The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2

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"That which would have required a year of care and reflection,"
says a competent foreigner, "was proposed, deliberated over, and
passed by general acclamation. The abolition of feudal rights, of
titles, of the privileges of the provinces, three articles which
alone embraced a whole system of jurisprudence and statesmanship,
were decided with ten or twelve other measures in less time than is
required in the English Parliament for the first reading of an
important bill."

"Such are our Frenchmen," says Mirabeau again, "they spend a month
in disputes about syllables, and overthrow, in a single night, the
whole established system of the Monarchy !"[10]

The truth is, they display the nervousness of women, and, from one
end of the Revolution to the other, this excitability keeps on
increasing.

Not only are they excited, but the pitch of excitement must be
maintained, and, like the drunkard who, once stimulated, has
recourse again to strong waters, one would say that they carefully
try to expel the last remnants of calmness and common sense from
their brains. They delight in pompous phrases, in high-sounding
rhetoric, in declamatory sentimental strokes of eloquence: this is
the style of nearly all their speeches, and so strong is their
taste, they are not satisfied with the orations made amongst
themselves. Lally and Necker, having made "affecting and sublime"
speeches at the Hôtel-de-Ville, the Assembly wish them to be
repeated before them:[11] this being the heart of France, it is
proper for it to answer to the noble emotions of all Frenchmen.
Let this heart throb on, and as strongly as possible, for that is
its office, and day by day it receives fresh impulses. Almost all
sittings begin with the reading of flattering addresses or of
threatening denunciations. The petitioners frequently appear in
person, and read their enthusiastic effusions, their imperious
advice, their doctrines of dissolution. To-day it is Danton, in
the name of Paris, with his bull visage and his voice that seems a
tocsin of insurrection; to-morrow, the vanquishers of the Bastille,
or some other troop, with a band of music which continues playing
even into the hall. The meeting is not a conference for business,
but a patriotic opera, where the eclogue, the melodrama, and
sometimes the masquerade, mingle with the cheers and the clapping of
hands.[12] -- A serf of the Jura is brought to the bar of the
Assembly aged one hundred and twenty years, and one of the members
of the cortège, " M. Bourbon de la Crosnière, director of a
patriotic school, asks permission to take charge of an honorable old
man, that he may be waited on by the young people of all ranks, and
especially by the children of those whose fathers were killed in the
attack on the Bastille." [13] Great is the hubbub and excitement.
The scene seems to be in imitation of Berquin,[14] with the
additional complication of a mercenary consideration.

But small matters are not closely looked into, and the Assembly,
under the pressure of the galleries, stoops to shows, such as are
held at fairs. Sixty vagabonds who are paid twelve francs a head,
in the costumes of Spaniards, Dutchmen, Turks, Arabs, Tripolitans,
Persians, Hindus, Mongols, and Chinese, conducted by the Prussian
Anacharsis Clootz, enter, under the title of Ambassadors of the
Human Race, to declaim against tyrants, and they are admitted to the
honors of the sitting. On this occasion the masquerade is a stroke
devised to hasten and extort the abolition of nobility.[15] At other
times, there is little or no object in it; its ridiculousness is
inexpressible, for the farce is played out as seriously and
earnestly as in a village award of prizes. For three days, the
children who have taken their first communion before the
constitutional bishop have been promenaded through the streets of
Paris; at the Jacobin club they recite the nonsense they have
committed to memory; and, on the fourth day, admitted to the bar of
the Assembly, their spokesman, a poor little thing of twelve years,
repeats the parrot-like tirade. He winds up with the accustomed
oath, upon which all the others cry out in their piping, shrill
voices, " We swear ! " As a climax, the President, Trejlhard, a
sober lawyer, replies to the little gamins with perfect gravity in a
similar strain, employing metaphors, personifications, and
everything else belonging to the stock-in-trade of a pedant on his
platform:

"You merit a share in the glory of the founders of liberty,
prepared as you are to shed your blood in her behalf."

