The Eve of the French Revolution

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All orders ask for the suppression of begging. The demand is commonly
accompanied by one looking to some humane provision for the poor,
sometimes by a request for a regular poor-law, or even for regulation
of wages. The people of the parish of Pecqueuse ask that there be
public works always going on, where the poor may earn wages calculated
on the price of grain; and, what is more significant, the Third Estate
of Paris makes a similar request for public work-shops.[Footnote: _A.
P._, v. 11, Sections 17, 18. _A. P._, v. 287, Section 28.] Yet the
universal cry for the suppression of mendicity, and the form in which
it was made, show that begging was considered a great evil on its own
account, whether mendicant monks or less authorized persons were the
beggars. The begging monks, indeed, were either to be abolished, or
their maintenance in their own monasteries was to be provided for in
the general readjustment of ecclesiastical benefices.

Another common request is that letters in the post-office be not
tampered with. All readers who are familiar with the history, and
particularly with the diplomatic history of the last century, know how
common was the practice of breaking open and taking copies of
political correspondence. The letters of Franklin and Silas Deane, and
of many less prominent persons, were continually opened in the mail,
both in France and in England. Regular ambassadors were driven to the
habitual use of bearers of dispatches; and even these might be waylaid
and robbed, by the agents of friendly governments disguised as
highwaymen. [Footnote: Ciphers were in common use, and governments
employed decipherers. Great skill had been attained in opening letters
and closing them again so that they might not appear to have been
tampered with. "This institution, if well directed, has the property
of serving as a compass to those who hold the reins of government,"
writes, with a fine jumbling of metaphors, one who has been a clerk in
the post-office. Sorel, i. 77. The _Facsimiles of MSS. in European
Archives relating to America_, now in process of publication by
Stevens, furnish numerous examples of these practices.] But it is
astonishing to find that the evil had gone so far as to excite the
fears of private persons for the maintenance of that privacy of which
all decent Frenchmen, with their strong feeling of the sanctity of the
family and their great dread of ridicule, are peculiarly
jealous.[Footnote: _T._, Agenois, _A. P._, i. 690.]

Again, the frequent recurrence of the request for the restraint of
quack doctors is somewhat surprising. The need of competent surgeons
and midwives was much felt in the country, and recourse was had to the
Estates General to provide them. In calling for legislation to
prohibit quackery and to forbid lotteries, the people asked to be
protected against themselves, any extravagant theories of the liberty
of man to the contrary notwithstanding.[Footnote: Quack doctors, _C._,
Nemours, _A. P._, iv. 108, Section 31. Cormeilles-en-Parisis, _A. P._,
iv. 463, Section 17. _N._, Troyes, _A. P._, vi. 79, Section 80. _T._,
Chalons-sur-Marne, _A. P._, ii. 595, Section 24.]

Such were the desires of the French nation in the spring of 1789. In
them we may note several important points of agreement. First,
government by the nation and the king together. France was still to be a
monarchy; not a republic, open or disguised; but it was to be a limited
and not an absolute monarchy. In this all the orders were agreed, and
the king, by the mere summoning of the Estates General, as well as by
his whole attitude, seemed to acquiesce.

Then, the desires of the nation included a diminution of the privileges
of the upper orders, not a complete abolition of them. Like all
Catholics, Frenchmen wished to leave the control of religious affairs
largely in the hands of the clergy. To the nobility, all but a few
extremists were willing to concede many privileges, honors, and
advantages.

But while retaining a government of limited monarchy and moderate
aristocracy, the nation in all its branches had determined that public
burdens and public benefits should be more equally divided than they had
ever been before. Proportionate equality of taxation, and a chance to
rise--these the Commons were determined to have, and the higher orders
were ready to concede.

In another feeling all France shared. Churchmen, nobles, and common
people alike dreaded and hated the little ring of courtiers. These had
grown great on the substance of the nation. They should be restrained
hereafter, and obliged as far as possible to surrender their ill-gotten
gains.

