Читать книгу History of France from the Earliest Times (Vol. 1-6) - Guizot François - Страница 46

The history of the commune of Laon is that of the majority of the towns which, in Northern and Central France, struggled from the eleventh to the fourteenth century to release themselves from feudal oppression and violence. Cambrai, Beauvais, Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, Vezelay, and several other towns displayed at this period a great deal of energy and perseverance in bringing their lords to recognize the most natural and the most necessary rights of every human creature and community. But within their walls dissensions were carried to extremity, and existence was ceaselessly tempestuous and troublous; the burghers were hasty, brutal, and barbaric—as barbaric as the lords against whom they were defending their liberties. Amongst those mayors, sheriffs, jurats, and magistrates of different degrees and with different titles, set up in the communes, many came before very long to exercise dominion arbitrarily, violently, and in their own personal interests. The lower orders were in an habitual state of jealousy and sedition of a ruffianly kind towards the rich, the heads of the labor market, the controllers of capital and of work. This reciprocal violence, this anarchy, these internal evils and dangers, with their incessant renewals, called incessantly for intervention from without; and when, after releasing themselves from oppression and iniquity coming from above, the burghers fell a prey to pillage and massacre coming from below, they sought for a fresh protector to save them from this fresh evil. Hence that frequent recourse to the king, the great suzerain whose authority could keep down the bad magistrates of the commune or reduce the mob to order; and hence also, before long, the progressive downfall, or, at any rate, the utter enfeeblement of those communal liberties so painfully won. France was at that stage of existence and of civilization at which security can hardly be purchased save at the price of liberty. We have a phenomenon peculiar to modern times in the provident and persistent effort to reconcile security with liberty, and the bold development of individual powers with the regular maintenance of public order. This admirable solution of the social problem, still so imperfect and unstable in our time, was unknown in the middle ages; liberty was then so stormy and so fearful, that people conceived before long, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a horror of it, and sought at any price a political regimen which would give them some security, the essential aim of the social estate. When we arrive at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, we see a host of communes falling into decay or entirely disappearing; they cease really to belong to and govern themselves; some, like Laon, Cambrai, Beauvais, and Rheims, fought a long while against decline, and tried more than once to re-establish themselves in all their independence; but they could not do without the king’s support in their resistance to their lords, laic or ecclesiastical; and they were not in a condition to resist the kingship, which had grown whilst they were perishing. Others, Meulan and Soissons, for example (in 1320 and 1335), perceived their weakness early, and themselves requested the kingship to deliver them from their communal organization, and itself assume their administration. And so it is about this period, under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome, that there appear in the collections of acts of the French kingship, those great ordinances which regulate the administration of all communes within the kingly domains. Hitherto the kings had ordinarily dealt with each town severally; and as the majority were almost independent, or invested with privileges of different kiwis and carefully respected, neither the king nor any great suzerain dreamed of prescribing general rules for communal regimen, nor of administering after a uniform fashion all the communes in their domains. It was under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome that general regulations on this subject began. The French communes were associations too small and too weak to suffice for self-maintenance and self-government amidst the disturbances of the great Christian community; and they were too numerous and too little enlightened to organize themselves into one vast confederation, capable of giving them a central government. The communal liberties were not in a condition to found in France a great republican community; to the kingship appertained the power and fell the honor of presiding over the formation and the fortunes of the French nation.

But the kingship did not alone accomplish this great work. At the very time that the communes were perishing and the kingship was growing, a new power, a new social element, the Third Estate, was springing up in France; and it was called to take a far more important place in the history of France, and to exercise far more influence upon the fate of the French father-land, than it had been granted to the communes to acquire during their short and incoherent existence.

