The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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

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"He is a ravenous wolf," says Renauldon, "let loose on the estate.
He draws upon it to the last sou, he crushes the subjects, reduces
them to beggary, forces the cultivators to desert. The owner, thus
rendered odious, finds himself obliged to tolerate his exactions to
able to profit by them."

Imagine, if you can, the evil which a country usurer exercises,
armed against them with such burdensome rights; it is the feudal
seigniory in the hands of Harpagon, or rather of old Grandet. When,
indeed, a tax becomes insupportable we see, by the local complaints,
that it is nearly always a fermier who enforces it.[46] It is one of
these, acting for a body of canons, who claims Jeanne Mermet's
paternal inheritance on the pretense that she had passed her wedding
night at her husband's house. One can barely find similar exactions in
the Ireland of 1830, on those estates where, the farmer-general
renting to sub-farmers and the latter to others still below them. The
poor tenant at the foot of the ladder himself bore the full weight of
it, so much the more crushed because his creditor, crushed himself
measured the requirements he exacted by those he had to submit to.

Suppose that, seeing this abuse of his name, the seignior is
desirous of withdrawing the administration of his domains from these
mercenary hands. In most cases he is unable to do it: he too deeply in
debt, having appropriated to his creditors a certain portion of his
land, a certain branch of his income. For centuries, the nobles are
involved through their luxury, their prodigality, their carelessness,
and through that false sense of honor, which consists in looking upon
attention to accounts as the occupation of an accountant. They take
pride in their negligence, regarding it, as they say, living
nobly.[47] "Monsieur the archbishop," said Louis XVI. to M. de Dillon,
." they say that you are in debt, and even largely." "Sire," replied
the prelate, with the irony of a grand seignior, "I will ask my
intendant and inform Your Majesty." Marshal de Soubise has five
hundred thousand livres income, which is not sufficient for him. We
know the debts of the Cardinal de Rohan and of the Comte Artois;[48]
their millions of income were vainly thrown into this gulf. The Prince
de Guémenée happens to become bankrupt on thirty-five millions. The
Duke of Orleans, the richest proprietor in the kingdom, owed at his
death seventy-four millions. When became necessary to pay the
creditors of the emigrants out of the proceeds of their possessions,
it was proved that most of the large fortunes were eaten up with
mortgages.[49] Readers of the various memoirs know that, for two
hundred years, the deficiencies had to be supplied by marriages for
money and by the favors of the king. - This explains why, following
the king's example, the nobles converted everything into money, and
especially the places at their disposition, and, in relaxing authority
for profit, why they alienated the last fragment of government
remaining in their hands. Everywhere they thus laid aside the
venerated character of a chief to put on the odious character of a
trafficker. "Not only," says a contemporary,[50] "do they give no pay
to their officers of justice, or take them at a discount, but, what is
worse, the greater portion of them make a sale of these offices." In
spite of the edict of 1693, the judges thus appointed take no steps to
be admitted into the royal courts and they take no oaths. "What is the
result? Justice, too often administered by knaves, degenerates into
brigandage or into a frightful impunity." - Ordinarily the seignior
who sells the office on a financial basis, deducts, in addition, the
hundredth, the fiftieth, the tenth of the price, when it passes into
other hands; and at other times he disposes of the survivorship. He
creates these offices and survivorships purposely to sell them. "All
the seigniorial courts, say the registers, are infested with a crowd
of officials of every description, seigniorial sergeants, mounted and
unmounted officers, keepers of the provostship of the funds, guards of
the constabulary. It is by no means rare to find as many as ten in an
arrondissement which could hardly maintain two if they confined
themselves within the limits of their duties." Also "they are at the
same time judges, attorneys, fiscal-attorneys, registrars, notaries,"
each in a different place, each practicing in several seigniories
under various titles, all perambulating, all in league like thieves at
a fair, and assembling together in the taverns to plan, prosecute and
decide. Sometimes the seignior, to economize, confers the title on one
of his own dependents: "At Hautemont, in Hainaut, the fiscal-attorney
is a domestic." More frequently he nominates some starveling advocate
of a petty village in the neighborhood on wages which would not
suffice to keep him alive a week." He indemnifies himself out of the
peasants. Processes of chicanery, delays and willful complications in
the proceedings, sittings at three livres the hour for the advocate
and three livres the hour for the bailiff. The black brood of judicial
leeches suck so much the more eagerly, because the more numerous, a
still more scrawny prey, having paid for the privilege of sucking
it.[51] The arbitrariness, the corruption, the laxity of such a régime
can be divined. "Impunity," says Renauldon, "is nowhere greater than
in the seigniorial tribunals . . . . The foulest crimes obtain no
consideration there," for the seignior dreads supplying the means for
a criminal trial, while his judges or prosecuting attorneys fear that
they will not be paid for their proceedings. Moreover, his jail is
often a cellar under the chateau; "there is not one tribunal out of a
hundred in conformity with the law in respect of prisons;" their
keepers shut their eyes or stretch out their hands. Hence it is that
"his estates become the refuge of all the scoundrels in the canton."
The effect of his indifference is terrible and it is to react against
him: to-morrow, at the club, the attorneys whom he has multiplied will
demand his head, and the bandits whom he has tolerated will place it
on the end of a pike.