Immense applause from the "left" and the galleries, and a decree
ordering the speeches of both president and children to be printed.
The children, probably, would rather have gone out to play; but,
willingly or unwillingly, they receive or endure the honors of the
sitting.[16]

Such are the tricks of the stage and of the platform by which the
managers here move their political puppets. Emotional
susceptibility, once recognized as a legitimate force, thus becomes
an instrument of intrigue and constraint. The Assembly, having
accepted theatrical exhibitions when these were sincere and earnest,
is obliged to tolerate them when they become mere sham and
buffoonery. At this vast national banquet, over which it meant to
preside, and to which, throwing the doors wide open, it invited all
France, its first intoxication was due to wine of a noble quality;
but it has touched glasses with the populace, and by degrees, under
the pressure of its associates, it has descended to adulterated and
burning drinks, to a grotesque unwholesome inebriety which is all
the more grotesque and unwholesome, because it persists in believing
itself to be reason.

II.

Inadequacy of its information - Its composition - The social
standing and culture of the larger number - Their incapacity.
Their presumption - Fruitless advice of competent men.- Deductive
politics - Parties - The minority; its faults - The majority; its
dogmatism.

If reason could only resume its empire during the lucid intervals!
But reason must exist before it can govern, and in no French
Assembly, except the two following this, have there ever been fewer
political intellects. - Strictly speaking, with careful search,
there could undoubtedly be found in France, in 1789, five or six
hundred experienced men, such as the intendants and military
commanders of every province; next to these the prelates,
administrators of large dioceses the members of the local
"parlements," whose courts gave them influence, and who, besides
judicial functions, possessed a portion of administrative power; and
finally, the principal members of the Provincial Assemblies, all of
them influential and sensible people who had exercised control over
men and affairs, at once humane, liberal, moderate, and capable of
understanding the difficulty, as well as the necessity, of a great
reform; indeed, their correspondence, full of facts, stated with
precision and judgment, when compared with the doctrinaire rubbish
of the Assembly, presents the strongest possible contrast. - But
most of these lights remain under a bushel; only a few of them get
into the Assembly; these burn without illuminating, and are soon
extinguished in the tempest.' I. The venerable Machault is not there,
nor Malesherbes; there are none of the old ministers or the marshals
of France. Not one of the intendants is there, except Malouet, and
by the superiority of this man, the most judicious of the Assembly,
one can judge the services which his colleagues would have rendered.
Out of two hundred and ninety-one members of the clergy,[17] there
are indeed forty-eight bishops or archbishops and thirty-five abbots
or canons, but, being prelates and with large endowments, they
excite the envy of their order, and are generals without any
soldiers. We have the same spectacle among the nobles. Most of
them, the gentry of the provinces, have been elected in opposition
to the grandees of the Court. Moreover, neither the grandees of
the Court, devoted to worldly pursuits, nor the gentry of the
provinces, confined to private life, are practically familiar with
public affairs. A small group among them, twenty-eight magistrates
and about thirty superior officials who have held command or have
been connected with the administration, probably have some idea of
the peril of society; but it is precisely for this reason that they
seem to be behind the age and remain without influence. - In the
Third-Estate, out of five hundred and seventy-seven members, only
ten have exercised any important functions, those of intendant,
councillor of state, receiver-general, lieutenant of police,
director of the mint, and others of the same category. The great
majority is composed of unknown lawyers and people occupying
inferior positions in the profession, notaries, royal attorneys,
register commissaries, judges and assessors of; the présidial,
bailiffs and lieutenants of the bailiwick, simple practitioners
confined from their youth to the narrow circle of an inferior
jurisdiction or to a routine of scribbling, with no escape but
philosophical excursions in imaginary space under the guidance of
Rousseau and Raynal. There are three hundred and seventy-three of
this class, to whom may be added thirty-eight farmers and
husbandmen, fifteen physicians, and, among the manufacturers,
merchants, and capitalists, some fifty or sixty who are their equals
in education and in political capacity. Scarcely one hundred and
fifty proprietors are here from the middle class.[18] To these four
hundred and fifty deputies, whose condition, education, instruction,
and mental range qualified them for being good clerks, prominent men
in a commune, honorable fathers of a family, or, at best,
provincial academicians, add two hundred and eight curés, their
equals; this makes six hundred and fifty out of eleven hundred and
eighteen deputies, forming a positive majority, which, again, is
augmented by about fifty philosophical nobles, leaving out the weak
who follow the current, and the ambitious who range themselves on
the strong side. - We may divine what a chamber thus made up can
do, and those who are familiar with such matters prophesy what it
will do.[19]

"There are some able men in the National Assembly," writes the
American minister, "yet the best heads among them would not be
injured by experience, and, unfortunately, there are great numbers
who, with much imagination, have little knowledge, judgment, or
reflection."