It may astonish many who study the records of French history from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, not to find anywhere the words third estate; and a desire may arise to know whether those inquirers of our day who have devoted themselves professedly to this particular study, have been more successful in discovering that grand term at the time when it seems that we ought to expect to meet with it. The question was, therefore, submitted to a learned member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, M. Littre, in fact, whose Dictionnaire etymologique de la Langur Francaise is consulted with respect by the whole literary world, and to a young magistrate, M. Picot, to whom the Acacdemie des Sciences morales et politiques but lately assigned the first prize for his great work on the question it had propounded, as to the history and influence of states-general in France; and here are inserted, textually, the answers given by two gentlemen of so much enlightenment and authority upon such a subject.

M. Littre, writing on the 3d of October, 1871, says, “I do not find, in my account of the word, third estate before the sixteenth century. I quote these two instances of it: ‘As to the third order called third estate …’ (La Noue, Discours, p. 541); and ‘clerks and deputies for the third estate, same for the estate of labor (laborers).’ (Coustumier general, t. i. p. 335.) In the fifteenth century, or at the end of the fourteenth, in the poems of Eustace Deschamps, I have—

‘Prince, dost thou yearn for good old times again? In good old ways the Three Estates restrain.’

“At date of fourteenth century, in Du Cange, we read under the word status, ‘Per tres status concilii generalis Praelatorum, Baronum, nobilium et universitatum comitatum.’ According to these documents, I think it is in the fourteenth century that they began to call the three orders tres status, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that they began to speak in French of the tiers estat (third estate). But I cannot give this conclusion as final, seeing that it is supported only by the documents I consulted for my dictionary.”

M. Picot replied on the 3d of October, 1871, “It is certain that acts contemporary with King John frequently speak of the ‘three estates,’ but do not utter the word tiers-etat (third estate). The great chronicles and Froissart say nearly always, ‘the church-men, the nobles, and the good towns.’ The royal ordinances employ the same terms; but sometimes, in order not to limit their enumeration to the deputies of closed cities, they add, the good towns, and the open country (Ord. t. iii p. 221, note). When they apply to the provincial estates of the Oil tongue it is the custom to say, the burghers and inhabitants; when it is a question of the Estates of Languedoc, the commonalties of the seneschalty. Such were, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the only expressions for designating the third order.

“Under Louis XI., Juvenal des Ursins, in his harangue, addresses the deputies of the third by the title of burghers and inhabitants of the good towns. At the States of Tours, the spokesman of the estates, John de Rely, says, the people of the common estate, the estate of the people. The special memorial presented to Charles VIII. by the three orders of Languedoc likewise uses the word people.

“It is in Masselin’s report and the memorial of grievances presented in 1485 that I meet for the first time with the expression third estate (tiers-etat). Masselin says, ‘It was decided that each section should furnish six commissioners, two ecclesiastics, two nobles, and two of the third estate (duos ecclesiasticos, duos nobiles, et duos tertii status.)’ (Documents inedits sur l’Histoire de France; proces-verbal de Masselin, p. 76.) The commencement of the chapter headed Of the Commons (du commun) is, ‘For the third and common estate the said folks do represent …’ and a few lines lower, comparing the kingdom with the human body, the compilers of the memorial say, ‘The members are the clergy, the nobles, and the folks of the third estate. (Ibid. after the report of Masselin, memorial of grievances, p. 669.)

“Thus, at the end of the fifteenth century, the expression third estate was constantly employed; but is it not of older date? There are words which spring so from the nature of things that they ought to be contemporaneous with the ideas they express; their appearance in language is inevitable, and is scarcely noticed there. On the day when the deputies of the communes entered an assembly, and seated themselves beside the first two orders, the new comer, by virtue of the situation and rank occupied, took the name of third order; and as our fathers used to speak of the third denier (tiers denier), and the third day (tierce journee), so they must have spoken of the (tiers-etat) third estate. It was only at the end of the fifteenth century that the expression became common; but I am inclined to believe that it existed in the beginning of the fourteenth.