And all men wanted administrative reforms. The courts of justice, the
army, the finances, were to be put in order and improved. Here all
agreed as to the end sought, and if there was much difference of opinion
as to the methods, parties had not yet formed, nor had feeling run very
high on these subjects.

What, then, were the dangers threatening France? They were to be looked
for in the very magnitude of the changes proposed, changes which could
not fail to startle and alarm all Europe. They were to be seen in the
opposition of the nobles, who were ready to give up much, but were asked
to give up more. They were to be feared most of all in a monarch so weak
and an administration so faulty, that the first attempt at reform was
likely to destroy them altogether.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXIII.

CONCLUSION.

France had become a despotism in the attempt to escape from mediaeval
anarchy. What she asked of her kings was security from external enemies,
and good government at home. The first of these they had given her. No
country in Europe was more respected and feared. In spite of occasional
and temporary reverses, her borders had been enlarged from reign to
reign, and her fields, for nearly three centuries, had seldom been
trodden by foreign armies.

Within the country the house of Capet had been partially successful. It
had put down armed opposition, it had taken away the power of the feudal
nobility, it had maintained tolerable security against violent crime.
But here its zeal had slackened. Civilization was advancing rapidly, and
the French internal government was not keeping pace with it.

This better performance of its external than of its internal tasks is
almost inevitable in a despotism. To protect his country, and to add to
it, is the obvious duty and the natural ambition of a despot. His
dignity is concerned; his pride is flattered by success; and whether he
has succeeded or failed is obvious to himself and to every one else. To
control and improve the internal administration is a hard and ungrateful
labor, in which mistakes are sure to occur; and the greatest and truest
reform when accomplished will injure and displease some persons. The
most beneficent improvements are sometimes those which involve the most
labor and bring the least reputation.

Moreover, it is not the people who surround kings that are chiefly
benefited by the good administration of a country. Courtiers are likely
to be interested in abuses, and in the absence of a free press courtiers
are the public of monarchs. If we compare the facilities possessed by
Louis XVI. for ascertaining the true condition of his country with those
possessed by the sovereigns of our own day, an emperor of Germany or of
Austria, or even a Russian Czar, we shall find that the king of France
was far worse off than they are. There were no undisputed national
accounts or statistics in France. There was no serious periodical press
in any country, watching events and collecting facts. There were no
newspapers endeavoring at once to direct and to be directed by public
opinion. True, the satirists were everywhere, with their epigrams and
their songs; but who can form a policy by listening to the jeers of the
splenetic?

The absolute monarchy, therefore, while it protected the French nation,
was failing to secure to it the reasonable and civilized government to
which it felt itself to be entitled. It was failing partly from lack of
information, but largely also from lack of will. The kings in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had beaten down the power of the
nobility and of the Parliaments; the kings of the eighteenth century
shrank before the influence of the very bodies which their ancestors had
defeated. It is vain to try to eliminate the personal element from
history. France would have been a very different country in 1789 from
what she was, had Louis XV. and Louis XVI. been strong and able men. The
education of a prince is not necessarily enfeebling. Perhaps the
commonest vice of despots is willfulness; but the last absolute king of
France might have known a far happier fate if he had had a little more
of it.

The French government was not aristocratic. There was no class in the
country, unless it were the clergy, that was in the habit of exercising
important political rights. But the nobility comprised all those men and
all those families which were trained to occupy high administrative
place. The secretaries of state, the judges of the higher courts, the
officers in the army, were noblemen. The order also included a large
proportion of the educated men and the possessors of a considerable part
of the wealth of the country. It was, therefore, a true power, which
might appropriately be considered. Moreover, it was popularly supposed
to have political rights, although in fact these were mostly obsolete.
Could a good deal of weight have been given, for a time at least, to the
nobility, the result would probably have been favorable to the national
order and prosperity.

