felt for all provincial privileges was such, said Boulainvilliers, that his anger was excited by the mere name of them. It is hard to sound the hatred of feeble souls for whatever compels them to exert themselves. All that they retain of manhood is turned in that direction, and they exhibit strength in their animosity, however weak they may be in everything else. Fortunately the ancient constitution of Languedoc was restored under the minority of Louis XIV., who consequently respected it as his own work. Louis XV. suspended it for a couple of years, but afterwards allowed it to go on.
The creation of municipal offices for sale exposed the constitution of the province to dangers less direct, but not less formidable. That pernicious institution not only destroyed the constitution of the towns; it tended to vitiate that of the provinces. I know not whether the deputies of the commons in the Provincial Assemblies had ever been elected ad hoc, but at any rate they had long ceased to be so; the municipal officers of the towns were ex officio the sole representatives of the burgesses and the people in those bodies.
This absence of a direct constituency acting with reference to the affairs of the day was but little remarked as long as the towns freely elected their own magistrates by universal suffrage, and generally for a very limited period. Thus the mayor, the council, or the syndic represented the wishes of the population in the Hall of the Estates as faithfully as if they had been elected by their fellow-citizens for that purpose. But very different was the case with a civic officer who had purchased for money the right of governing. Such an officer represented no one but himself, or, at best, the petty interests or the petty passions of his own coterie. Yet this magistrate by contract retained the powers which had been exercised by his elected predecessors. The character of the institution was, therefore, immediately changed. The nobles and the clergy, instead of having the representatives of the people sitting with them or opposite to them in the Provincial Assembly, met there none but a few isolated, timid, and powerless burgesses, and thus the commons occupied a more subordinate place in the government at the very time when they were every day becoming richer and stronger in society. This was not the case in Languedoc, the province having always taken care to buy up these offices as fast as they were established by the Crown. The loan contracted by the States for this purpose, in the year 1773 only, amounted to more than four millions of livres.
Other causes of still greater power had contributed to infuse a new spirit into these ancient institutions, and to give to the States of Languedoc an incontestable superiority over those of all the other provinces.
In this province, as in a great portion of the south of France, the taille was real and not personal—that is to say, it was regulated by the value of property, and not by the personal condition of the proprietor. Some lands had, no doubt, the privilege of not paying this tax: these lands had, in former times, belonged to the nobility, but, by the progress of time and of capital, it had happened that a portion of this property had fallen into the hands of non-noble holders. On the other hand, the nobles had become the holders of many lands which were liable to the taille. The privilege of exemption, being thus removed from persons to things, was doubtless more abused; but it was less felt, because, though still irksome, it was no longer humiliating. Not being indissolubly connected with the idea of a class, not investing any class with interests altogether alien and opposed to those of the other classes, such a privilege no longer opposed a barrier to the co-operation of all in public affairs. In Languedoc especially, more than in any other part of France, all classes did so co-operate, and this on a footing of complete equality.
In Brittany the landed gentry of the province had the right of all appearing in their own persons at the States, which made these Assemblies in some sort resemble the Polish Diets. In Languedoc the nobles only figured at the States of the province by their representatives: twenty-three of them sat for the whole body. The clergy also sat in the person of the twenty-three bishops of the province, and it deserves especial observation that the towns had as many votes as the two upper orders.
As the Assembly sat in one house and the orders did not vote separately, but conjointly, the commons naturally acquired much importance, and their spirit gradually infused itself into the whole body. Nay, more, the three magistrates, who, under the name of Syndics-General, were charged, in the name of the States, with the ordinary management of the business, were almost always lawyers,—that is to say, commoners. The nobility was strong enough to maintain its rank, but no longer strong enough to reign alone. The clergy, though consisting to a great extent of men of gentle birth, lived on excellent terms with the commons; they eagerly adopted most of the plans of that Order, and laboured in conjunction with it to increase the material prosperity of the whole community, by encouraging trade and manufactures, thus placing their own great knowledge of mankind and their singular dexterity in the conduct of affairs at the service of the people. A priest was almost always chosen to proceed to Versailles to discuss with the Ministers of the Crown the questions which sometimes set at variance the royal authority and that of the States. It might be said that throughout the last century Languedoc was administered by the Commons, who were controlled by the Nobles and assisted by the Bishops.
