The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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

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[68] Mathieu Dumas, "Mémoires," I.426. - Sir Samuel Romilly,
"Mémoires," I. 99.-- "Confidence increased even to extravagance,"
(Mme. de Genlis). - On the 29th June, 1789, Necker said at the
council of the king at Marly, "What is more frivolous than the fears
now entertained concerning the organization of the assembly of the
States-General? No law can be passed without obtaining the king's
assent" (De Barentin, "Mémoires," p. 187). - Address of the
National Assembly to its constituents, October 2, 1789. "A great
revolution of which the idea should have appeared chimerical a few
months since has been effected amongst us."

CHAPTER III. THE MIDDLE CLASS.

I. THE PAST.

The former spirit of the Third-Estate. - Public matters concern
the king only. - Limits of the Jansenist and parliamentarian
opposition.

The new philosophy, confined to a select circle, had long served
as a mere luxury for refined society. Merchants, manufacturers,
shopkeepers, lawyers, attorneys, physicians, actors, professors,
curates, every description of functionary, employee and clerk, the
entire middle class, had been absorbed with its own cares. The
horizon of each was limited, being that of the profession or
occupation which each exercised, that of the corporation in which each
one was comprised, of the town in which each one was born, and, at the
utmost, that of the province which each one inhabited[1]. A dearth of
ideas coupled with conscious diffidence restrained the bourgeois
within his hereditary barriers. His eyes seldom chanced to wander
outside of them into the forbidden and dangerous territory of state
affairs; hardly was a furtive and rare glance bestowed on any of the
public acts, on the matters which "belonged to the king." There was no
critical irritability then, except with the bar, the compulsory
satellite of the Parliament, and borne along in its orbit. In 1718,
after a session of the royal court (lit de justice), the lawyers of
Paris being on a strike the Regent exclaims angrily and with
astonishment, "What! those fellows meddling too!"[2] It must be
stated furthermore that many kept themselves in the background. "My
father and myself," afterwards writes the advocate Barbier, "took no
part in the uproars, among those caustic and turbulent spirits." and
he adds this significant article of faith: "I believe that one has to
fulfill his duties honorably, without concerning oneself with state
affairs, in which one has no mission and exercises no power." During
the first half of the eighteenth century I am able to discover but one
center of opposition in the Third-Estate , the Parliament; and around
it, feeding the flame, the ancient Gallican or Jansenist spirit. "The
good city of Paris," writes Barbier in 1733, "is Jansenist from top to
bottom," and not alone the magistrates, the lawyers, the professors,
the best among the bourgeoisie, "but again the mass of the Parisians,
men, women and children, all upholding that doctrine, without
comprehending it, or understanding any of its distinctions and
interpretations, out of hatred to Rome and the Jesuits. Women, the
silliest, and even chambermaids, would be hacked to pieces for it. .
. " This party is increased by the honest folks of the kingdom who
detest persecutions and injustice. Accordingly, when the various
chambers of magistrates, in conjunction with the lawyers, tender their
resignations and file out of the palace "amidst a countless multitude,
the crowd exclaims: Behold the true Romans, the fathers of the
country! and as the two counselors Pucelle and Menguy pass along they
fling them crowns." The quarrel between the Parliament and the Court,
constantly revived, is one of the sparks which provokes the grand
final explosion, while the Jansenist embers, smoldering in the ashes,
are to be of use in 1791 when the ecclesiastical edifice comes to be
attacked. But, within this old chimney-corner only warm embers are
now found, firebrands covered up, sometimes scattering sparks and
flames, but in themselves and by themselves, not incendiary; the flame
is kept within bounds by its nature, and its supplies limit its heat.
The Jansenist is too good a Christian not to respect powers
inaugurated from above. The parliamentarian, conservative through his
profession, would be horrified at overthrowing the established order
of things. Both combat for tradition and against innovation; hence,
after having defended the past against arbitrary power they are to
defend it against revolutionary violence, and to fall, the one into
impotency and the other into oblivion.

II. CHANGE IN THE CONDITION OF THE BOURGEOIS.

Change in the condition of the bourgeois. - He becomes wealthy.
- He makes loans to the State. - The danger of his creditorship. -
He interests himself in public matters.