It would be just as sensible to select eleven hundred notables from
an inland province and entrust them to the repair of an old frigate.
They would conscientiously break the vessel up, and the frigate they
would construct in its place would founder before it left port.

If they would only consult the pilots and professional shipbuilders!
-- There are several of such to be found around them, whom they
cannot suspect, for most of them are foreigners, born in free
countries, impartial, sympathetic, and, what is more, unanimous.
The Minister of the United States writes, two months before the
convocation of the States-General:[20]

"I, a republican, and just, as it were, emerged from that Assembly
which has formed one of the most republican of republican
constitutions, - I preach incessantly respect for the prince,
attention to the rights of the nobility, and moderation, not only in
the object, but also in the pursuit of it."

Jefferson, a democrat and radical, expresses himself no
differently. At the time of the oath of the Tennis Court, he
redoubles his efforts to induce Lafayette and other patriots to make
some arrangement with the King to secure freedom of the press,
religious, liberty, trial by jury, the habeas corpus, and a national
legislature, - things which he could certainly be made to adopt, -
and then to retire into private life, and let these institutions act
upon the condition of the people until they had rendered it capable
of further progress, with the assurance that there would be no lack
of opportunity for them to obtain still more.

"This was all," he continues, "that I thought your countrymen able
to bear soberly and usefully."

Arthur Young, who studies the moral life of France so
conscientiously, and who is so severe in depicting old abuses,
cannot comprehend the conduct of the Commons.

"To set aside practice for theory . . . in establishing the
interests of a great kingdom, in securing freedom to 25,000,000 of
people, seems to me the very acme of imprudence, the very
quintessence of insanity."

Undoubtedly, now that the Assembly is all-powerful, it is to be
hoped that it will be reasonable:

"I will not allow myself to believe for a moment that the
representatives of the people can ever so far forget their duty to
the French nation, to humanity, and their own fame, as to suffer any
inordinate and impracticable views - any visionary or theoretic
systems - . . . to turn aside their exertions from that security
which is in their hands, to place on the chance and hazard of public
commotion and civil war the invaluable blessings which are certainly
in their power. I will not conceive it possible that men who have
eternal fame within their grasp will place the rich inheritance on
the cast of a die, and, losing the venture, be damned among the
worst and most profligate adventurers that ever disgraced humanity."

As their plan becomes more definite the remonstrances become more
decided, and all the expert judges point out to them the importance
of the wheels which they are willfully breaking.

"As they have[21] hitherto felt severely the authority exercised
over them in the name of their princes, every limitation of that
authority seems to them desirable. Never having felt the evils of
too weak an executive, the disorders to be apprehended from anarchy
make as yet no impression" -- "They want an American
Constitution,[22] but with a King instead of a President, without
reflecting they have no American citizens to support that
Constitution. . . If they have the good sense to give the nobles,
as nobles, some portion of the national power, this free
constitution will probably last, But otherwise it will degenerate
either into a pure monarchy, or a vast republic, or a democracy.
Will the latter last? I doubt it. I am sure that it will not,
unless the whole nation is changed."

A little later, when they renounce a parliamentary monarchy to put
in its place "a royal democracy," it is at once explained to them
that such an institution applied to France can produce nothing but
anarchy, and finally end in despotism.

"Nowhere[23] has liberty proved to be stable without a sacrifice
of its excesses, without some barrier to its own omnipotence. . . .
Under this miserable government . . . the people, soon weary of
storms, and abandoned without legal protection to their seducers or
to their oppressors, will shatter the helm, or hand it over to some
audacious hand that stands ready to seize it."