Thanks to this peculiar constitution of Languedoc, the spirit of the age was enabled peacefully to pervade this ancient institution, and to modify it altogether without at all destroying it.
It might have been so everywhere else in France. A small portion of the perseverance and the exertions which the sovereigns of France employed for the abolition or the dislocation of the Provincial Estates would have sufficed to perfect them in this manner, and to adapt them to all the wants of modern civilisation, if those sovereigns had ever had any other aim than to become and to remain the masters of France.
[The chapters which follow were not included in the work first published by M. de Tocqueville in 1855. They are the continuation of it, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1859, and published in 1865 by M. de Beaumont amongst the posthumous works of his friend. They are now translated for the first time. Although they must be regarded as incomplete, since they never received the final revision of the author, and the latter portions of them are fragmentary, yet they are not, I think, unworthy to form part of the work to which they were intended to belong, and a melancholy interest attaches to them as the last meditations of a great and original thinker. In the French text an attempt has been made to distinguish, by a different type, the passages which are more carefully finished from those which consisted merely of notes for further elaboration. But as this arrangement breaks the uniformity of the text more than is necessary, I have not adopted it.—H. R.]
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
OF THE VIOLENT AND UNDEFINED AGITATION OF THE HUMAN MIND AT THE MOMENT WHEN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BROKE OUT
What I have previously said of France is applicable to the whole Continent. In the ten or fifteen years preceding the French Revolution, the human mind was abandoned, throughout Europe, to strange, incoherent, and irregular impulses, symptoms of a new and extraordinary disease, which would have singularly alarmed the world if the world had understood them.
A conception of the greatness of man in general, and of the omnipotence of his reason and the boundless range of his intelligence, had penetrated and pervaded the spirit of the age; yet this lofty conception of mankind in general was commingled with a boundless contempt for the age in which men were living and the society to which they belonged. Never was so much humility united to so much pride—the pride of humanity was inflated to madness; the estimate each man formed of his age and country was singularly low.
All over the Continent that instinctive attachment and involuntary respect which the men of all ages and all countries are wont in general to feel for their own peculiar institutions, for their traditional customs, and for the wisdom or the virtues of their forefathers, had almost ceased to exist among the educated classes. Nothing was spoken of but the decrepitude and incoherence of existing institutions, the vices and corruption of existing society.
Traces of this state of mind may be discovered throughout the literature of Germany. The philosophy, the history, the poetry, even the novels of the time, are full of it. Every product of the intellect was so stamped by it, that the books of that epoch bear a mark that distinguishes them from the works of every other age. All the memoirs of that day, which gave birth to a profusion of memoirs—all the correspondence of the time which has been published—attest a state of mind so different from the present, that nothing short of this concurrence of certain and abundant evidence could convince us of the fact.
Every page of Schlosser’s ‘History of the Eighteenth Century’ reveals this general presentiment, that a great change was about to take place in the condition of mankind.
George Forster, one of the companions of Captain Cook, to whose expedition he had been attached with his father as a naturalist, writes to Jacobi in 1779: ‘Things cannot remain as they are: this is announced by every symptom in the world of science, in the world of theology, and in that of politics. Much as my heart has hitherto desired peace, not less do I desire to see the arrival of this crisis on which such mighty hopes are founded.’85 ‘Europe,’ he writes again in 1782, ‘seems to me on the brink of a horrible revolution; in truth the mass is so corrupt that bleeding may well be necessary.’86 ‘The present state of society,’ said Jacobi, ‘presents to me nothing but the aspect of a dead and stagnant sea: that is why I could desire an inundation, be it what it may, even of barbarians, to sweep away this reeking marsh and lay bare a fresh soil.’87 ‘We are living in the midst of shattered institutions and forms’—a monstrous chaos which everywhere reflects an image of dismay88 and of death.’ These things were written in a pretty country house, by wealthy people, surrounded by their literary friends, who passed their time in endless philosophical discussions which affected, excited, and inflamed them till they shed torrents of daily tears—in imagination.
