The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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In any event, I came to the conclusion that if we should ever
discover the one we need it would not be through some fashionable
theory. The point is, if it exists, to discover it, and not to put it
to a vote. To do that would not only be pretentious it would be
useless; history and nature will do it for us; it is for us to adapt
ourselves to them, as it is certain they will accommodate themselves
to us. The social and political mold, into which a nation may enter
and remain, is not subject to its will, but determined by its
character and its past. It is essential that, even in its least
traits, it should be shaped on the living material to which it is
applied; otherwise it will burst and fall to pieces. Hence, if we
should succeed in finding ours, it will only be through a study of
ourselves, while the more we understand exactly what we are, the more
certainly shall we distinguish what best suits us. We ought,
therefore, to reverse the ordinary methods, and form some conception
of the nation before formulating its constitution. Doubtless the first
operation is much more tedious and difficult than the second. How much
time, how much study, how many observations rectified one by the
other, how many researches in the past and the present, over all the
domains of thought and of action, what manifold and age-long labors
before we can obtain an accurate and complete idea of a great people.
A people which has lived a people's age, and which still lives! But it
is the only way to avoid the unsound construction based on a
meaningless planning. I promised myself that, for my own part, if I
should some day undertake to form a political opinion, it would be
only after having studied France.

What is contemporary France? To answer this question we must know
how this France is formed, or, what is still better, to act as
spectator at its formation. At the end of the last century (in 1789),
like a molting insect, it underwent a metamorphosis. Its ancient
organization is dissolved; it tears away its most precious tissues and
falls into convulsions, which seem mortal. Then, after multiplied
throes and a painful lethargy, it re-establishes itself. But its
organization is no longer the same: by silent interior travail a new
being is substituted for the old. In 1808, its leading characteristics
are decreed and defined: departments, arondissements, cantons and
communes, no change have since taken place in its exterior divisions
and functions. Concordat, Code, Tribunals, University, Institute,
Prefects, Council of State, Taxes, Collectors, Cours des Comptes, a
uniform and centralized administration, its principal organs, are
still the same. Nobility, commoners, artisans, peasants, each class
has henceforth the position, the sentiments, the traditions which we
see at the present day (1875). Thus the new creature is at once stable
and complete; consequently its structure, its instincts and its
faculties mark in advance the circle within which its thought and its
action will be stimulated. Around it, other nations, some more
advanced, others less developed, all with greater caution, some with
better results, attempt similarly a transformation from a feudal to a
modern state; the process takes place everywhere and all but
simultaneously. But, under this new system as beneath the ancient, the
weak is always the prey of the strong. Woe to those (nations) whose
retarded evolution exposes them to the neighbor suddenly emancipated
from his chrysalis state, and is the first to go forth fully armed!
Woe likewise to him whose too violent and too abrupt evolution has
badly balanced his internal economy. Who, through the exaggeration of
his governing forces, through the deterioration of his deep-seated
organs, through the gradual impoverishment of his vital tissues is
condemned to commit inconsiderate acts, to debility, to impotency,
amidst sounder and better-balanced neighbors! In the organization,
which France effected for herself at the beginning of the (19th)
century, all the general lines of her contemporary history were
traced. Her political revolutions, social Utopias, division of
classes, role of the church, conduct of the nobility, of the middle
class, and of the people, the development, the direction, or deviation
of philosophy, of letters and of the arts. That is why, should we wish
to understand our present condition our attention always reverts to
the terrible and fruitful crisis by which the ancient regime produced
the Revolution, and the Revolution the new regime.

Ancient régime, Revolution, new régime, I am going to try to
describe these three conditions with exactitude. I have no other
object in view. A historian may be allowed the privilege of a
naturalist; I have regarded my subject the same as the metamorphosis
of an insect. Moreover, the event is so interesting in itself that it
is worth the trouble of being observed for its own sake, and no effort
is required to suppress one's ulterior motives. Freed from all
prejudice, curiosity becomes scientific and may be completely
concentrated on the secret forces, which guide the wonderful process.
These forces are the situation, the passions, the ideas, the wills of
each group of actors, and which can be defined and almost measured.
They are in full view; we are not reduced to conjectures about them,
to uncertain divination, to vague indications. By singular good
fortune we perceive the men themselves, their exterior and their
interior. The Frenchmen of the ancient régime are still within visual
range. All of us, in our youth, (around 1840-50), have encountered one
or more of the survivors of this vanished society. Many of their
dwellings, with the furniture, still remain intact. Their pictures and
engravings enable us to take part in their domestic life, see how they
dress, observe their attitudes and follow their movements. Through
their literature, philosophy, scientific pursuits, gazettes, and
correspondence, we can reproduce their feeling and thought, and even
enjoy their familiar conversation. The multitude of memoirs, issuing
during the past thirty years from public and private archives, lead us
from one drawing room to another, as if we bore with us so many
letters of introduction. The independent descriptions by foreign
travelers, in their journals and correspondence, correct and complete
the portraits, which this society has traced of itself. Everything
that it could state has been stated, except,