“For an instant I had imagined, in the course of my researches, that, under King John, the ordinances had designated the good towns by the name of third estate. I very soon saw my mistake; but you will see how near I found myself to the expression of which we are seeking the origin. Four times, in the great ordinance of December, 1335, the deputies wrest from the king a promise that in the next assemblies the resolutions shall be taken according to the unanimity of the orders ‘without two estates, if they be of one accord, being able to bind the third.’ At first sight it might be supposed that the deputies of the towns had an understanding to secure themselves from the dangers of common action on the part of the clergy and noblesse, but a more attentive examination made me fly back to a more correct opinion: it is certain that the three orders had combined for mutual protection against an alliance of any two of them. Besides, the States of 1576 saw how the clergy readopted to their profit, against the two laic orders, the proposition voted in 1355. It is beyond a doubt that this doctrine served to keep the majority from oppressing the minority whatever may have been its name. Only, in point of fact, it was most frequently the third estate that must have profited by the regulation.

“In brief, we may, before the fifteenth century, make suppositions, but they are no more than mere conjectures. It was at the great States of Tours, in 1468, that, for the first time, the third order bore the name which has been given to it by history.”

The fact was far before its name. Had the third estate been centred entirely in the communes at strife with their lords, had the fate of burgherdom in France depended on the communal liberties won in that strife, we should see, at the end of the thirteenth century, that element of French society in a state of feebleness and decay. But it was far otherwise. The third estate drew its origin and nourishment from all sorts of sources; and whilst one was within an ace of drying up, the others remained abundant and fruitful. Independently of the commune properly so called and invested with the right of self-government, many towns had privileges, serviceable though limited franchises, and under the administration of the king’s officers they grew in population and wealth. These towns did not share, towards the end of the thirteenth century, in the decay of the once warlike and victorious communes. Local political liberty was to seek in them; the spirit of independence and resistance did not prevail in them; but we see growing up in them another spirit which has played a grand part in French history, a spirit of little or no ambition, of little or no enterprise, timid even and scarcely dreaming of actual resistance, but honorable, inclined to order, persevering, attached to its traditional franchises, and quite able to make them respected, sooner or later. It was especially in the towns administered in the king’s name and by his provosts that there was a development of this spirit, which has long been the predominant characteristic of French burgherdom. It must not be supposed that, in the absence of real communal independence, these towns lacked all internal security. The kingship was ever fearful lest its local officers should render themselves independent, and remembered what had become in the ninth century of the crown’s offices, the duchies and the countships, and of the difficulty it had at that time to recover the scattered remnants of the old imperial authority. And so the Capetian kings with any intelligence, such as Louis VI., Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and Philip the Handsome, were careful to keep a hand over their provosts, sergeants, and officers of all kinds, in order that their power should not grow so great as to become formidable. At this time, besides, Parliament and the whole judicial system was beginning to take form; and many questions relating to the administration of the towns, many disputes between the provosts and burghers, were carried before the Parliament of Paris, and there decided with more independence and equity than they would have been by any other power. A certain measure of impartiality is inherent in judicial power; the habit of delivering judgment according to written texts, of applying laws to facts, produces a natural and almost instinctive respect for old-acquired rights. In Parliament the towns often obtained justice and the maintenance of their franchises against the officers of the king. The collection of kingly ordinances at this time abounds with instances of the kind. These judges, besides, these bailiffs, these provosts, these seneschals, and all these officers of the king or of the great suzerains, formed before long a numerous and powerful class. Now the majority amongst them were burghers, and their number and their power were turned to the advantage of burgherdom, and led day by day to its further extension and importance. Of all the original sources of the third estate, this it is, perhaps, which has contributed most to bring about the social preponderance of that order. Just when burgherdom, but lately formed, was losing in many of the communes a portion of its local liberties, at that same moment it was seizing by the hand of Parliaments, provosts, judges, and administrators of all kinds, a large share of central power. It was through burghers admitted into the king’s service and acting as administrators or judges in his name that communal independence and charters were often attacked and abolished; but at the same time they fortified and elevated burgherdom, they caused it to acquire from day to day more wealth, more credit, more importance and power in the internal and external affairs of the state.