It was not the princes, the ministers, the rulers, or those, in short, who, in different capacities, were directing the march of affairs, who perceived that some great change was at hand. The idea that government could become quite different from what government then was,—that all which had lasted so long might be destroyed and superseded by that which as yet only existed in the brain of a few men of letters—the thought that the existing order of things might be overthrown to establish a new order in the midst of disorder and ruin, would have appeared to them an absurd illusion and a fantastic dream. The gradual improvement of society seemed to them the limit of the possible.
It is a common error of the people who are called wise and practical in ordinary times, to judge by certain rules the men whose very object is to change or to destroy those rules. When a time is come at which passion takes the guidance of affairs, the beliefs of men of experience are less worthy of consideration than the schemes which engage the imagination of dreamers.
It is curious to see in the official correspondence of that epoch, civil officers of ability and foresight laying their plans, framing their measures, and calculating scientifically the use they will make of their powers, at a time when the Government they are serving, the laws they are applying, the society they are living in, and they themselves shall be no more.
‘What scenes are passing in France!’ writes Johann Müller on the 6th of August, 1789.89 ‘Blessed be the impression they produce on the nations and on their masters! I know there are excesses, but the cost of a free constitution is not too great. Is not a storm which purifies the air better than an atmosphere tainted as with the plague, even though here and there it should strike a few heads?’ ‘What an event,’ exclaimed Fox, ‘how much the greatest it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!’90
Can we be surprised that this conception of the Revolution as a general uprising of humanity, a conception which enlarged and invigorated so many small and feeble souls, should have taken possession at once of the mind of France, when even other countries partook of it? Nor is it astonishing that the first excesses of the Revolution should have affected the best patriots of France so little, when even foreigners who were not excited by the struggle or embittered by personal grievances could extend so much indulgence to them.
Let it not be supposed that this sort of abhorrence of themselves and of their age, which had thus strangely fallen upon almost all the inhabitants of the continent of Europe, was a superficial or a transient sentiment.
Ten years later, when the French Revolution had inflicted on Germany all sorts of violent transformations accompanied by death and destruction, even then, one of those Germans, in whom enthusiasm for France had turned to bitter hatred, exclaims, mindful of the past, in a confidential effusion, ‘What was is no more. What new edifice will be raised on the ruins, I know not. But this I know, that it would be the direst calamity if this tremendous era were again to give birth to the apathy and the worn-out forms of the past.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the person to whom these words were addressed, ‘the old social body must perish.’91
The years which preceded the French Revolution were, in almost every part of Europe, years of great national prosperity. The useful arts were everywhere more cultivated. The taste for enjoyments, which follow in the train of affluence, was more diffused. Industry and commerce, which supply these wants, were improving and spreading. It seemed as if the life of man becoming thus more busy and more sensual, the human mind would lose sight of those abstract studies which embrace society, and would centre more and more on the petty cares of daily life. But the contrary took place. Throughout Europe, almost as much as in France, all the educated classes were plunged in philosophical discussions and dogmatical theories. Even in places ordinarily the most remote from speculations of this nature, the same train of argument was eagerly pursued. In the most trading cities of Germany, in Hamburg, Lubeck, and Dantzig, the merchants, traders, and manufacturers would meet after the labours of the day to discuss amongst themselves the great questions which affect the existence, the condition, the happiness of man. Even the women, amidst their petty household cares, were sometimes distracted by these enigmas of life. ‘We thought,’ says Perthes, ‘that by becoming highly enlightened, one might become perfect.’
‘Der König sey der beste Mann, sonst sey der bessere König,’
said the poet Claudius.
This period too gave birth to a new passion, embodied in a new word—cosmopolitism—which was to swallow up patriotism. It seemed as if all classes were bent on escaping whenever they could from the care of their private affairs, to give themselves up to the grand interests of humanity.