The uprising is, however, late to catch on among the middle
class, and, before it can take hold, the resistant material must
gradually be made inflammable. -- In the eighteenth century a
great change takes place in the condition of the Third-Estate . The
bourgeois has worked, manufactured, traded, earned and saved money,
and has daily become richer and richer.[3] This great expansion of
enterprises, of trade, of speculation and of fortunes dates from
Law;[4] arrested by war it reappears with more vigor and more
animation at each interval of peace after the treaty of Aix-la-
Chapelle in 1748, and that of Paris in 1763, and especially after the
beginning of the reign of Louis XVI. The exports of France which
amounted to

106 millions in 1720

124 millions in 1735

192 millions in 1748

257 millions in 1755

309 millions in 1776

354 millions in 1788.

In 1786 Saint Domingo alone ships back to France for 131
millions of its products, and in return receives 44 millions in
merchandise. As a result of these exchanges we see, at Nantes, and at
Bordeaux, the creation of colossal commercial houses. "I consider
Bordeaux, says Arthur Young, as richer and doing more business than
any city in England except London; . . . of late years the progress
of maritime commerce has been more rapid in France than even in
England."[5] According to an administrator of the day, if the taxes on
the consumption of products daily increase the revenue, this is
because the industry since 1774 has developed a number of new
products[6]. And this progress is regular and constant. "We may
calculate," says Necker in 1781, "on an increase of two millions a
year on all the duties on consumption." -- In this great exertion
of innovation, labor and engineering, Paris, constantly growing, is
the central workshop. It enjoys, to a much greater extent than today,
the monopoly of all works of intelligence and taste, books, pictures,
engravings, statues, jewelry, toilet details, carriages, furniture,
articles of fashion and rarity, whatever affords pleasure and
ornamentation for an elegant worldly society; all Europe is supplied
by it. In 1774 its trade in books is estimated at 45 millions, and
that of London at only one-quarter of that sum[7]. Upon the profits
many immense and even more numerous moderate fortunes were built up,
and these now became available for investment. -- In fact, we see
the noblest hands stretching out to receive them, princes of the
blood, provincial assemblies, assemblies of the clergy, and, at the
head of all, the king, who, the most needy, borrows at ten percent and
is always in search of additional lenders. Already under Fleury, the
debt has augmented to 18 millions in interests, and during the Seven
years' War, to 34 millions. Under Louis XVI., M. Necker borrows a
capital of 530 millions; M. Joly de Fleury, 300 millions; M. de
Calonne, 800 millions; in all 1630 millions over a period of ten
years. The interest of the public debt, only 45 millions in 1755,
reaches 106 millions in 1776 and amounts to 206 millions in 1789[8].
What creditors which these few figures tell us about ! As the Third-
Estate , it must be noted, is the sole class making and saving money,
nearly all these creditors belong it. Thousands of others must be
added to these. In the first place, the financiers who make advances
to the government, advances that are indispensable, because, from time
immemorial, it has eaten its corn on the blade, so the present year is
always gnawing into the product of coming years; there are 80 millions
of advances in 1759, and 170 millions in 1783. In the second place
there are so many suppliers, large and small, who, on all parts of the
territory, keep accounts with the government for their supplies and
for public works, a veritable army and increasing daily, since the
government, impelled by centralization, takes sole responsibility for
all ventures, and, requested by public opinion, it increases the
number of undertakings useful to the public. Under Louis XV. the
State builds six thousand leagues of roads, and under Louis XVI. in
1788, to guard against famine, it purchases grain to the amount of
forty millions.