Philip the Handsome, that ambitious and despotic prince, was under no delusion when in 1302, 1308, and 1314, on convoking the first states-general of France, he summoned thither “the deputies of the good towns.” He did not yet give them the name of third estate; but he was perfectly aware that he was thus summoning to his aid against Boniface VIII. and the Templars and the Flemings a class already invested throughout the country with great influence and ready to lend him efficient support. His son, Philip the Long, was under no delusion when in 1317 and 1321 he summoned to the states-general “the commonalties and good towns of the kingdom” to decide upon the interpretation of the Salle law as to the succession to the throne, “or to advise as to the means of establishing a uniformity of coins, weights, and measures;” he was perfectly aware that the authority of burgherdom would be of great assistance to him in the accomplishment of acts so grave. And the three estates played the prelude to the formation, painful and slow as it was, of constitutional monarchy, when, in 1338, under Philip of Valois, they declared, “in presence of the said king, Philip of Valois, who assented thereto, that there should be no power to impose or levy talliage in France if urgent necessity or evident utility did not require it, and then only by grant of the people of the estates.”

In order to properly understand the French third estate and its importance, more is required than to look on at its birth; a glance must be taken at its grand destiny and the results at which it at last arrived. Let us, therefore, anticipate centuries and get a glimpse, now at once, of that upon which the course of events from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century will shed full light.

Taking the history of France in its entirety and under all its phases, the third estate has been the most active and determining element in the process of French civilization. If we follow it in its relation with the general government of the country, we see it at first allied for six centuries to the kingship, struggling without cessation against the feudal aristocracy and giving predominance in place thereof to a single central power, pure monarchy, closely bordering, though with some frequently repeated but rather useless reservations, on absolute monarchy. But, so soon as it had gained this victory and brought about this revolution, the third estate went in pursuit of a new one, attacking that single power to the foundation of which it had contributed so much and entering upon the task of changing pure monarchy into constitutional monarchy. Under whatever aspect we regard it during these two great enterprises, so different one from the other, whether we study the progressive formation of French society or that of its government, the third estate is the most powerful and the most persistent of the forces which have influenced French civilization.

This fact is unique in the history of the world. We recognize in the career of the chief nations of Asia and ancient Europe nearly all the great facts which have agitated France; we meet in them mixture of different races, conquest of people by people, immense inequality between classes, frequent changes in the forms of government and extent of public power; but nowhere is there any appearance of a class which, starting from the very lowest, from being feeble, despised, and almost imperceptible at its origin, rises by perpetual motion and by labor without respite, strengthens itself from period to period, acquires in succession whatever it lacked, wealth, enlightenment, influence, changes the face of society and the nature of government, and arrives at last at such a pitch of predominance that it may be said to be absolutely the country. More than once in the world’s history the external semblances of such and such a society have been the same as those which have just been reviewed here, but it is mere semblance. In India, for example, foreign invasions and the influx and establishment of different races upon the same soil have occurred over and over again; but with what result? The permanence of caste has not been touched; and society has kept its divisions into distinct and almost changeless classes. After India take China. There too history exhibits conquests similar to the conquest of Europe by the Germans; and there too, more than once, the barbaric conquerors settled amidst a population of the conquered. What was the result? The conquered all but absorbed the conquerors, and changelessness was still the predominant characteristic of the social condition. In Western Asia, after the invasions of the Turks, the separation between victors and vanquished remained insurmountable; no ferment in the heart of society, no historical event, could efface this first effect of conquest. In Persia, similar events succeeded one another; different races fought and intermingled; and the end was irremediable social anarchy, which has endured for ages without any change in the social condition of the country, without a shadow of any development of civilization.