Government, to be stable, should represent the true forces of the state.
In a country where all men are of the same race, and where a large
portion of the population has some property and some education, numbers
should be given weight in government; for the simple reason that, in
such a country, many men are stronger than a few, and may choose to use
their strength rather than that a few should govern them. What a large
majority of the people desires, it can enforce. It is often agreed, in
favor of peace and to end controversy, that what a small majority
decides shall be taken as decided for all. On this agreement rests the
legitimacy of democracy. The compromise is an arbitrary one in itself,
but reasonable and sensible; and in a nation that has a good deal of
practical good sense, a feeling of loyalty may gather about it. But
sensible and practical as it may be, it remains a compromise after all.
There is no divine right in one half the voters plus one. Some other
proportion may be, and often is agreed on; or some compromise entirely
different may be found to be more in accordance with the national will.

In old France the conditions required for democratic government were but
partially fulfilled. The population was fairly homogeneous. Property and
education were more or less diffused. But of political experience there
was little, and the democratic compromise, to be thoroughly successful,
requires a great deal. It was rightly felt that a proper regard was not
had to the desires of the more numerous part of the inhabitants of the
country; that a few persons had privileges far beyond their public
deserts or their true powers; but how was this state of things to be
remedied? What new relations were to take the place of the old? No
actual compromise had been effected, and the idea of the rights of a
majority, with the limitations to which those rights are subject, was
not clearly defined in men's minds.

A government should represent the sense of duty of a country. All men
believe that something better is imaginable than that which exists,
and that the better things would be attainable if only men would act
as they ought. Most men strive somewhat to improve their own condition
and conduct. Every man believes at least that others should do so. But
in making laws men are trying to regulate the conduct of others, and
are willing, therefore, that the laws should be a little nearer to
their ideals than their own practice is. All sensible men believe that
they ought to obey the laws, and that if they suffer for not doing so
their suffering is righteous. This opinion is one of the forces in the
world that makes for good.

Now what were the qualities considered really moral and desirable by
the Frenchmen of 1789, and how far did the government of the Bourbons
tend toward them? The duty first recognized by the whole country was
patriotism. The love of France has never grown cold in French hearts.
It is needless to insist on this, for no one who has ever met a
Frenchman worthy of the name, or read a French book of any value, can
doubt it. With all its noble and all its petty incidents, patriotism
is a French virtue.

Under the kings of France its aspirations were satisfied. The country
was great and glorious.

That loyalty was held to be a duty will perhaps be less generally
recognized, but I think that enough has been written in this book to
show it. The evidence of the cahiers is chiefly on that side. Most
Frenchmen believed that a king should govern, and that they had a good
and well-meaning king. Toward him their hearts were still warm and
their sense of duty alive. He was misled, thwarted, overruled, by
selfish and designing courtiers. If he could but have his way all
would be well. Only a very few persons had eyes strong enough to see
that they were worshiping a stuffed scarecrow. A man inside those
clothes could really have led them.

Next among the ideals of France, and far above loyalty in many bosoms,
came liberty and equality. They were not very clearly comprehended. By
liberty was chiefly meant a share of political power; few Frenchmen
believed then, or ever have believed, in letting every man do what
seemed good in his eyes. Such a theory of liberty does not take a very
strong hold on a race so sociable as theirs; nor does such unbridled
liberty seem consistent with civilization to men accustomed to the rigid
system of Continental police. Equality of rights was an ideal, but most
people in France were not prepared to demand its entire carrying out.
Equality of property and of enjoyment many persons, especially such as
considered themselves Philosophers,--persons who had read Rousseau or
Montesquieu,--considered desirable; but no one of any weight had the
most distant intention of trying to bring about such a state of things
in the work-a-day world. Communistic schemes were not quite unknown in
the eighteenth century, but they belong to the nineteenth.[Footnote:
See for eighteenth century communism the curious essay of Morelly.]