* what was commonplace and well-known to contemporaries,

* whatever seemed technical, tedious and vulgar,

* whatever related to the provinces, to the bourgeoisie, the
peasant, to the laboring man, to the government, and to the household.

It has been my aim to fill this void, and make France known to
others outside the small circle of the literary and the cultivated.
Owing to the kindness of M. Maury[1] and the precious indications of
M. Boutaric, I have been able to examine a mass of manuscript
documents. These include the correspondence of a large number of
intendants, (the Royal governor of a large district), the directors of
customs and tax offices, legal officers, and private persons of every
kind and of every degree during the thirty last years of the ancient
regime. Also included are the reports and registers of the various
departments of the royal household, the reports and registers of the
States General in 176 volumes, the dispatches of military officers in
1789 and 1790, letters, memoirs and detailed statistics preserved in
the one hundred boxes of the ecclesiastical committee, the
correspondence, in 94 bundles, of the department and municipal
authorities with the ministries from 1790 to 1799, the reports of the
Councilors of State on mission at the end of 1801, the reports of
prefects under the Consulate, the Empire, and the Restoration down to
1823. There is such a quantity of unknown and instructive documents
besides these that the history of the Revolution seems, indeed, to be
still unwritten. In any event, it is only such documents, which can
make all these people come alive. The lesser nobles, the curates, the
monks, the nuns of the provinces, the aldermen and bourgeoisie of the
towns, the attorneys and syndics of the country villages, the laborers
and artisans, the officers and the soldiers. These alone enable us to
contemplate and appreciate in detail the various conditions of their
existence, the interior of a parsonage, of a convent, of a town-
council, the wages of a workman, the produce of a farm, the taxes
levied on a peasant, the duties of a tax-collector, the expenditure of
a noble or prelate, the budget, retinue and ceremonial of a court.
Thanks to such resources, we are able to give precise figures, to know
hour by hour the occupations of a day and, better still, read off the
bill of fare of a grand dinner, and recompose all parts of a full-
dress costume. We have even, on the one hand, samples of the materials
of the dresses worn by Marie Antoinette, pinned on paper and
classified by dates. And on the other hand, we can tell what clothes
were worn by the peasant, describe the bread he ate, specify the flour
it was made of, and state the cost of a pound of it in sous and
deniers.[2] With such resources one becomes almost contemporary with
the men whose history one writes and, more than once, in the Archives,
I have, while tracing their old handwriting on the time-stained paper
before me, been tempted to speak aloud with them.

H. A. Taine, August 1875.

Notes:

[1]. Taine's friend who was the director of the French National
Archives. (SR.)

[2]. One sou equals 1/20th of a franc or 5 centimes. 12 diniers
equaled one sou. (SR.)

BOOK FIRST. THE STRUCTURE OF THE ANCIENT SOCIETY.

CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN OF PRIVILEGES.

In 1789 three classes of persons, the Clergy, the Nobles and the
King, occupied the most prominent position in the State with all the
advantages pertaining thereto namely, authority, property, honors, or,
at the very least, privileges, immunities, favors, pensions,
preferences, and the like. If they occupied this position for so long
a time, it is because for so long a time they had deserved it. They
had, in short, through an immense and secular effort, constructed by
degrees the three principal foundations of modern society.