So much for Asia. Let us pass to the Europe of the Greeks and Romans. At the first blush we seem to recognize some analogy between the progress of these brilliant societies and that of French society; but the analogy is only apparent; there is, once more, nothing resembling the fact and the history of the French third estate. One thing only has struck sound judgments as being somewhat like the struggle of burgherdom in the middle ages against the feudal aristocracy, and that is the struggle between the plebeians and patricians at Rome. They have often been compared; but it is a baseless comparison. The struggle between the plebeians and patricians commenced from the very cradle of the Roman republic; it was not, as happened in the France of the middle ages, the result of a slow, difficult, incomplete development on the part of a class which, through a long course of great inferiority in strength, wealth, and credit, little by little extended itself and raised itself, and ended by engaging in a real contest with the superior class. It is now acknowledged that the struggle at Rome between the plebeians and patricians was a sequel and a prolongation of the war of conquest, was an effort on the part of the aristocracy of the cities conquered by Rome to share the rights of the conquering aristocracy. The families of plebeians were the chief families of the vanquished peoples; and though placed by defeat in a position of inferiority, they were not any the less aristocratic families, powerful but lately in their own cities, encompassed by clients, and calculated from the very first to dispute with their conquerors the possession of power. There is nothing in all this like that slow, obscure, heart-breaking travail of modern burgherdom escaping, full hardly, from the midst of slavery or a condition approximating to slavery, and spending centuries, not in disputing political power, but in winning its own civil existence. The more closely the French third estate is examined, the more it is recognized as a new fact in the world’s history, appertaining exclusively to the civilization of modern, Christian Europe.

Not only is the fact new, but it has for France an entirely special interest, since—to employ an expression much abused in the present day—it is a fact eminently French, essentially national. Nowhere has burgherdom had so wide and so productive a career as that which fell to its lot in France. There have been communes in the whole of Europe, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and England, as well as in France. Not only have there been communes everywhere, but the communes of France are not those which, as communes, under that name and in the middle ages, have played the chiefest part and taken the highest place in history. The Italian communes were the parents of glorious republics. The German communes became free and sovereign towns, which had their own special history, and exercised a great deal of influence upon the general history of Germany. The communes of England made alliance with a portion of the English feudal aristocracy, formed with it the preponderating house in the British government, and thus played, full early, a mighty part in the history of their country. Far were the French communes, under that name and in their day of special activity, from rising to such political importance and to such historical rank. And yet it is in France that the people of the communes, the burgherdom, reached the most complete and most powerful development, and ended by acquiring the most decided preponderance in the general social structure. There have been communes, we say, throughout Europe; but there has not really been a victorious third estate anywhere, save in France. The revolution of 1789, the greatest ever seen, was the culminating point arrived at by the third estate; and France is the only country in which a man of large mind could, in a burst of burgher’s pride, exclaim, “What is the third estate? Everything.”

