The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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

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IV.
Isolation of the Chiefs - Sentiments of subordinates- Provincial
nobility - The Curates.

The fleeced flock is to discover finally what is done with its
wool. "Sooner or later," says a parliament of 1764,[21] "the people
will learn that the remnants of our finances continue be wasted in
donations which are frequently undeserved; in excessive and multiplied
pensions for the same persons; in dowries and promises of dowry, and
in useless offices and salaries." Sooner or later they will thrust
back "these greedy hands which are always open and never full; that
insatiable crowd which seems to be born only to seize all and possess
nothing, and pitiless as it is shameless." - And when this day
arrives the extortioners will find that they stand alone. For the
characteristic of an aristocracy which cares only for itself is to
live aloof in a closed circle. Having forgotten the public, it also
neglects its subordinates; after being separated from the nation it
separates itself from its own adherents. Like a group of staff-
officers on furlough, it indulges in Sports without giving itself
further concern about inferior officers; when the hour of battle comes
nobody will march under its orders, and chieftains are sought
elsewhere. Such is the isolation of the seigniors of the court and of
the prelates among the lower grades of the nobility and the clergy;
they appropriate to themselves too large a share, and give nothing, or
almost nothing, to the people who are not of their society. For a
century a steady murmur against them rising, and goes on expanding
until it becomes an uproar, which the old and the new spirit, feudal
ideas and philosophic ideas, threaten in unison. "I see," said the
bailiff of Mirabeau,[22] "that the nobility is demeaning itself and
becoming a wreck. It is extended to all those children of
bloodsuckers, the vagabonds of finance, introduced by La Pompadour,
herself the spring of this foulness. One portion of it demeans itself
in its servility to the court; the other portion is amalgamated with
that quill-driving rabble who are converting the blood of the king's
subjects into ink; another perishes stifled beneath vile robes, the
ignoble atoms of cabinet-dust which an office drags up out of the mire
;" and all, parvenus of the old or of the new stock, form a band
called the court, 'The court!" exclaims D'Argenson. "The entire evil
is found in this word, The court has become the senate of the nation;
the least of the valets at Versailles is a senator; chambermaids take
part in the government, if not to legislate, at least to impede laws
and regulations; and by dint of hindrance there are no longer either
laws, or rules, or law-makers. . . . Under Henry IV courtiers remained
each one at home; they had not entered into ruinous expenditure to
belong to the court; favors were not thus due to them as at the
present day. . . The court is the sepulcher of the nation." Many noble
officers, finding that high grades are only for courtiers, abandon the
service, and betake themselves with their discontent to their estates.
Others, who have not left their domains, brood there in discomfort,
idleness, and ennui, their ambition embittered by their powerlessness.
In 1789, says the Marquis de Ferrières, most of them "are so weary of
the court and of the ministers, they are almost democrats." At least,
"they want to withdraw the government from the ministerial oligarchy
in whose hands it is concentrated;" there are no grand seigniors for
deputies; they set them aside and "absolutely reject them, saying that
they would traffic with the interests of the nobles;" they themselves,
in their registers, insist that there be no more court nobility.