Through this increase of activity and its demands for capital
the State becomes the universal debtor; henceforth public affairs are
no longer exclusively the king's business. His creditors become
uneasy at his expenditures; for it is their money he wastes, and, if
he proves a bad administrator, they will be ruined. They want to know
something of his budget, to examine his books: a lender always has the
right to look after his securities. We accordingly see the bourgeois
raising his head and beginning to pay close attention to the great
machine whose performances, hitherto concealed from vulgar eyes, have,
up to the present time, been kept a state secret. He becomes a
politician, and, at the same time, discontented. For it cannot be
denied that these matters, in which he is interested, are badly
conducted. Any young man of good family managing affairs in the same
way would be checked. The expenses of the administration of the State
are always in excess of the revenue[9]. According to official
admissions[10] the annual deficit amounted to 70 in 1770, and 80
millions in 1783; when one has attempted to reduce this it has been
through bankruptcies; one to the tune of two milliards at the end of
the reign of Louis XIV, and another almost equal to it in the time of
Law, and another on from a third to a half of all the interests in the
time of Terray, without mentioning suppressions in detail, reductions,
indefinite delays in payment, and other violent and fraudulent means
which a powerful debtor employs with impunity against a feeble
creditor. "Fifty-six violations of public faith have occurred from
Henry IV down to the ministry of M. de Loménie inclusive,"[11] while a
last bankruptcy, more frightful than the others, loom up on the
horizon. Several persons, Bezenval and Linguet for instance,
earnestly recommend it as a necessary and salutary amputation. Not
only are there precedents for this, and in this respect the government
will do no more than follow its own example, but such is its daily
practice, since it lives only from day to day, by dint of expedients
and delays, digging one hole to stop up another, and escaping failure
only through the forced patience which it imposes on its creditors.
With it, says a contemporary, people were never sure of anything,
being always obliged to wait[12]. "Were their capital invested in its
loans, they could never rely on a fixed date for the payment of
interest. Did they build ships, repair highways, or the soldiers
clothed, they had no guarantees for their advances, no certificates of
repayment, being reduced to calculate the chances involved in a
ministerial contract as they would the risks of a bold speculation."
It pays if it can and only when it can, even the members of the
household, the purveyors of the table and the personal attendants of
the king. In 1753 the domestics of Louis XV had received nothing for
three years. We have seen how his grooms went out to beg during the
night in the streets of Versailles; how his purveyors "hid
themselves;" how , under Louis XVI in 1778, there were 792,620 francs
due to the wine-merchant, and 3,467,980 francs to the purveyor of fish
and meat[13]. In 1788, so great is the distress, the Minister de
Loménie appropriates and expends the funds of a private subscription
raised for a hospital, and, at the time of his resignation, the
treasury is empty, save 450,000 francs, half of which he puts in his
pocket. What an administration! -- In the presence of this debtor,
evidently becoming insolvent, all people, far and near, interested in
his business, consult together with alarm, and debtors are
innumerable, consisting of bankers, merchants, manufacturers,
employees, lenders of every kind and degree, and, in the front rank,
the capitalists, who have put all their means for life into his hands,
and who are to beg should he not pay them annually the 44 millions he
owes them; the industrialists and traders who have entrusted their
commercial integrity to him and who would shrink with horror from
failure as its issue; and after these come their creditors, their
clerks, their relations, in short, the largest portion of the laboring
and peaceable class which, thus far, had obeyed without a murmur and
never dreamed of bringing the established order of things under its
control. Henceforth this class will exercise control attentively,
distrustfully and angrily. Woe to those who are at fault, for they
well know that the ruin of the State is their ruin.

III. SOCIAL PROMOTION.

He rises on the social ladder. - The noble draws near to him.
- He becomes cultivated. - He enters into society. - He regards
himself as the equal of the noble. - Privileges an annoyance.

Meanwhile this class has climbed up the social ladder, and,
through its élite, rejoined those in the highest position. Formerly
between Dorante and M. Jourdain, between Don Juan and M. Dimanche,[14]
between M. Sotenville himself and Georges Dandin, the distance was
vast; everything was different - dress, house, habits, characters,
points of honor, ideas and language. On the one hand the nobles are
drawn nearer to the Third-Estate and, on the other, the Third-Estate
is drawn nearer to the nobles, actual equality having preceded
equality as a right. -- On the approach of the year 1789 it was
difficult to distinguish one from the other in the street. The sword
is no longer worn by gentlemen in the city; they have abandoned
embroideries and laces, and walk about in plain frock-coats, or drive
themselves in their cabriolets[15]. "The simplicity of English
customs," and the customs of the Third-Estate seem to them better
adapted to ordinary life. Their prominence proves irksome to them and
they grow weary of being always on parade. Henceforth they accept
familiarity that they may enjoy freedom of action, and are content "to
mingle with their fellow-citizens without obstacle or ostentation. -
- "It is certainly a grave sign, and the old feudal spirits have
reason to tremble. The Marquis de Mirabeau, on learning that his son
wishes to act as his own lawyer, consoles himself by seeing others, of
still higher rank, do much worse[16].