Events occur from month to month in fulfillment of these
predictions, and the predictions grow gloomier and more gloomy. It
is a flock of wild birds:[24]

"It is very difficult to guess whereabouts the flock will settle
when it flies so wild. . . . This unhappy country, bewildered in
the pursuit of metaphysical whims, presents to our moral view a
mighty ruin. The Assembly, at once master and slave, new in power,
wild in theory, raw in practice, engrossing all functions without
being able to exercise any, has freed that fierce, ferocious people
from every restraint of religion and respect. . . . Such a state
of things cannot last . . . The glorious opportunity is lost and
for this time, at least, the Revolution has failed."

We see, from the replies of Washington, that he is of the same
opinion. On the other side of the Channel, Pitt, the ablest
practician, and Burke, the ablest theorist, of political liberty,
express the same judgment. Pitt, after 1789, declares that the
French have overleaped freedom. After 1790, Burke, in a work which
is a prophecy as well as a masterpiece, points to military
dictatorship as the termination of the Revolution, "the most
completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth." Nothing
is of any effect. With the exception of the small powerless group
around Malouet and Mounier, the warnings of Morris, Jefferson,
Romilly, Dumont, Mallet du Pan, Arthur Young, Pitt and Burke, all of
them men who have experience of free institutions, are received with
indifference or repelled with disdain. Not only are our new
politicians incapable, but they think themselves the contrary, and
their incompetence is aggravated by their infatuation.

"I often used to say, "writes Dumont,[25] "that if a hundred
persons were stopped at haphazard in the streets of London, and a
hundred in the streets of Paris, and a proposal were made to them to
take charge of the Government, ninety-nine would accept it in Paris
and ninety-nine would refuse it in London . . . The Frenchman
thinks that all difficulties can be overcome by a little quickness
of wit. Mirabeau accepted the post of reporter to the Committee on
Mines without having the slightest tincture of knowledge on the
subject."

In short, most of them enter politics "like the gentleman who, on
being asked if he knew how to play on the harpsichord, replied, 'I
cannot tell, I never tried, but I will see.' "

"The Assembly had so high an opinion of itself, especially the
left side of it, that it would willingly have undertaken the framing
of the Code of Laws for all nations. . . Never has so many men been
seen together, fancying that they were all legislators, and that
they were there to correct all the errors of the past, to remedy all
mistakes of the human mind, and ensure the happiness of all ages to
come. Doubt had no place in their minds, and infallibility always
presided over their contradictory decrees." --

This is because they have a theory and because, according to their
notion, this theory renders special knowledge unnecessary. Herein
they are thoroughly sincere, and it is of set purpose that they
reverse all ordinary modes of procedure. Up to this time a
constitution used to be organized or repaired like a ship.
Experiments were made from time to time, or a model was taken from
vessels in the neighborhood; the first aim was to make the ship
sail; its construction was subordinated to its work; it was
fashioned in this or that way according to the materials on hand; a
beginning was made by examining these materials, and trying to
estimate their rigidity, weight, and strength. - All this is
reactionary; the age of Reason has come and the Assembly is too
enlightened to drag on in a rut. In conformity with the fashion of
the time it works by deduction, after the method of Rousseau,
according to an abstract notion of right, of the State and of the
social compact.[26] According to this process, by virtue of
political geometry alone, they shall have the perfect vessel and
since it perfect it follows that it will sail, and that much better
than any empirical craft. - They legislate according to this
principle, and one may imagine the nature of their discussions.
There are no convincing facts, no pointed arguments; nobody would
ever imagine that the speakers were gathered together to conduct
real business. Through speech after speech, strings of hollow
abstractions are endlessly renewed as in a meeting of students in
rhetoric for the purpose of practice, or in a society of old
bookworms for their own amusement. On the question of the veto
"each orator in turn, armed with his portfolio, reads a dissertation
which has no bearing whatever" on the preceding one, which makes a
"sort of academical session,"[27] a succession of pamphlets fresh
every morning for several days. On the question of the Rights of
Man fifty-four speakers are placed on the list.