Since the explosion, and after all the changes, liberal and illiberal, due to the revolution of 1789, there has been a common-place, ceaselessly repeated, to the effect that there are no more classes in French society—there is only a nation of thirty-seven millions of persons. If it be meant that there are now no more privileges in France, no special laws and private rights for such and such families, proprietorships, and occupations, and that legislation is the same, and there is perfect freedom of movement for all, at all steps of the social ladder, it is true; oneness of laws and similarity of rights, is now the essential and characteristic fact of civil society in France, an immense, an excellent, and a novel fact in the history of human associations. But beneath the dominance of this fact, in the midst of this national unity and this civil equality, there evidently and necessarily exist numerous and important diversities and inequalities, which oneness of laws and similarity of rights neither prevent nor destroy. In point of property, real or personal, land or capital, there are rich and poor; there are the large, the middling, and the small property. Though the great proprietors may be less numerous and less rich, and the middling and the small proprietors more numerous and more powerful than they were of yore, this does not prevent the difference from being real and great enough to create, in the civil body, social positions widely different and unequal. In the professions which are called liberal, and which live by brains and knowledge, amongst barristers, doctors, scholars, and literates of all kinds, some rise to the first rank, attract to themselves practice and success, and win fame, wealth, and influence; others make enough, by hard work, for the necessities of their families and the calls of their position; others vegetate obscurely in a sort of lazy discomfort. In the other vocations, those in which the labor is principally physical and manual, there also it is according to nature that there should be different and unequal positions; some, by brains and good conduct, make capital, and get a footing upon the ways of competence and progress; others, being dull, or idle, or disorderly, remain in the straitened and precarious condition of existence depending solely on wages. Throughout the whole extent of the social structure, in the ranks of labor as well as of property, differences and inequalities of position are produced or kept up and co-exist with oneness of laws and similarity of rights. Examine any human associations, in any place and at any time, and whatever diversity there may be in point of their origin, organization, government, extent, and duration, there will be found in all three types of social position always fundamentally the same, though they may appear under different and differently distributed forms; 1st, men living on income from their properties, real or personal, land or capital, without seeking to increase them by their own personal and assiduous labor; 2d, men devoted to working up and increasing, by their own personal and assiduous labor, the real or personal properties, land or capital they possess; 3d, men living by their daily labor, without land or capital to give them an income. And these differences, these inequalities in the social position of men, are not matters of accident or violence, or peculiar to such and such a time, or such and such a country; they are matters of universal application, produced spontaneously in every human society by virtue of the primitive and general laws of human nature, in the midst of events and under the influence of social systems utterly different.

These matters exist now and in France as they did of old and elsewhere. Whether you do or do not use the name of classes, the new French social fabric contains, and will not cease to contain, social positions widely different and unequal. What constitutes its blessing and its glory is, that privilege and fixity no longer cling to this difference of positions; that there are no more special rights and advantages legally assigned to some and inaccessible to others; that all roads are free and open to all to rise to everything; that personal merit and toil have an infinitely greater share than was ever formerly allowed to them in the fortunes of men. The third estate of the old regimen exists no more; it disappeared in its victory over privilege and absolute power; it has for heirs the middle classes, as they are now called; but these classes, whilst inheriting the conquests of the old third estate, hold them on new conditions also, as legitimate as binding. To secure their own interests, as well as to discharge their public duty, they are bound to be at once conservative and liberal; they must, on the one hand, enlist and rally beneath their flag the old, once privileged superioritics, which have survived the fall of the old regimen, and, on the other hand, fully recognize the continual upward movement which is fermenting in the whole body of the nation. That, in its relations with the aristocratic classes, the third estate of the old regimen should have been and for a long time remained uneasy, disposed to take umbrage, jealous and even envious, is no more than natural; it had its rights to urge and its conquests to gain; nowadays its conquests have been won, the rights are recognized, proclaimed, and exercised; the middle classes have no longer any legitimate ground for uneasiness or envy; they can rest with full confidence in their own dignity and their own strength; they have undergone all the necessary trials, and passed all the necessary tests. In respect of the lower orders, and the democracy properly so called, the position of the middle classes is no less favorable; they have no fixed line of separation; for who can say where the middle classes begin and where they end? In the name of the principles of common rights and general liberty they were formed; and by the working of the same principles they are being constantly recruited, and are incessantly drawing new vigor from the sources whence they sprang. To maintain common rights and free movement upwards against the retrograde tendencies of privilege and absolute power, on the one hand, and on the other against the insensate and destructive pretensions of levellers and anarchists, is now the double business of the middle classes; and it is at the same time, for themselves, the sure way of preserving preponderance in the state, in the name of general interests, of which those classes are the most real and most efficient representatives.

On reaching, in our history, the period at which Philip the Handsome, by giving admission amongst the states-general to the “burghers of the good towns,” substituted the third estate for the communes, and the united action of the three great classes of Frenchmen for their local struggles, we did well to halt a while, in order clearly to mark the position and part of the new actor in the great drama of national life. We will now return to the real business of the drama, that is, to the history of France, which became, in the fourteenth century, more complex, more tragic, and more grand than it had ever yet been.