The same sentiments prevail among the lower clergy, and still more
actively; for they are excluded from the high offices, not only as
inferiors, but also as commoner.[23] Already, in 1766, the Marquis de
Mirabeau writes: "It would be an insult to most of our pretentious
ecclesiastics to offer them a curacy. Revenues and honors are for the
abbés-commendatory, for tonsured beneficiaries not in orders, for the
numerous chapters (of nobility)." On the contrary, "the true pastors
of souls, the collaborators in the holy ministry, scarcely obtain a
subsistence." The first class "drawn from the nobility and from the
best of the bourgeoisie have pretensions only, without being of the
true ministry. The other, only having duties to fulfill without
expectations and almost without income . . . can be recruited only
from the lowest ranks of civil society," while the parasites who
despoil the laborers "affect to subjugate them and to degrade them
more and more." "I pity," said Voltaire, "the lot of a country curate,
obliged to contend for a sheaf of wheat with his unfortunate
parishioner, to plead against him, to exact the tithe of peas and
lentils, to waste his miserable existence in constant strife. . . . I
pity still more the curate with a fixed allowance to whom monks,
called gros decimateurs[24] dare offer a salary of forty ducats, to
go about during the year, two or three miles from his home, day and
night, in sunshine and in rain, in the snow and in the ice, exercising
the most trying and most disagreeable functions." Attempts are made
for thirty years to secure their salaries and raise them a little; in
case of their inadequacy the beneficiary, collator or tithe-owner of
the parish is required to add to them until the curê obtains 500
livres (1768), then 700 livres (1785), the vicar 200 livres (1768),
then 250 (1778), and finally 350 (1785). Strictly, at the prices at
which things are, a man may support himself on that.[25] But he must
live among the destitute to whom he owes alms, and he cherishes at the
bottom of his heart a secret bitterness towards the indolent Dives
who, with full pockets, dispatches him, with empty pockets, on a
mission of charity. At Saint-Pierre de Barjouville, in the Toulousain,
the archbishop of Toulouse appropriates to himself one-half of the
tithes and gives away eight livres a year in alms. At Bretx, the
chapter of Isle Jourdain, which retains one-half of certain tithes and
three-quarters of others, gives ten livres; at Croix Falgarde, the
Benedictines, to whom a half of the tithes belong, give ten livres per
annum.[26] At Sainte-Croix de Bernay in Normandy,[27] the non-
resident abbé, who receives 57,000 livres gives 1,050 livres to the
curate without a parsonage, whose parish contains 4,000 communicants.
At Saint-Aubin-sur-Gaillon, the abbé, a gros décimateur, gives 350
livres to the vicar, who is obliged to go into the village and obtain
contributions of flour, bread and apples. At Plessis Hébert, "the
substitute deportuaire,[28] not having enough to live on is obliged to
get his meals in the houses of neighboring curates." In Artois, where
the tithes are often seven and a half and eight per cent. on he
product of the soil, a number of curates have a fixed rate and no
parsonage; their church goes to ruin and the beneficiary gives nothing
to the poor. "At Saint-Laurent, in Normandy, the curacy is worth not
more than 400 livres, which the curate shares with an obitier,[29]
and there are 500 inhabitants, three quarters of whom receive alms."
As the repairs on a parsonage or on a church are usually at the
expense of a seignior or of a beneficiary often far off, and in debt
or indifferent, it sometimes happens that the priest does not know
where to lodge, or to say mass. "I arrived," says a curate of the
Touraine, "in the month of June, 1788. . . . The parsonage would
resemble a hideous cave were it not open to all the winds and the
frosts. Below there are two rooms with stone floors, without doors or
windows, and five feet high; a third room six feet high, paved with
stone, serves as parlor, hall, kitchen, wash-house, bakery, and sink
for the water of the court and garden. Above are three similar rooms,
the whole cracking and tumbling in ruins, absolutely threatening to
fail, without either doors and windows that hold." And, in 1790, the
repairs are not yet made. See, by way of contrast, the luxury of the
prelates possessing half a million income, the pomp of their palaces,
the hunting equipment of M. de Dillon, bishop of Evreux, the
confessionals lined with satin of M. de Barral, bishop of Troyes, and
the innumerable culinary utensils in massive silver of M. de Rohan,
bishop of Strasbourg. - Such is the lot of curates at the
established rates, and there are "a great many" who do not get the
established rates, withheld from them through the ill-will of the
higher clergy; who, with their perquisites, get only from 400 to 500
livres, and who vainly ask for the meager pittance to which they are
entitled by the late edict. "Should not such a request," says a
curate, "be willingly granted by Messieurs of the upper clergy who
suffer monks to enjoy from 5 to 6,000 livres income each person,
whilst they see curates, who are at least as necessary, reduced to the
lighter portion, as little for themselves as for their parish? " -
And they yet gnaw on this slight pittance to pay the free gift. In
this, as in the rest, the poor are charged to discharge the rich. In
the diocese of Clermont, "the curates, even with the simple fixed
rates, are subject to a tax of 60, 80, 100, 120 livres and even more;
the vicars, who live only by the sweat of their brows, are taxed 22
livres." The prelates, on the contrary, pay but little, and "it is
still a custom to present bishops on New-Year's day with a receipt for
their taxes."[30] - There is no escape for the curates. Save two or
three small bishoprics of "lackeys," all the dignities of the church
are reserved to the nobles; "to be a bishop nowadays," says one of
them, "a man must be a gentleman." I regard them as sergeants who,
like their fellows in the army, have lost all hope of becoming
officers. - Hence there are some whose anger bursts its bounds: "We,
unfortunate curates at fixed rates; we, commonly assigned to the
largest parishes, like my own which, for two leagues in the woods,
includes hamlets that would form another; we, whose lot makes even the
stones and beams of our miserable dwellings cry aloud," we have to
endure prelates "who would still, through their forest-keepers,
prosecute a poor curate for cutting a stick in their forests, his sole
support on his long journeys over the road." On their passing, the
poor man "is obliged to jump close against a slope to protect himself
from the feet and the spattering of the horses, as likewise from the
wheels and, perhaps, the whip of an insolent coachman," and then,
"begrimed with dirt, with his stick in one hand and his hat, such as
it is, in the other, he must salute, humbly and quickly, through the
door of the close, gilded carriage, the counterfeit hierophant who is
snoring on the wool of the flock the poor curate is feeding, and of
which he merely leaves him the dung and the grease." The whole letter
is one long cry of rage; it is rancor of this stamp which is to
fashion Joseph Lebons and Fouchés. - In this situation and with
these sentiments it is evident that the lower clergy will treat its
chiefs as the provincial nobility treated theirs.[31] They will not
select "for representatives those who swim in opulence and who have
always regarded their sufferings with tranquility." The curates, on
all sides "will confederate together" to send only curates to the
States-General, and to exclude "not only canons, abbés, priors and
other beneficiaries, but again the principal superiors, the heads of
the hierarchy," that is to say, the bishops. In fact, in the States-
General, out of three hundred clerical deputies we count two hundred
and eight curates, and, like the provincial nobles, these bring along
with them the distrust and the ill-will which they have so long
entertained against their chiefs. Events are soon to prove this. If
the first two orders are constrained to combine against the communes
it is at the critical moment when the curates withdraw. If the
institution of an upper chamber is rejected it is owing to the
commonalty of the gentry (la plèbe des gentilshommes) being unwilling
to allow the great families a prerogative which they have abused.