"As it was difficult to accept the idea that the grandson of my
father, whom we just had seen pass by on the promenade, everybody,
young and old, raising their hats to him from afar, would soon be seen
at the bar of a lower tribunal, there to contest minor legal matters
with pettifoggers; but I said to myself, however, that Louis XIV would
be still more astonished had he seen the wife of his grand-successor
dressed in a peasant's frock and apron, with no attendants, not a page
or any one else, running about the palace and the terraces, requesting
the first scamp in a frock-coat she encountered to give her his hand,
which he simply does, all the way down to the foot of the steps."

But the leveling of manners and appearances of life reflected,
indeed, only an equalization of minds and tempers. The antique
scenery being torn away indicates the disappearance of the sentiments
to which it belonged. It indicated gravity, dignity, custom of self-
control and of exposed, in authority and command. It was the rigid
and sumptuous parade of a social corps of staff-officers. At this
time the parade is discontinued because the corps has been dissolved.
If the nobles dress like the bourgeoisie it is owing to their having
become bourgeois, that is to say, idlers retired from business, with
nothing to do but to talk and amuse themselves. -- Undoubtedly they
amuse themselves and converse like people of refinement; but it is not
very difficult to equal them in this respect. Now that the Third-
Estate has acquired its wealth a good many commoners have become
people of society. The successors of Samuel Bernard are no longer so
many Turcarets, but Paris-Duverneys, Saint-Jameses, Labordes, refined
men, people of culture and of feeling, possessing tact, literary and
philosophical attainments, benevolent, giving parties and knowing how
to entertain[17]. With them, slightly different, we find the same
company as with a grand lord, the same ideas and the same tone. Their
sons, messieurs de Villemer, de Francueil, d'Epinay, throw money out
of the window with as much elegance as the young dukes with whom they
sup. A parvenu with money and intellect soon learns the ropes, and
his son, if not himself, is initiated: a few years' exercises in an
academy, a dancing-master, and one of the four thousand public offices
which confer nobility, supply him with the deficient appearances.
Now, in these times, as soon as one knows how to conform to the laws
of good-breeding, how to bow and how to converse, one possesses a
patent for admission everywhere. An Englishman[18] remarks that one
of the first expressions employed in praise of a man is, "he has a
very graceful address." The Maréchale de Luxembourg, so high-spirited,
always selects Laharpe as her cavalier, because "he offers his arm so
well." -- The commoner not only enters the drawing-room, if he is
fitted for it, but he stands foremost in it if he has any talent. The
first place in conversation, and even in public consideration, is for
Voltaire, the son of a notary, for Diderot, the son of a cutler, for
Rousseau, the son of a watchmaker, for d'Alembert, a foundling brought
up by a glazier; and, after the great men have disappeared, and no
writers of the second grade are left, the leading duchesses are still
content to have the seats at their tables occupied by Champfort,
another foundling, Beaumarchais, the son of another watchmaker,
Laharpe, supported and raised on charity, Marmontel, the son of a
village tailor, and may others of less note, in short, every parvenu
possessing wit.