I. Services and Recompenses of the Clergy.

Of these three layered foundations the most ancient and deepest was
the work of the clergy. For twelve hundred years and more they had
labored upon it, both as architects and workmen, at first alone and
then almost alone. - In the beginning, during the first four
centuries, they constituted religion and the church. Let us ponder
over these two words; in order to weigh them well. One the one hand,
in a society founded on conquest, hard and cold like a machine of
brass, forced by its very structure to destroy among its subjects all
courage to act and all desire to live, they had proclaimed the "glad
tidings," held forth the "kingdom of God," preached loving resignation
in the hands of a Heavenly Father, inspired patience, gentleness,
humility, self-abnegation, and charity, and opened the only issues by
which Man stifling in the Roman 'ergastulum' could again breathe and
see daylight: and here we have religion. On the other hand, in a State
gradually undergoing depopulation, crumbling away, and fatally
becoming a prey, they had formed a living society governed by laws and
discipline, rallying around a common aim and a common doctrine,
sustained by the devotion of chiefs and by the obedience of believes,
alone capable of subsisting beneath the flood of barbarians which the
empire in ruin suffered to pour in through its breaches: and here we
have the church. - It continues to build on these two first
foundations, and after the invasion, for over five hundred years, it
saves what it can still save of human culture. It marches in the van
of the barbarians or converts them directly after their entrance,
which is a wonderful advantage. Let us judge of it by a single fact:
In Great Britain, which like Gaul had become Latin, but whereof the
conquerors remain pagan during a century and a half, arts, industries,
society, language, all were destroyed; nothing remained of an entire
people, either massacred or fugitive, but slaves. We have still to
divine their traces; reduced to the condition of beasts of burden,
they disappear from history. Such might have been the fate of Europe
if the clergy had not promptly tamed the fierce brutes to which it
belonged.

Before the bishop in his gilded cope or before the monk, the
converted German "emaciated, clad in skins," wan, "dirtier and more
spotted than a chameleon,"[1] stood fear-stricken as before a
sorcerer. In his calm moments, after the chase or inebriety, the vague
divination of a mysterious and grandiose future, the dim conception of
an unknown tribunal, the rudiment of conscience which he already had
in his forests beyond the Rhine, arouses in him through sudden alarms
half-formed, menacing visions. At the moment of violating a sanctuary
he asks himself whether he may not fall on its threshold with vertigo
and a broken neck.[2] Convicted through his own perplexity, he stops
and spares the farm, the village, and the town, which live under the
priest's protection. If the animal impulse of rage, or of primitive
lusts, leads him to murder or to rob, later, after satiety, in times
of sickness or of misfortune, taking the advice of his concubine or of
his wife, he repents and makes restitution twofold, tenfold, a
hundredfold, unstinted in his gifts and immunities.[3] Thus, over the
whole territory the clergy maintain and enlarge their asylums for the
oppressed and the vanquished. - On the other hand, among the warrior
chiefs with long hair, by the side of kings clad in furs, the mitered
bishop and abbot, with shaven brows, take seats in the assemblies;
they alone know how to use the pen and how to discuss. Secretaries,
councilors, theologians, they participate in all edicts; they have
their hand in the government; they strive through its agency to bring
a little order out of immense disorder; to render the law more
rational and more humane, to re-establish or preserve piety,
instruction, justice, property, and especially marriage. To their
ascendancy is certainly due the police system, such as it was,
intermittent and incomplete, which prevented Europe from falling into
a Mongolian anarchy. If, down to the end of the twelfth century, the
clergy bears heavily on the princes, it is especially to repress in
them and beneath them the brutal appetites, the rebellions of flesh
and blood, the outbursts and relapses of irresistible ferocity which
are undermining the social fabric. - Meanwhile, in its churches and
in its convents, it preserves the ancient acquisitions of humanity,
the Latin tongue, Christian literature and theology, a portion of
pagan literature and science, architecture, sculpture, painting, the
arts and industries which aid worship. It also preserved the more
valuable industries, which provide man with bread, clothing, and
shelter, and especially the greatest of all human acquisitions, and
the most opposed to the vagabond humor of the idle and plundering
barbarian, the habit and taste for labor. In the districts depopulated
through Roman exactions, through the revolt of the Bagaudes, through
the invasion of the Germans, and the raids of brigands, the
Benedictine monk built his cabin of boughs amid briers and
brambles.[4] Large areas around him, formerly cultivated, are nothing
but abandoned thickets. Along with his associates he clears the ground
and erects buildings; he domesticates half-tamed animals, he
establishes a farm, a mill, a forge, an oven, and shops for shoes and
clothing. According to the rules of his order, he reads daily for two
hours. He gives seven hours to manual labor, and he neither eats nor
drinks more than is absolutely essential. Through his intelligent,
voluntary labor, conscientiously performed and with a view to the
future, he produces more than the layman does. Through his temperate,
judicious, economical system he consumes less than the layman does.
Hence it is that where the layman had failed he sustains himself and
even prospers.[5] He welcomes the unfortunate, feeds them, sets them
to work, and unites them in matrimony and beggars, vagabonds, and
fugitive peasants gather around the sanctuary. Their camp gradually
becomes a village and next a small town; man plows as soon as he can
be sure of his crops, and becomes the father of a family as soon as he
considers himself able to provide for his offspring. In this way new
centers of agriculture and industry are formed, which likewise become
new centers of population.[6]