V. The King's Incompetence and Generosity.

The most privileged of all - Having monopolized all powers, he
takes upon himself their functional activity - The burden of this task
- He evades it or is incompetent - His conscience at ease - France is
his property - How he abuses it - Royalty the center of abuses.

One privilege remains the most considerable of all, that of the
king; for, in his staff of hereditary nobles he is the hereditary
general. His office, indeed, is not a sinecure, like their rank; but
it involves quite as grave disadvantages and worse temptations. Two
things are pernicious to Man, the lack of occupation and the lack of
restraint; neither inactivity nor omnipotence are in harmony with his
nature. The absolute prince who is all-powerful, like the listless
aristocracy with nothing to do, in the end become useless and
mischievous. - In grasping all powers the king insensibly took upon
himself all functions; an immense undertaking and one surpassing human
strength. For it is the Monarchy, and not the Revolution, which
endowed France with administrative centralization [32]. Three
functionaries, one above the other, manage all public business under
the direction of the king's council; the comptroller-general at the
center, the intendant in each generalship,[33] the sub-delegate in
each election, fixing, apportioning and levying taxes and the militia,
laying out and building highways, employing the national police force,
distributing succor, regulating cultivation, imposing their tutelage
on the parishes, and treating municipal magistrates as valets. "A
village," says Turgot,[34] "is simply an assemblage of houses and
huts, and of inhabitants equally passive. . . . Your Majesty is
obliged to decide wholly by yourself or through your mandataries. . .
. Each awaits your special instructions to contribute to the public
good, to respect the rights of others, and even sometimes to exercise
his own." Consequently, adds Necker, "the government of France is
carried on in the bureaux. . ..The clerks, relishing their influence,
never fail to persuade the minister that he cannot separate himself
from command in a single detail." Bureaucratic at the center,
arbitrariness, exceptions and favors everywhere, such is a summary of
the system. "Sub-delegates, officers of elections, receivers and
comptrollers of the vingtièmes, commissaires and collectors of the
tailles, officers of the salt-tax, process-servers, voituriers-
buralistes, overseers of the corvées, clerks of the excise, of the
registry, and of dues reserved, all these men belonging to the tax-
service. Each of these will, aided by his fiscal knowledge and petty
authority, so overwhelm the ignorant and inexperienced tax payer that
he does not recognize that he is being cheated." [35] A rude species
of centralization with no control over it, with no publicity, without
uniformity, thus installs over the whole country an army of petty
pashas who, as judges, decide causes in which they are themselves
contestants, ruling by delegation, and, to sanction their theft or
their insolence, always having on their lips the name of the king, who
is obliged to let them do as they please. - In short, the machine,
through its complexity, irregularity, and dimensions, escapes from his
grasp. A Frederick II. who rises at four o'clock in the morning, a
Napoleon who dictates half the night in his bath, and who works
eighteen hours a day, would scarcely suffice for its needs. Such a
régime cannot operate without constant strain, without indefatigable
energy, without infallible discernment, without military rigidity,
without superior genius; on these conditions alone can one convert
twenty-five millions of men into automatons and substitute his own
will, lucid throughout, coherent throughout and everywhere present,
for the wills of those he abolishes. Louis XV lets "the good machine"
work by itself, while he settles down into apathy. "They would have it
so, they thought it all for the best,"[36] is his manner of speaking
when ministerial measures prove unsuccessful. "If I were a lieutenant
of the police," he would say again, "I would prohibit cabs." In vain
is he aware of the machine being dislocated, for he can do nothing and
he causes nothing to be done. In the event of misfortune he has a
private reserve, his purse apart. "The king," said Mme. de Pompadour,
"would sign away a million without thinking of it, but he would
scarcely bestow a hundred louis out of his own little treasury." -
Louis XVI strives for some time to remove some of the wheels, to
introduce better ones and to reduce the friction of the rest; but the
pieces are too rusty, and too weighty. He cannot adjust them, or
harmonize them and keep them in their places; his hand falls by his
side wearied and powerless. He is content to practice economy himself;
he records in his journal the mending of his watch, and leaves the
State carriage in the hands of Calonne to be loaded with fresh abuses
that it may revert back to the old rut from which it is to issue only
by breaking down.