One-point remains, the chase, wherein the noble's jurisdiction is
still active and severe, and it is just the point which is found the
most offensive. Formerly, when one-half of the canton consisted of
forest, or waste land, while the other half was being ravaged by wild
beasts, he was justified in reserving the right to hunt them; it
entered into his function as local captain. He was the hereditary
gendarme, always armed, always on horseback, as well against wild
boars and wolves as against rovers and brigands. Now that nothing is
left to him of the gendarme but the title and the epaulettes he
maintains his privilege through tradition, thus converting a service
into an annoyance. Hunt he must, and he alone must hunt; it is a
physical necessity and, it the same time, a sign of his blood. A
Rohan, a Dillon, chases the stag although belonging to the church, in
spite of edicts and in spite of the canons. "You hunt too much," said
Louis XV.[52] to the latter; "I know something about it. How can you
prohibit your curates from hunting if you pass your life in setting
them such an example? - Sire, for my curates the chase is a fault, for
myself it is the fault of my ancestors." When the vanity and arrogance
of caste thus mounts guard over a right it is with obstinate
vigilance. Accordingly, their captains of the chase, their game-
keepers, their wood-rangers, their forest-wardens protect brutes as if
they were men, and hunt men as if they were brutes. In the bailiwick
of Pont-l'Evèque in 1789 four instances are cited "of recent
assassinations committed by the game-keepers of Mme. d'A----, -Mme. N-
---, a prelate and a marshal of France, on commoners caught breaking
the game laws or carrying guns. All four publicly escape punishment."
In Artois, a parish makes declaration that "on the lands of the
Chattellany the game devours all the avêtis (pine saplings) and that
the growers of them will be obliged to abandon their business." Not
far off; at Rumancourt, at Bellone, "the hares, rabbits and partridges
entirely devour them, Count d'Oisy never hunting nor having hunts." In
twenty villages in the neighborhood around Oisy where he hunts it is
on horseback and across the crops. "His game-keepers, always armed,
have killed several persons under the pretense of watching over their
master's rights. . . . The game, which greatly exceeds that of the
royal captaincies, consumes annually all prospects of a crop, twenty
thousand razières of wheat and as many of other grains." In the
bailiwick of Evreux "the game has just destroyed everything up to the
very houses. . . . On account of the game the citizen is not free to
pull up the weeds in summer which clog the grain and injure the seed
sown. . . . How many women are there without husbands, and children
without fathers, on account of a poor hare or rabbit!" The game-
keepers of the forest of Gouffray in Normandy "are so terrible that
they maltreat, insult and kill men. . . . I know of farmers who,
having pleaded against the lady to be indemnified for the loss of
their wheat, not only lost their time but their crops and the expenses
of the trial. . . . Stags and deer are seen roving around our houses
in open daylight." In the bailiwick of Domfront, "the inhabitants of
more than ten parishes are obliged to watch all night for more than
six months of the year to secure their crops.[53] -This is the effect
of tile right of the chase in the provinces. It is, however, in the
Ile-de-France, where captaincies abound, and become more extensive,
that the spectacle is most lamentable. A procés-verba1 shows that in
the single parish of Vaux, near Meulan, the rabbits of warrens in the
vicinity ravage eight hundred cultivated arpents (acres) of ground and
destroy the crops of two thousand four hundred setiers (three acres
each), that is to say, the annual supplies of eight hundred persons.
Near that place, at la Rochette, herds of deer and of stags devour
everything in the fields during the day, and, at night, they even
invade the small gardens of the inhabitants to consume vegetables and
to break down young trees. It is found impossible in a territory
subjected to a captaincy to retain vegetables safe in gardens,
enclosed by high walls. At Farcy, of five hundred peach trees planted
in a vineyard and browsed on by stags, only twenty remain at the end
