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Table of Contents

The French Aristocracy—Priests, Lawyers, and Petty Nobles—Burghers, Artisans, and Laborers—Intelligent Curiosity of the Nation—Exasperating Anachronisms—Contrast of Demand and Resources—The Great Nobles a Barrier to Reform—Mistakes of the King—The Estates Meet at Versailles—The Court Party Provokes Violence—Downfall of Feudal Privilege.

1787–89.

At last the ideas of the century had declared open war on its institutions; their moral conquest was already coextensive with central and western Europe, but the first efforts toward their realization were to be made in France, for the reason that the line of least resistance was to be found not through the most downtrodden, but through the freest and the best instructed nation on the Continent. Both the clergy and the nobility of France had become accustomed to the absorption in the crown of their ancient feudal power. They were content with the great offices in the church, in the army, and in the civil administration, with exemption from the payment of taxes; they were happy in the delights of literature and the fine arts, in the joys of a polite, self-indulgent, and spendthrift society, so artificial and conventional that for most of its members a sufficient occupation was found in the study and exposition of its trivial but complex customs. The conduct and maintenance of a salon, the stage, gallantry; clothes, table manners, the use of the fan: these are specimens of what were considered not the incidents but the essentials of life.

The serious-minded among the upper classes were as enlightened as any of their rank elsewhere. They were familiar with prevalent philosophies, and full of compassion for miseries which, for lack of power, they could not remedy, and which, to their dismay, they only intensified in their attempts at alleviation. They were even ready for considerable sacrifices. The gracious side of the character of Louis XVI is but a reflection of the piety, moderation, and earnestness of many of the nobles. His rule was mild; there were no excessive indignities practised in the name of royal power except in cases like that of the "Bargain of Famine," where he believed himself helpless. The lower clergy, as a whole, were faithful in the performance of their duties. This was not true of the hierarchy. They were great landowners, and their interests coincided with those of the upper nobility. The doubt of the country had not left them untouched, and there were many without conviction or principle, time-serving and irreverent. The lawyers and other professional men were to be found, for the most part, in Paris and in the towns. They had their livelihood in the irregularities of society, and, as a class, were retentive of ancient custom and present social habits. Although by birth they belonged in the main to the third estate, they were in reality adjunct to the first, and consequently, being integral members of neither, formed a strong independent class by themselves. The petty nobles were in much the same condition with regard to the wealthy, powerful families in their own estate and to the rich burghers; they married the fortunes of the latter and accepted their hospitality, but otherwise treated them with the same exclusive condescension as that displayed to themselves by the great.

But if the estate of the clergy and the estate of the nobility were alike divided in character and interests, this was still more true of the burghers. In 1614, at the close of the middle ages, the third estate had been little concerned with the agricultural laborer. For various reasons this class had been gradually emancipated until now there was less serfage in France than elsewhere; more than a quarter, perhaps a third, of the land was in the hands of peasants and other small proprietors. This, to be sure, was economically disastrous, for over-division of land makes tillage unprofitable, and these very men were the taxpayers. The change had been still more marked in the denizens of towns. During the last two centuries the wealthy burgesses had grown still more wealthy in the expansion of trade, commerce, and manufactures; many had struggled and bought their way into the ranks of the nobility. The small tradesmen had remained smug, hard to move, and resentful of change. But there was a large body of men unknown to previous constitutions, and growing ever larger with the increase in population—intelligent and unintelligent artisans, half-educated employees in workshops, mills, and trading-houses, ever recruited from the country population, seeking such intermittent occupation as the towns afforded. The very lowest stratum of this society was then, as now, most dangerous; idle, dissipated, and unscrupulous, they were yet sufficiently educated to discuss and disseminate perilous doctrines, and were often most ready in speech and fertile in resource.

This comparative well-being of a nation, devoted like the ancient Greeks to novelty, avid of great ideas and great deeds, holding opinions not merely for the pleasure of intellectual gymnastics but logically and with a view to their realization, sensitive to influences like the deep impressions made on their thinkers by the English and American revolutions—such relative comfort with its attendant opportunities for discussion was not the least of many causes which made France the vanguard in the great revolution which had already triumphed in theory throughout the continent and was eventually to transform the social order of all Europe.