Undoubtedly the wrong they do, or which is done in their name,
dissatisfies the kings and upsets them, but, at the bottom, their
conscience is not disturbed. They may feel compassion for the people,
but they do not feel guilty; they are its sovereigns and not its
representatives. France, to them, is as a domain to its lord, and a
lord is not deprived of honor in being prodigal and neglectful. He
merely gambles away his own property, and nobody has a right to call
him to account. Founded on feudal society, royalty is like an estate,
an inheritance. It would be infidelity, almost treachery in a prince,
in any event weak and base, should he allow any portion of the trust
received by him intact from his ancestors for transmission to his
children, to pass into the hands of his subjects. Not only according
to medieval traditions is he proprietor-commandant of the French and
of France, but again, according to the theory of the jurists, he is,
like Caesar, the sole and perpetual representative of the nation, and,
according to the theological doctrine, like David, the sacred and
special delegate of God himself. It would be astonishing, if, with all
these titles, he did not consider the public revenue as his personal
revenue, and if, in many cases, he did not act accordingly. Our point
of view, in this matter, is so essentially opposed to his, we can
scarcely put ourselves in his place; but at that time his point of
view was everybody's point of view. It seemed, then, as strange to
meddle with the king's business as to meddle with that of a private
person. Only at the end of the year 1788[37] the famous salon of the
Palais-Royal "with boldness and unimaginable folly, asserts that in a
true monarchy the revenues of the State should not be at the
sovereign's disposition; that he should be granted merely a sum
sufficient to defray the expenses of his establishment, of his
donations, and for favors to his servants as well as for his
pleasures, while the surplus should be deposited in the royal treasury
to be devoted only to purposes sanctioned by the National Assembly. To
reduce the sovereign to a civil list, to seize nine-tenths of his
income, to forbid him cash on demand, what an outrage! The surprise
would be no greater if at the present day it were proposed to divide
the income of each millionaire into two portions, the smallest to go
for the owner's support, and the largest to be placed in the hands of
a government to be expended in works of public utility. An old farmer-
general, an intellectual and unprejudiced man, gravely attempts to
justify the purchase of Saint-Cloud by calling it "a ring for the
queen's finger." The ring cost, indeed, 7,700,000 francs, but "the
king of France then had an income of 447,000,000. What could be said
of any private individual who, with 477,000 livres income, should, for
once in his life, give his wife diamonds worth 7,000 or 8,000
livres?"[38] People would say that the gift is moderate, and that the
husband is reasonable.