of three years. Over the whole territory of Fontainebleau, the
communities, to save their vines, are obliged to maintain, with the
assent always of the captaincy, a gang of watchmen who, with licensed
dogs, keep watch and make a hubbub all night from the first of May to
the middle of October. At Chartrettes the deer cross the Seine,
approach the doors of the Comtesse de Larochefoucauld and destroy
entire plantations of poplars. A domain rented for two thousand livres
brings in only four hundred after the establishment of the captaincy
of Versailles. In short, eleven regiments of an enemy's cavalry,
quartered on the eleven captaincies near the capital, and starting out
daily to forage, could not do more mischief. - We need not be
surprised if, in the neighborhood of these lairs, the people become
weary of cultivating.[54] Near Fontainebleau and Melun, at Bois-le-
Roi, three-quarters of the ground remains waste. Almost all the houses
in Brolle are in ruins, only half-crumbling gables being visible; at
Coutilles and at Chapelle-Rablay, five farms are abandoned; at
Arbonne, numerous fields are neglected. At Villiers, and at Dame-
Marie, where there were four farming companies and a number of special
cultures, eight hundred arpents remain untilled. - Strange to say, as
the century becomes more easygoing the enforcement of the chase
becomes increasingly harsh. The officers of the captaincy are zealous
because they labor under the eye and for the "pleasures" of their
master. In 1789, eight hundred preserves had just been planted in one
single canton of the captaincy of Fontainebleau, and in spite of the
proprietors of the soil. According to the regulations of 1762 every
private individual domiciled on the reservation of a captaincy is
forbidden from enclosing his homestead or any ground whatever with
hedges or ditches, or walls without a special permit.[55] In case of a
permit being given he must leave a wide, open and continuous space in
order to let the huntsmen easily pass through. He is not allowed to
keep any ferret, any fire-arm, any instrument adapted to the chase,
nor to be followed by any dog even if not adapted to it, except the
dog be held by a leash or clog fastened around its neck. And better
still. He is forbidden to reap his meadow or his Lucerne before St.
John's day, to enter his own field between the first of May and the
twenty-fourth of June, to visit any island in the Seine, to cut grass
on it or osiers, even if the grass and osiers belong to him. The
reason is, that now the partridge is hatching and the legislator
protects it; he would take less pains for a woman in confinement; the
old chroniclers would say of him, as with William Rufus, that his
bowels are paternal only for animals. Now, in France, four hundred
square leagues of territory are subject to the control of the
captaincies,[56] and, over all France, game, large or small, is the
tyrant of the peasant. We may conclude, or rather listen to the
people's conclusion. "Every time," says M. Montlosier, in 1789,[57]
"that I chanced to encounter herds of deer or does on my road my
guides immediately shouted: 'Make room for the gentry!' in this way
alluding to the ravages committed by them on their land." Accordingly,
in the eyes of their subjects, they are wild animals. - This shows to
what privileges can lead when divorced from duties. In this manner an
obligation to protect degenerates into a right of devastation. Thus do
humane and rational beings act, unconsciously, like irrational and
inhuman beings. Divorced from the people they misuse them; nominal
chiefs, they have unlearned the function of an effective chief; having
lost all public character they abate nothing of their private
advantages. So much the worse for the canton, and so much worse for
themselves. The thirty or forty poachers whom they prosecute to day on
their estates will march to-morrow to attack their chateaux at the
head of an insurrection. The absence of the masters, the apathy of the
provinces, the bad state of cultivation, the exactions of agents, the
corruption of the tribunals, the vexations of the captaincies,
indolence, the indebtedness and exigencies of the seignior, desertion,
misery, the brutality and hostility of vassals, all proceeds from the
same cause and terminates in the same effect.