To food for the body add food for the soul, not less essential.
For, along with nourishment, it was still necessary to furnish Man
with inducements to live, or, at the very least, with the resignation
that makes life endurable, and also with the poetic daydreams taking
the place of massing happiness.[7] Down to the middle of the
thirteenth century the clergy stands almost alone in furnishing this.
Through its innumerable legends of saints, through its cathedrals and
their construction, through its statues and their expression, through
its services and their still transparent meaning, it rendered visible
"the kingdom of God." It finally sets up an ideal world at the end of
the present one, like a magnificent golden pavilion at the end of a
miry morass.[8] The saddened heart, athirst for tenderness and
serenity, takes refuge in this divine and gentle world. Persecutors
there, about to strike, are arrested by an invisible hand; wild beasts
become docile; the stags of the forest come of their own accord every
morning to draw the chariots of the saints; the country blooms for
them like a new Paradise; they die only when it pleases them.
Meanwhile they comfort mankind; goodness, piety, forgiveness flows
from their lips with ineffable sweetness; with eyes upturned to
heaven, they see God, and without effort, as in a dream, they ascend
into the light and seat themselves at His right hand. How divine the
legend, how inestimable in value, when, under the universal reign of
brute force, to endure this life it was necessary to imagine another,
and to render the second as visible to the spiritual eye as the first
was to the physical eye. The clergy thus nourished men for more than
twelve centuries, and in the grandeur of its recompense we can
estimate the depth of their gratitude. Its popes, for two hundred
years, were the dictators of Europe. It organized crusades, dethroned
monarchs, and distributed kingdoms. Its bishops and abbots became
here, sovereign princes, and there, veritable founders of dynasties.
It held in its grasp a third of the territory, one-half of the
revenue, and two-thirds of the capital of Europe. Let us not believe
that Man counterfeits gratitude, or that he gives without a valid
motive; he is too selfish and too envious for that. Whatever may be
the institution, ecclesiastic or secular, whatever may be the clergy,
Buddhist or Christian, the contemporaries who observe it for forty
generations are not bad judges. They surrender to it their will and
their possessions, just in proportion to its services, and the excess
of their devotion may measure the immensity of its benefaction.

II. Services and Recompenses of the Nobles.

Up to this point no aid is found against the power of the sword and
the battle-ax except in persuasion and in patience. Those States
which, imitating the old empire, attempted to rise up into compact
organizations, and to interpose a barrier against constant invasion,
obtained no hold on the shifting soil; after Charlemagne everything
melts away. There are no more soldiers after the battle of Fontanet;
during half a century bands of four or five hundred outlaws sweep over
the country, killing, burning, and devastating with impunity. But, by
way of compensation, the dissolution of the State raises up at this
very time a military generation. Each petty chieftain has planted his
feet firmly on the domain he occupies, or which he withholds; he no
longer keeps it in trust, or for use, but as property, and an
inheritance. It is his own manor, his own village, his own earldom; it
no longer belongs to the king; he contends for it in his own right.
The benefactor, the conservator at this time is the man capable of
fighting, of defending others, and such really is the character of the
newly established class. The noble, in the language of the day, is the
man of war, the soldier (miles), and it is he who lays the second
foundation of modern society.