"I remember," says Dumont, "that long discussion, which lasted for
weeks, as a period of deadly boredom, -- vain disputes over words, a
metaphysical jumble, and most tedious babble; the Assembly was
turned into a Sorbonne lecture-room,"

and all this while chateaux were burning, while town-halls were
being sacked, and courts dared no longer hold assize, while the
distribution of wheat was stopped, and while society was in course
of dissolution. In the same manner the theologians of the Easter
Roman Empire kept up their wrangles about the uncreated light of
Mount Tabor while Mahomet II was battering the walls of
Constantinople with his cannon. - Ours, of course, are another
sort of men, juvenile in feeling, sincere, enthusiastic, even
generous, and further, more devoted, laborious, and in some cases
endowed with rare talent. But neither zeal, nor labor, nor talent
are of any use when not employed in the service of a sound idea; and
if in the service of a false one, the greater they are the more
mischief they do.

Towards the end of the year 1789, there can be not doubt of this;
and the parties now formed reveal their presumption, improvidence,
incapacity, and obstinacy. "This Assembly," writes the American
ambassador,[28] "may be divided into three parties; --

one called the aristocrats, consists of the high clergy, the
parliamentary judges, and such of the nobility as think they ought
to form a separate order." This is the party which offers resistance
to follies and errors, but with follies and errors almost equally
great. In the beginning "the prelates,[29] instead of conciliating
the curés, kept them at a humiliating distance, affecting
distinctions, exacting respect," and, in their own chamber, "ranging
themselves apart on separate benches." The nobles, on the other
hand, the more to alienate the commons, began by charging these
with, "revolt, treachery, and treason," and by demanding the use of
military force against them. Now that the victorious Third-Estate
has again overcome them and overwhelms them with numbers, they
become still more maladroit, and conduct the defense much less
efficiently than the attack. "In the Assembly," says one of them,
"they do not listen, but laugh and talk aloud;" they take pains to
embitter their adversaries and the galleries by their impertinence.
"They leave the chamber when the President puts the question and
invite the deputies of their party to follow them, or cry out to
them not to take part in the deliberation : through this desertion,
the clubbists become the majority, and decree whatever they please."
It is in this way that the appointment of judges and bishops is
withdrawn from the King and assigned to the people. Again, after
the return from Varennes, when the Assembly finds out that the
result of its labors is impracticable and wants to make it less
democratic, the whole of the right side refuses to share in the
debates, and, what is worse, votes with the revolutionaries to
exclude the members of the Constituent from the Legislative
Assembly. Thus, not only does it abandon its own cause, but it
commits self-destruction, and its desertion ends in suicide. --

A second party remains, "the middle party,"[30] which consists of
well-intentioned people from every class, sincere partisans of a
good government; but, unfortunately, they have acquired their ideas
of government from books, and are admirable on paper. But as it
happens that the men who live in the world are very different from
imaginary men who dwell in the heads of philosophers, it is not to
be wondered at if the systems taken out of books are fit for nothing
but to be upset by another book. Intellects of this stamp are the
natural prey of utopians. Lacking the ballast of experience they
are carried away by pure logic and serve to enlarge the flock of
theorists. - The latter form the third party, which is called the
"enragés (the wild men), and who, at the expiration of six months,
find themselves "the most numerous of all."

"It is composed," says Morris, "of that class which in America is
known by the name of pettifogging lawyers, together with a host of
curates and many of those persons who in all revolutions throng to
the standard of change because they are not well.[31] This last
party is in close alliance with the populace and derives from this
circumstance very great authority."

All powerful passions are on its side, not merely the irritation
of the people tormented by misery and suspicion, not merely the
ambition and self-esteem of the bourgeois, in revolt against the
ancient régime, but also the inveterate bitterness and fixed ideas
of so many suffering minds and so many factious intellects,
Protestants, Jansenists, economists, philosophers, men who, like
Fréteau, Rabout-Saint-Etienne, Volney, Sieyès, are hatching out a
long arrears of resentments or hopes, and who only await the
opportunity to impose their system with all the intolerance of
dogmatism and of faith. To minds of this stamp the past is a dead
letter; example is no authority; realities are of no account; they
live in their own Utopia. Sieyès, the most important of them all,
judges that "the whole English constitution is charlatanism,
designed for imposing on the people;"[32] he regards the English "as
children in the matter of a constitution," and thinks that he is
capable of giving France a much better one. Dumont, who sees the
first committees at the houses of Brissot and Clavières, goes away
with as much anxiety as "disgust."

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