As in France the love of letters filled a large space even in the busiest times, the publication of a new book was an event of interest in the smallest towns as well as in the chief cities. Everything was a subject of inquiry; everything was a source of emotion. Treasures of passion seemed accumulated in every breast, which sought but an occasion to break forth.
Thus, a traveller who had been round the globe was an object of general attention. When Forster went to Germany in 1774, he was received with enthusiasm. Not a town but gave him an ovation. Crowds flocked about him to hear his adventures from his own lips, but still more to hear him describe the unknown countries he had visited, and the strange customs of the men among whom he had been living. Was not their savage simplicity worthy more than all our riches and our arts: were not their instincts above our virtues?92
A certain unfrocked Lutheran priest, one Basidow, ignorant, quarrelsome, and a drunkard, a caricature of Luther, excogitated a new system of schools which was, he said, to change the ideas and manners of his countrymen. He put forth his scheme in coarse and intemperate language. The object, as he took care to announce, was not only to regenerate Germany, but the human race. Forthwith, all Germany is in movement. Princes, nobles, commons, towns, cities, abet the great innovator. Lords and ladies of high estate write to Basidow to ask his advice. Mothers of families place his books in the hands of their children. The old schools founded by Melanchthon are forsaken. A college, designed to educate these reformers of mankind, is founded under the name of the ‘Philanthropian,’ blazes for a moment, and disappears. The enthusiasm drops, leaving behind it confusion and doubt.
The real spirit of the age was to reject every form of mysticism, and to cling in all things to the evidence most palpable to the understanding. Nevertheless, in this violent perturbation of mind, men, not knowing as yet which way to look, cast themselves suddenly on the supernatural. On the eve of the French Revolution, Europe was covered with strange fraternities and secret societies, which only revived under new names delusions that had long been forgotten. Such, were the doctrines of Swedenborg, of the Martinists, of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the disciples of Strict Abstinence, the Mesmerists, and many other varieties of similar sects. Many of these sects originally contemplated no more than the private advantage of their members. But all of them now aspired to embrace the destinies of mankind. Most of them had been, at the time of their birth, wholly philosophical or religious: all now turned at once to politics, and were absorbed in them. By different means they all proposed to bring about the regeneration of society and the reform of governments. It is especially worthy of remark that this sense of unrest, this perturbation of the human mind which I am describing, did not manifest itself in the lower classes, which bore nevertheless the burden of existing abuses. Those classes were still motionless and inert. Not the poor man, but the rich man was tossing in this feverish condition: the movement sunk not lower than the upper rank of the middle classes. Nowadays secret societies are filled by poor workmen, obscure artisans, or ignorant peasants. At the time I am speaking of they consisted entirely of princes, great nobles, capitalists, merchants, and men of letters.
When in 1786 the secret papers of the Illuminati were seized in the hands of their principal chiefs, many anarchical documents were found among them, in which personal property was denounced as the source of all evil, and absolute equality of conditions was vaunted. In the archives of the same sect a list of adepts was found. It consisted entirely of the most distinguished names in Germany, princes, great nobles, and ministers: the founder of the sect was himself a professor of canon law. The King of Poland and Prince Frederick of Prussia were Rosicrucians. The new King of Prussia, who had just succeeded Frederick the Great on the throne, immediately sent for the leading Rosicrucians and intrusted to them important missions.93 ‘It is asserted,’ says Mounier94 in his books on these sects, ‘that several great personages of France and Germany, some of whom were Protestants, took the tonsure in order to be admitted into the sect of Strict Observance.’
Another thing well worthy of notice: it was a time when the sciences had discredited the marvellous, as they became more positive and more certain—when the inexplicable was easily taken for the false, and when in all things reason claimed to supersede authority, reality the imaginary, and free inquiry faith: nevertheless there was not one of the sects I have just mentioned but had some point of contact with the supernatural; all of them ended in some fantastic conclusion. Some of them were imbued with mystical conceptions: others fancied they had found out the secret to change some of the laws of nature. At that moment every species of enthusiasm might pass for science, every dreamer could find listeners, every impostor could find believers: nothing is more characteristic of the perplexed and agitated condition of men’s minds, running to and fro, like a benighted traveller who has lost his way, and who, instead of getting onward, doubles back upon his own footsteps. And it was not the common herd of the people who were at the head of these extravagances; men of letters, men of learning believed in alchemy, in the visible action of the demon, in the transmutation of metals, in the apparition of ghosts. Strange instance of belief in every form of absurdity, growing amidst the decay of religious convictions—of men putting faith in every invisible and supernatural influence, except in that of God!