The nobility, to perfect their own accomplishments, borrow their
pens and aspire to their successes. "We have recovered from those old
Gothic and absurd prejudices against literary culture," says the
Prince de Hénin;[19] "as for myself I would compose a comedy to-morrow
if I had the talent, and if I happened to be made a little angry, I
would perform in it." And, in fact, "the Vicomte de Ségur, son of the
minister of war, plays the part of the lover in 'Nina' on Mlle. de
Guimard's stage with the actors of the Italian Comedy."[20] One of
Mme. de Genlis's personages, returning to Paris after five years'
absence, says that "he left men wholly devoted to play, hunting, and
their small houses, and he finds them all turned authors."[21] They
hawk about their tragedies, comedies, novels, eclogues, dissertations
and treatises of all kinds from one drawing room to another. They
strive to get their pieces played; they previously submit them to the
judgment of actors; they solicit a word of praise from the Mercure;
they read fables at the sittings of the Academy. They become involved
in the bickering, in the vainglory, in the pettiness of literary life,
and still worse, of the life of the stage, inasmuch as they are
themselves performers and play in company with real actors in hundreds
of private theaters. Add to this, if you please, other petty amateur
talents such as sketching in water-colors, writing songs, and playing
the flute. -- After this amalgamation of classes and this transfer
of parts what remains of the superiority of the nobles? By what
special merit, through what recognized capacity are they to secure
respect of a member of the Third-Estate? Outside of fashionable
elegance and a few points of breeding, in what respect they differ
from him? What superior education, what familiarity with affairs, what
experience with government, what political instruction, what local
ascendancy, what moral authority can be alleged to sanction their
pretensions to the highest places? -- In the way of practice, the
Third-Estate already does the work, providing the qualified men, the
intendants, the ministerial head-clerks, the lay and ecclesiastical
administrators, the competent laborers of all kinds and degrees. Call
to mind the Marquis of whom we have just spoken, a former captain in
the French guards, a man of feeling and of loyalty, admitting at the
elections of 1789 that "the knowledge essential to a deputy would most
generally be found in the Third-Estate , the mind there being
accustomed to business." -- In the way of theory: the commoner is
as well-informed as the noble, and he thinks he is still better
informed, because, having read the same books and arrived at the same
principles, he does not, like him, stop half-way on the road to their
consequences, but plunges headlong to the very depths of the doctrine,
convinced that his logic is clairvoyance and that he is more
enlightened because he is the least prejudiced. -- Consider the
young men who, about twenty years of age in 1780, born in industrious
families, accustomed to effort and able to work twelve hours a day, a
Barnave, a Carnot, a Roederer, a Merlin de Thionville, a Robespierre,
an energetic stock, feeling their strength, criticizing their rivals,
aware of their weakness, comparing their own application and education
to their levity and incompetence, and, at the moment when youthful
ambition stirs within them, seeing themselves excluded in advance from
any superior position, consigned for life to subaltern employment, and
subjected in every career to the precedence of superiors who they
hardly recognize as their equals. At the artillery examinations where
Chérin, the genealogist, refuses commoners, and where the Abbé Bosen,
a mathematician, rejects the ignorant, it is discovered that capacity
is wanting among the noble pupils and nobility among the capable
pupils,[22] the two qualities of gentility and intelligence seeming to
exclude each other, as there are but four or five out of a hundred
pupils who combine the two conditions. Now, as society at this time
is mixed, such tests are frequent and easy. Whether lawyer,
physician, or man of letters, a member of the Third-Estate with whom a
duke converses familiarly, who sits in a diligence alongside of a
count-colonel of hussars,[23] can appreciate his companion or his
interlocutor, weigh his ideas, test his merit and esteem him at his
correct value, and I am sure that he does not overrate him. --
Now that the nobles have lost their special capacities and the Third-
Estate have acquired general competence, and as they are on the same
level in education and competence, the inequality which separates them
has become offensive because it has become useless. Nobility being
instituted by custom is no longer sanctified by conscience; the Third-
Estate being justly excited against privileges that have no
justification, whether in the capacity of the noble or in the
incapacity of the bourgeois.

IV. ROUSSEAU'S PHILOSOPHY SPREADS AND TAKES HOLD.

Philosophy in the minds thus fitted for it. - That of Rousseau
prominent. - This philosophy in harmony with new necessities. - It
is adopted by the Third-Estate .

Distrust and anger against a government putting all fortunes
at risk, rancor and hostility against a nobility barring all roads to
popular advancement, are, then, the sentiments developing themselves
among the middle class solely due to their advance in wealth and
culture. -- We can imagine the effect of the new philosophy upon
people with such attitudes. At first, confined to the aristocratic
reservoir, the doctrine filters out through numerous cracks like so
many trickling streams, to scatter imperceptibly among the lower
class. Already, in 1727, Barbier, a bourgeois of the old school and
having little knowledge of philosophy and philosophers except the
name, writes in his journal:

"A hundred poor families are deprived of the annuities on which
they supported themselves, acquired with bonds for which the capital
is obliterated; 56,000 livres are given in pensions to people who have
held the best offices, where they have amassed considerable property,
always at the expense of the people, and all this merely that they may
rest themselves and do nothing."[24]