When sovereignty becomes transformed into a sinecure it becomes
burdensome without being useful, and on becoming burdensome without
being useful it is overthrown.

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Notes:
[1]. Beugnot, "Mémoires," V. I. p.292. - De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien
Régime et la Révolution."

[2]. Arthur Young, "Travels in France," II. 456. In France, he
says, it is from the eleventh to the thirty-second. "But nothing is
known like the enormities committed in England where the tenth is
really taken."

[3]. Saint-Simon, "Mémoires," ed. Chéruel, vol. I. - Lucas de
Montigny, "Mémoires de Mirabeau," I. 53-182. - Marshal Marmont,
"Mémoires," I. 9, 11. - Châteaubriand, "Mémoires," I. 17. De
Montlosier, "Mémoires," 2 vol. passim. - Mme. de Larochejacquelein,
"Souvenirs," passim. Many details concerning the types of the old
nobility will be found in these passages. They are truly and forcibly
depicted in two novels by Balzac in "Beatrix," (the Baron de Guénic)
and in the "Cabinet des Antiques," (the Marquis d' Esgrignon).

[4]. A letter of the bailiff of Mirabeau, 1760, published by M. de
Loménie in the "Correspondant," V. 49, p.132.

[5]. Mme. de Larochejacquelein, ibid. I. 84. "As M. de Marigny had
some knowledge of the veterinary art the peasants of the canton came
after him when they had sick animals."

[6]. Marquis de Mirabeau, "Traité de la Population," p. 57.

[7]. De Tocqueville, ibid. p.180. This is proved by the registers
of the capitation-tax which was paid at the actual domicile.

[8]. Renauldon, ibid.., Preface p. 5. - Anne Plumptre, "A narrative
of three years residence in France from 1802 to 1805." II. 357. --
Baroness Oberkirk, "Mémoires," II. 389. - "De l'état religieux," by
the abbés Bonnefoi and Bernard, 1784, p. 295. - Mme.Vigée-Lébrun,
"Souvenirs," p.171.

[9]. Archives nationales, D, XIX. portfolios 14, 15, 25. Five
bundles of papers are filled with these petitions.

[10]. Ibid. D, XIX. portfolio 11. An admirable letter by Joseph of
Saintignon, abbé of Domiévre, general of the regular canons of Saint-
Sauveur and a resident. He has 23,000 livres income, of which 6,066
livres is a pension from the government, in recompense for his
services. His personal expenditure not being over 5,000 livres "he is
in a situation to distribute among the poor and the workmen, in the
space of eleven years, more than 250,000 livres."

[11]. On the conduct and sentiments of lay and ecclesiastical
seigniors cf. Léonce de Lavergne, "Les Assemblées provinciales," I
vol. Legrand, "L'intendance du Hainaut," I vol. Hippeau, "Le
Gouvernement de Normandie," 9 vols.

[12]. "The most active sympathy filled their breasts; that which an
opulent man most dreaded was to be regarded as insensible."
(Lacretelle, vol. V. p. 2.)

[13]. Floquet, "Histoire du Parlement de Normandie," vol. VI.
p.696. In 1772 twenty-five gentlemen and imprisoned or exiled for
having signed a protest against the orders of the court.

[14]. De Tocqueville, ibid. pp. 39, 56, 75, 119, 184. He has
developed this point with admirable force and insight.

[15]. De Tocqueville, ibid. p.376. Complaints of the provincial
assembly of Haute-Guyenne. "People complain daily that there is no
police in the rural districts. How could there be one? The nobles
takes no interest in anything, excepting a few just and benevolent
seigniors who take advantage of their influence with vassals to
prevent affrays."

[16]. Records of the States-General of 1789. Many of the registers
of the noblesse consist of the requests by nobles, men and women, of
some honorary distinctive mark, for instance a cross or a ribbon which
will make them recognizable.

[17]. De Boullé, "Mémoires," p.50. - De Toqueville, ibid.. pp. 118,
119. - De Loménie, "Les Mirabeau, " p. 132. A letter of the bailiff of
Mirabeau, 1760. - De Châteaubriand, Mémoires," I. 14, 15, 29, 76, 80,
125. - Lucas de Montigny, "Mémoires de Mirabeau," I. 160. - Reports of
the Société du Berry. "Bourges en 1753 et 1754," according to a diary
(in the national archives), written by one of the exiled
parliamentarians, p. 273.

[18]. "La vie de mon père," by Rétif de la Bretonne, I. 146.

[19]. The rule is analogous with the other coutumes (common-law
rules), of other places and especially in Paris. (Renauldon, ibid.. p.
134.)

[20]. A sort of dower right. TR.

[21]. Mme. d'Oberkirk, "Mémoires," I. 395.

[22]. De Bouillé, "Mémoires," p. 50. According to him, "all the
noble old families, excepting two or three hundred, were ruined. A
larger portion of the great titled estates had become the appanage of
financiers, merchants and their descendants. The fiefs, for the most
part, were in the hands of the bourgeoisie of the towns." - Léonce de
Lavergne, "Economie rurale en France," p. 26. "The greatest number
vegetated in poverty in small country fiefs often not worth more than
2,000 or 3,000 francs a year." - In the apportionment of the indemnity
in 1825, many received less than 1,000 francs. The greater number of
indemnities do not exceed 50,000 francs. - "The throne," says
Mirabeau, "is surrounded only by ruined nobles."