These mountebanks were the especial delight of sovereigns. Forster writes to his father from Cassel in 1782: ‘An old French adventuress is here who shows spirits to the Landgrave, and receives 150 louis d’or. He is vain enough to think that the devil may take the trouble to tempt him in person. She has with her another Frenchman who casts out bad spirits from the afflicted,’ etc. etc. Great monarchs had at their courts charlatans of the first water—Cagliostro, the Count de St. Germain or Mesmer: the little princes were fain to put up, for want of better, with ridiculous little tricksters.
The aspect of this society was nevertheless one of the most imposing which has ever been presented to the world, in spite of the errors and follies of the age. Never had humanity been prouder of itself than at that moment, for at no other moment, from the birth of all the ages, had man believed in his own omnipotence. The whole of Europe resembled a camp, awakening at break of day, bustling at first in different directions, until the rising sun points out the destined track and illuminates the road of march. Alas! how little do those who come at the close of a great revolution resemble those who begin it,—full of lofty hopes, of generous designs, of stores of energy they are ready to pour forth, of noble delusions, of unselfish disinterestedness. Many contemporary writers, unable to discern the general causes which had produced the strange subversion of society they were witnessing, attributed it to a conspiracy of secret societies.95 As if any private conspiracy could ever explain a movement of such depth and so destructive of human institutions. The secret societies were certainly not the cause of the Revolution: but they must be considered as one of the most conspicuous signs of its approach.
They were not the only signs.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the American Revolution was hailed with ardent sympathy in France alone: the noise of it went forth to the ends of Europe: everywhere it was regarded as a beacon. Steffens, who fifty years later took so active a part in rousing Germany against France, relates in his Memoirs, that in early childhood the first thing that excited him was the cause of American independence.
‘I still remember vividly,’ says he, ‘what happened at Elsinore and in the roadstead, on the day when that peace was signed which secured the triumph of freedom. The day was fine; the roadstead was full of people of all nations. We awaited with eager impatience the very dawn. All the ships were dressed—the masts ornamented with pennons, everything covered with flags; the weather was calm, with just wind enough to cause the gay bunting to flutter in the breeze; the boom of cannon, the cheers of the crews on deck, completed the festal character of the day. My father had invited some friends to his table; they drank to the victory of the Americans and the triumph of the popular cause, whilst a dim presentiment that great events would result from this triumph mingled with their rejoicings. It was the bright and cheering dawn of a bloody day. My father sought to imbue us with the love of political freedom. Contrary to the habit of the house, he had us brought to table; where he impressed on us the importance of the event we were witnessing, and bade us drink with him and his guests to the welfare of the new commonwealth.’96
Of the men who, in every corner of old Europe, felt themselves thus moved by the deeds of a small community in the New World, not one thoroughly understood the deep and secret cause of his own emotion, yet all heard a signal in that distant sound. What it announced was still unknown. It was the voice of John crying in the wilderness that new times were at hand.
Seek not to assign to these facts which I have been relating any peculiar cause: all of them were different symptoms of the same social disease. On all hands the old institutions and the old powers no longer fitted accurately the new condition and the new wants of man. Hence that strange unrest which led even the great and the worldly to regard their own state of life as intolerable. Hence that universal thirst for change, which came unbidden to every mind, though no one knew as yet how that change could be brought about. An internal and spontaneous impulse seemed to shake at once the whole fabric of society, and disturbed to their foundations the ideas and habits of every man. To hold back was felt to be impossible: yet none knew on which side they would incline; and the whole of Europe was in the condition of a huge mass which oscillates before it falls.