With the general growth of comfort, with the general hope of an improved
world, _humanity_, the hatred of seeing others suffer, had begun to
bestir itself. For many ages people had believed that another life, and
not this one, was really to be considered. Kind-hearted men had tried to
draw souls to heaven, stern men to drive them thither. The effort had
absorbed the energy and enthusiasm of a great proportion of those
persons who were willing to think of anything but their own concerns.
But in the eighteenth century heaven was clouded. Men's eyes were fixed
on a promised land nearer their own level. This world, which was known
by experience to be but too often a vale of tears, was soon, very soon,
by the operation of the fashionable philosophy, to be turned into
something like a paradise. To bring about so desirable a condition of
things, the tears must be stopped at their source. Nor was this all. The
world had acquired a new interest. It was capable of improvement. Hope
in temporal matters had led to Faith,--Faith in progress and happiness
here below. The new direction given to Faith and Hope was followed by
Charity. The task of relieving human pain was fairly undertaken.
Sickness and insanity were better cared for; torture was abolished,
punishment lightened. In these matters the government rather followed
than led the popular aspirations. In its general inefficiency, it came
halting behind the good intentions of the people.

The virtues toward which the government of old France tried to lead the
French nation were not, as we have seen, exactly the virtues toward
which the national conscience led. The government upheld loyalty and
humanity, and the people agreed with it; the government upheld a
centralized despotism and privileges, and the popular conscience called
for liberty and equality. In religion there was both agreement and
divergence. The country, in spite of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists,
believed itself to be fervently Catholic; but its ideal of Catholicism
was of a reformed and regenerated type; while that maintained by the
government was corrupt and lifeless in high places. The country wanted
provincial councils, resident bishops, a purified church.

And in so far as the ideals of the government differed from those of the
people, the monarchy did not stand for something nobler and higher than
the moral forces that attacked it. The French nation was in fact better
than its government, more honest and more generous. The country priests
were more self-devoted than the bishops who ruled over them; the poorer
nobles were more public-spirited and more moral than the favored
nobility of the court; the citizens of the Third Estate conducted their
private business more honorably than the administration conducted the
business of the country.

If the stability and legitimacy of government depend on its
correspondence with the real powers of the nation and with the
national conscience, the functions of government embrace something
harder to attain even than this agreement. No sovereign power, be it
that of an autocrat on his throne or of a nation in its councils, can
directly carry out the policy which it desires to adopt. The sovereign
must act through agents; and on the proper selection of these the
success of his undertakings will largely depend. Jurists must draft
the laws, judges must interpret them, officers must enforce obedience.
Generals, commanding soldiers, must defend the land. Engineers must
construct forts and roads; marine architects must furnish plans for
practical ship-builders. Financiers must devise schemes of taxation,
to be submitted to the sovereign; collectors of various kinds must
levy the taxes on the people. All these should be experts, trained to
do their especial work. The choice of experts, then, is one of the
most important functions of government.

In this respect the administration of King Louis XVI. and his immediate
predecessor was usually, although not uniformly bad. The army and navy,
until the last years of disorganization, were reasonably efficient, the
naval engineers in particular being the best then at work in the world.
The civil and criminal laws were chaotic, more from a defect of
legislation than of administration. Old privileges and anomalies were
supported by the government, but good jurists and magistrates were
produced. Those lawyers can hardly have been incompetent in whose school
were trained the framers of the Code Napoleon, the model of modern
Europe. Internal order and police were maintained with a thoroughness
that was remarkable in an age when the possession of a good horse put
the highwayman very nearly on an equality with the officer. The worst
experts employed by the government appear to have been those connected
with taxation and expenditure, from the Controller of the Finances to
the last clerk in the Excise. The schemes of most of them were
blundering, their actions were too often dishonest. They never reached
the art of keeping accurate accounts.

The condition of the people of France, both in Paris and in the
provinces, was far less bad than it is often represented to have been.
The foregoing chapters should have given the impression of a great,
prosperous, modern country. The face of Europe has changed since 1789
more through the enormous number and variety of mechanical inventions
that have marked the nineteenth century than through a corresponding
increase in mental or moral growth. While production and wealth have
advanced by strides, education has taken a few faltering steps forward.
Pecuniary honesty has probably increased, honesty and industry being the
virtues especially fostered by commerce and manufactures. Bigotry, the
unwillingness to permit in others thought and language unpalatable to
ourselves, has become less virulent, but has not disappeared. It is
shown alike by the church and by her enemies. Yet the tone of
controversy has softened even in France. There are fewer Voltairean
sneers, fewer episcopal anathemas. Humanity has been growing; the rich
and prosperous becoming more alive to the suffering around them. But it
is the material progress that is most striking, after all. The poor are
better off than they were a hundred years ago, and the rich also. The
minimum required by custom for the decent support of life has risen. The
earners of wages are better housed, fed, and clothed in return for fewer
hours of labor. In France, as in the world, there are many more things
to divide, and things are, on the whole, more evenly divided.