In the tenth century his extraction is of little consequence. He is
oftentimes a Carlovingian count, a beneficiary of the king, the sturdy
proprietor of one of the last of the Frank estates. In one place he is
a martial bishop or a valiant abbot in another a converted pagan, a
retired bandit, a prosperous adventurer, a rude huntsman, who long
supported himself by the chase and on wild fruits.[9] The ancestors
of Robert the Strong are unknown, and later the story runs that the
Capets are descended from a Parisian butcher. In any event the noble
of that epoch is the brave, the powerful man, expert in the use of
arms, who, at the head of a troop, instead of flying or paying ransom,
offers his breast, stands firm, and protects a patch of the soil with
his sword. To perform this service he has no need of ancestors; all
that he requires is courage, for he is himself an ancestor; security
for the present, which he insures, is too acceptable to permit any
quibbling about his title.-Finally, after so many centuries, we find
each district possessing its armed men, a settled body of troops
capable of resisting nomadic invasion; the community is no longer a
prey to strangers. At the end of a century this Europe, which had been
sacked by the Vikings, is to throw 200,000 armed men into Asia.
Henceforth, both north and south, in the face of Moslems and of
pagans, instead of being conquered it is to conquer. For the second
time an ideal figure becomes apparent after that of the saint,[10]
the hero; and the newborn sentiment, as effective as the old one, thus
groups men together into a stable society. -This consists of a
resident corps of men-at-arms, in which, from father to son, one is
always a soldier. Each individual is born into it with his hereditary
rank, his local post, his pay in landed property, with the certainty
of never being abandoned by his chieftain, and with the obligation of
giving his life for his chieftain in time of need. In this epoch of
perpetual warfare only one set-up is valid, that of a body of men
confronting the enemy, and such is the feudal system; we can judge by
this trait alone of the perils which it wards off, and of the service
which it enjoins. "In those days," says the Spanish general chronicle,
"kings, counts, nobles, and knights, in order to be ready at all
hours, kept their horses in the rooms in which they slept with their
wives." The viscount in his tower defending the entrance to a valley
or the passage of a ford, the marquis thrown as a forlorn hope on the
burning frontier, sleeps with his hand on his weapon, like an American
lieutenant among the Sioux behind a western stockade. His dwelling is
simply a camp and a refuge. Straw and heaps of leaves cover the
pavement of the great hall, here he rests with his troopers, taking
off a spur if he has a chance to sleep. The loopholes in the wall
scarcely allow daylight to enter; the main thing is not to be shot
with arrows. Every taste, every sentiment is subordinated to military
service; there are certain places on the European frontier where a
child of fourteen is required to march, and where the widow up to
sixty is required to remarry. Men to fill up the ranks, men to mount
guard, is the call, which at this moment issues from all institutions
like the summons of a brazen horn. - Thanks to these braves, the
peasant(villanus) enjoys protection. He is no longer to be
slaughtered, no longer to be led captive with his family, in herds,
with his neck in the yoke. He ventures to plow and to sow, and to
reply upon his crops; in case of danger he knows that he can find an
asylum for himself, and for his grain and cattle, in the circle of
palisades at the base of the fortress. By degrees necessity
establishes a tacit contract between the military chieftain of the
donjon and the early settlers of the open country, and this becomes a
recognized custom. They work for him, cultivate his ground, do his
carting, pay him quittances, so much for house, so much per head for
cattle, so much to inherit or to sell; he is compelled to support his
troop. But when these rights are discharged he errs if, through pride
or greed, he takes more than his due. - As to the vagabonds, the
wretched, who, in the universal disorder and devastation, seek refuge
under his guardianship, their condition is harder. The soil belongs to
the lord because without him it would be uninhabitable. If he assigns
them a plot of ground, if he permits them merely to encamp on it, if
he sets them to work or furnishes them with seeds it is on conditions,
which he prescribes. They are to become his serfs, subject to the laws
on mainmorte.[11] Wherever they may go he is to have the right of
fetching them back. From father to son they are his born domestics,
applicable to any pursuit he pleases, taxable and workable at his
discretion. They are not allowed to transmit anything to a child
unless the latter, "living from their pot," can, after their death,
continue their service. "Not to be killed," says Stendhal, "and to
have a good sheepskin coat in winter, was, for many people in the
tenth century, the height of felicity"; let us add, for a woman, that
of not being violated by a whole band. When we clearly represent to
ourselves the condition of humanity in those days, we can comprehend
how men readily accepted the most obnoxious of feudal rights, even
that of the droit du seigneur. The risks to which they were daily
exposed were even worse.[12] The proof of it is that the people
flocked to the feudal structure as soon as it was completed. In
Normandy, for instance, when Rollo had divided off the lands with a
line, and hung the robbers, the inhabitants of the neighboring
provinces rushed in to establish themselves. The slightest security
sufficed to repopulate a country.