To properly understand the history of our kings, let the
fundamental principle be always recognized that France is their land,
a farm transmitted from father to son, at first small, then slowly
enlarged, and, at last, prodigiously enlarged, because the proprietor,
always alert, has found means to make favorable additions to it at the
expense of his neighbors; at the end of eight hundred years it
comprises about 27,000 square leagues of territory. His interests and
his vanity harmonize, certainly, in several areas with public welfare;
he is, all in all, not a poor administrator, and, since he has always
expanded his territory, he has done better than many others. Moreover,
around him, a number of expert individuals, old family councilors,
withdrawn from business and devoted to the domain, with good heads an
gray beards, respectfully remonstrate with him when he spends too
freely; they often interest him in public improvements, in roads,
canals, homes for the invalids, military schools, scientific
institutions and charity workshops; in the control of trust-funds and
foundations, in the tolerance of heretics, in the postponement of
monastic vows to the age of twenty-one, in provincial assemblies, and
in other reforms by which a feudal domain becomes transformed into a
modern domain. Nevertheless, the country, feudal or modern, remains
his property, which he can abuse as well as use; however, whoever uses
with full sway ends by abusing with full license. If, in his ordinary
conduct, personal motives do not prevail over public motives, he might
be a saint like Louis IX, a stoic like Marcus Aurelius, while
remaining a seignior, a man of the world like the people of his court,
yet more badly brought up, worse surrounded, more solicited, more
tempted and more blindfolded. At the very least he has, like them, his
own vanity, his own tastes, his own relatives, his mistress, his wife,
his friends, all intimate and influential solicitors who must first be
satisfied, while the nation only comes after them. - The result is,
that, for a hundred years, from 1672 to 1774, whenever he makes war it
is through wounded pride, through family interest, through calculation
of private advantages, or to gratify a woman. Louis XV maintains his
wars yet worse than in undertaking them;"[39] while Louis XVI, during
the whole of his foreign policy, finds himself hemmed in by the
marriage he has made. - At home the king lives like other nobles,
but more grandly, because he is the greatest lord in France; I shall
describe his court presently, and further on we shall see by what
exactions this pomp is made possible. In the meantime let us note two
or three details. According to authentic statements, Louis XV expended
on Mme. de Pompadour thirty-six millions of livres, which is at least
seventy-two millions nowadays[40] According to d'Argenson,[41] in
1751, he has 4,000 horses in his stable, and we are assured that his
household alone, or his person, "cost this year 68,000,000," almost a
quarter of the public revenue. Why be astonished if we look upon the
sovereign in the manner of the day, that is to say, as a lord of the
manor enjoying of his hereditary property? He constructs, he
entertains, he gives festivals, he hunts, and he spends money
according to his station. Moreover, being the master of his own funds,
he gives to whomsoever he pleases, and all his selections are favors.
Abbé de Vermond writes to Empress Maria Theresa[42]

"Your Majesty knows better than myself, that, according to
immemorial custom, three-fourths of the places honors and pensions are
awarded not on account of services but out of favor and through
influence. This favor was originally prompted by birth, alliance and
fortune; the fact is that it nearly always is based on patronage and
intrigue. This procedure is so well established, that is respected as
a sort of justice even by those who suffer the most from it. A man of
worth not able to dazzle by his court alliances, nor through a
brilliant expenditure, would not dare to demand a regiment, however
ancient and illustrious his services, or his birth. Twenty years ago,
the sons of dukes and ministers, of people attached to the court, of
the relations and protégés of mistresses, became colonels at the age
of sixteen. M. de Choiseul caused loud complaints on extending this
age to twenty-three years. But to compensate favoritism and absolutism
he assigned to the pure grace of the king, or rather to that of his
ministers, the appointment to the grades of lieutenant-colonel and
major which, until that time, belonged of right to priority of
services in the government; also the commands of provinces and of
towns. You are aware that these places have been largely multiplied,
and that they are bestowed through favor and credit, like the
regiments. The cordon bleu and the cordon rouge are in the like
position, and abbeys are still more constantly subject to the régime
of influence. As to positions in the finances, I dare not allude to
them. Appointments in the judiciary are the most conditioned by
services rendered; and yet how much do not influence and
recommendation affect the nomination of intendants, first presidents"
and the others?