If we compare the France of 1789 no longer with the France of 1892, but
with the other countries of Continental Europe as they were in the days
preceding the great Revolution, we find that she was worse governed than
a few of them. The administration of Prussia while the great King
Frederick sat on the throne was probably better than that of France.
After his death it rapidly fell off, until a series of defeats had been
earned by mis-government at Berlin. In a few of the smaller states,
such as Holland, the Swiss cantons, or Tuscany, the citizen was perhaps
better governed than in France. But in general, life and property appear
to have been less safe beyond the French border than within it. A small
despotism, when it is bad, is more searching and interfering than a
large one. The lords of France were tyrannous enough at times, but there
were always courts of law and a royal court above them, and appeals for
justice, although doubtful, might yet be attempted with a hope of
success.

The intellectual leadership of France in Europe was very clearly marked
under Louis XV. French was unquestionably the language of the well-born
and the witty as it was the favorite language of the learned all over
the Continent. The reputation of Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, and
Rousseau, was distinctly European. Frederick of Prussia was glad to
compose his academy at Berlin of second-rate French men of letters, and
to make his own attempts at literary distinction in the French language.
Smaller German princes modeled their courts on that of Versailles, and
ruined themselves in palaces and gardens that were distant copies of
those of that famous suburb. This spirit lasted well down to 1789,
although the masterpieces of Lessing were already twenty years old, and
those of Goethe and Schiller had begun to appear.

But while France was great, prosperous, and growing, and a model to her
neighbors, she was deeply discontented. The condition of other countries
was less good than hers, but the minds of the people of those countries
had not risen above their condition. France had become conscious that
her government did not correspond to her degree of civilization. The
fact was emphasized in the national mind by the mediocrity of Louis XV.
as a sovereign and by the utter incompetence of his well-meaning
successor. In hands so feeble, the smallest excess of expenditure over
income was important as a symptom of weakness, and for many years the
deficit had in fact been increasing. The financial situation gave the
nation a ground of attack against its government; it was not the cause
of the Revolution, but its occasion. All the machinery of the state
needed to be inspected, repaired, or renewed. The people entered into
the task with good will, and the warmest interest. But they were
entirely without experience. They knew and believed that old forms were
to be respected as far as might be compatible with new conditions; they
thought that the improvements needed were so obvious that nothing but
fairness was required to recognize them. In their ignorance of the
working of popular assemblies they supposed them to be inspired with
wisdom and virtue beyond that of the individuals who compose them.

This is a mistake not likely to occur to any one who has experience of
public meetings; but among the twelve hundred deputies to the Estates
General, and among their constituents all over France, no one had much
experience. A hundred and forty Notables, in 1787 and 1788, had
deliberated on public questions; but their work had been done
principally in committee, and their conclusions were without binding
force on anybody, their functions being merely advisory. A good many
delegates had been members of provincial assemblies or provincial
estates; but these, in most of the provinces, had met but a few times,
and their powers had been very limited. Such assemblies could do some
good, and were carefully hedged from doing much harm. As training for
membership in a body which was to discuss all sorts of questions and
possess almost absolute power, experience among the Notables or in the
provincial assemblies and estates, although valuable, was insufficient,
and comparatively few of the members had even so much. Nor was foreign
example of avail. No great scholar had published in French a study of
the parliamentary history of England, nor were Frenchmen prepared to
profit by English experience. Absolute right, according to his own
ideas, was what every man expected to obtain.

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