[23]. De Bouillé, "Memoires," p. 50. - Cherin, "Abrégé
chronologique des édits" (1788). "Of this innumerable multitude
composing the privileged order scarcely a twentieth part of it can
really pretend to nobility of an immemorial and ancient date." - 4,070
financial, administrative, and judicial offices conferred nobility. -
Turgot, "Collection des Economistes," II. 276. "Through the facilities
for acquiring nobility by means of money there is no rich man who does
not at once become noble." - D'Argenson, "Mémoires," III. 402.

[24]. Necker, "De l'Administration des Finances," II. 271. Legrand,
"L'Intendance de Hainaut," pp. 104, 118, 152, 412.

[25]. Even after the exchange of 1784, the prince retains for
himself "all personal impositions as well as subventions on the
inhabitants," except a sum of 6,000 livres for roads. Archives
Nationales, G, 192, a memorandum of April 14th, 1781, on the state of
things in the Clermontois. - Report of the provincial assembly of the
Three Bishoprics (1787), p. 380.

[26]. The town of St. Amand, alone, contains to day 10,210
inhabitants.

[27]. See note 3 at the end of the volume.

[28]. De Ferrières, "Mémoires," II. 57: "All had 100,000 some 200,
300, and even 800,000."

[29]. De Tocqueville, ibid.. book 2, Chap. 2. p.182. - Letter of
the bailiff of Mirabau, August 23, 1770. "This feudal order was merely
vigorous, even though they have pronounced it barbarous, because
France, which once had the vices of strength, now has only those of
feebleness, and because the flock which was formerly devoured by
wolves is now eaten up with lice. . . . Three or four kicks or blows
with a stick were not half so injurious to a poor man's family, nor to
himself, as being devoured by six rolls of handwriting." - "The
nobility," says St. Simon, in his day, "has become another people with
no choice left it but to crouch down in mortal and ruinous indolence,
which renders it a burden and contemptible, or to go and be killed in
warfare; subject to the insults of clerks, secretaries of the state
and the secretaries of intendants." Such are the complaints of feudal
spirits. - The details which follow are all derived from Saint Simon,
Dangeau, de Luynes, d'Argenson and other court historians.

[30]. Works of Louis XIV. and his own words. - Mme Vigée-Lebrun,
"Souvenirs," I.71: "I have seen the queen (Marie Antoinette), obliging
Madame to dine, then six years of age, with a little peasant girl whom
she was taking care of, and insisting that this little one should he
served first, saying to her daughter: 'You must do the honors.' "
(Madame is the title given to the king's oldest daughter. SR.)

[31]. Molière, "Misanthrope." This is the "desert" in which
Célimène refuses to he buried with Alceste. See also in "Tartuffe" the
picture which Dorine draws of a small town.- Arthur Young," Voyages en
France," I. 78.

[32]. 'Traité de la Population," p. 108, (1756).

[33]. I have this from old people who witnessed it before 1789.

[34]. "Mémoires" de M. de Montlosier," I. p. 161,.

[35]. Reports of the Société de Berry, "Bourges en 1753 et 1754,"
p. 273.

[36]. Ibid.. p. 271. One day the cardinal, showing his guests over
his palace just completed, led them to the bottom of a corridor where
he had placed water closets, at that time a novelty. M. Boutin de la
Coulommière, the son of a receiver-general of the finances, made an
exclamation at the sight of the ingenious mechanism which it pleased
him to see moving, and, turning towards the abbé de Canillac, he says:
"That is really admirable, but what seems to me still more admirable
is that His Eminence, being above all human weakness, should
condescend to make use of it." This anecdote is valuable, as it serves
to illustrate the rank and position of a grand-seignior prelate in the
provinces.

[37]. Arthur Young, V.II. P.230 and the following pages.

[38]. Abolition of the tithe, the feudal rights, the permission to
kill the game, etc.

[39]. De Loménie, "Les Mirabeau," p.134. A letter of the bailiff,
September 25, 1760: "I am at Harcourt, where I admire the master's
honest, benevolent greatness. You cannot imagine my pleasure on fête
days at seeing the people everywhere around the château, and the good
little peasant boys and girls looking right in the face of their good
landlord and almost pulling his watch off to examine the trinkets on
the chain, and all with a fraternal air; without familiarity. The good
duke does not make his vassals to go to court; he listens to them and
decides for them, humoring them with admirable patience." Lacretelle,
"Dix ans d'épreuve," p. 58.

[40]. "De l'état religieux," by the abbés de Bonnefoi et Bernard,
1784, I. pp. 287, 291.

[41]. See on this subject "La partie de chasse de Henri IV" by
Collé. Cf. Berquin, Florian, Marmontel, etc, and likewise the
engravings of that day.