Discussion is not only a safety-valve, it is absolutely essential in governments where the religion, morals, opinions, and occupations of the people give form and character to institutions and legislation. The centralized and despotic Bourbon monarchy of France was an anachronism among an intelligent people. So was every institution emanating from and dependent upon it. It was impossible for the structure to stand indefinitely, however tenderly it was treated, however cleverly it was propped and repaired. As in the case of England in 1688 and of her colonies in 1772, the immediate and direct agency in the crash was a matter of money. But the analogy holds good no further, for in France the questions of property and taxation were vastly more complex than in England, where the march of events had so largely destroyed feudalism, or in America, where feudalism had never existed. On the great French estates the laborers had first to support the proprietor and his representatives, then the Church and the King; the minute remainder of their gains was scarcely sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. The small proprietors were so hampered in their operations by the tiny size of their holdings that they were still restricted to ancient and wretched methods of cultivation; but they too were so burdened with contributions direct and indirect that famine was always imminent with them as well. Under whatever name the tax was known, license (octroi), bridge and ferry toll, road-work, salt-tax, or whatever it may have been, it was chiefly distasteful not because of its form but because it was oppressive. Some of it was paid to the proprietors, some to the state. The former was more hateful because the gainer was near and more tangible; the hatred of the country people for the feudal privileges and those who held them was therefore concrete and quite as intense as the more doctrinaire dislike of the poor in the towns to the rich. Such was the alienation of classes from each other throughout the beginning and middle of the century that the disasters which French arms suffered at the hands of Marlborough and Frederick, so far from humiliating the nation, gave pleasure and not pain to the masses because they were, as they thought, defeats not of France, but of the nobility and of the crown.

Feudal dues had arisen when those imposing them had the physical force to compel their payment and were also the proprietors of the land on which they were exacted. Now the nobility were entirely stripped of power and in many instances of land as well. How empty and bottomless the oppressive institutions and how burdensome the taxes which rested on nothing but a paper grant, musty with age and backed only by royal complaisance! Want too was always looking in at the doors of the many, while the few were enjoying the national substance. This year there was a crisis, for before the previous harvest time devastating hail-storms had swept the fields, in 1788; during the winter there had been pinching want and many had perished from destitution and cold; the advancing seasons had brought warmth, but sufficient time had not even yet elapsed for fields and herds to bring forth their increase, and by the myriad firesides of the people hunger was still an unwelcome guest.

With wholesome economy such crises may be surmounted in a rich and fertile country. But economy had not been practised for fifty years by the governing classes. As early as 1739 there had been a deficiency in the French finances. From small beginnings the annual loans had grown until, in 1787, the sum to be raised over and above the regular income was no less than thirty-two millions of dollars. This was all due to the extravagance of the court and the aristocracy, who spent, for the most part, far more than the amount they actually collected and which they honestly believed to be their income. Such a course was vastly more disastrous than it appeared, being ruinous not only to personal but to national well-being, inasmuch as what the nobles, even the earnest and honest ones, believed to be their legitimate income was not really such. Two thirds of the land was in their hands; the other third paid the entire land-tax. They were therefore regarding as their own two thirds of what was in reality taken altogether from the pockets of the small proprietors. Small sacrifices the ruling class professed itself ready to make, but such a one as to pay their share of the land-tax—never. It had been proposed also to destroy the monopoly of the grain trade, and to abolish the road-work, a task more hateful to the people than any tax, because it brought them into direct contact with the exasperating superciliousness of petty officials. But in all these proposed reforms, Necker, Calonne, and Loménie de Brienne, each approaching the nobles from a separate standpoint, had alike failed. The nobility could see in such retrenchment and change nothing but ruin for themselves. An assembly of notables, called in 1781, would not listen to propositions which seemed suicidal. The King began to alienate the affection of his natural allies, the people, by yielding to the clamor of the court party. From the nobility he could wring nothing. The royal treasury was therefore actually bankrupt, the nobles believed that they were threatened with bankruptcy, and the people knew that they themselves were not only bankrupt, but also hungry and oppressed.

At last the King, aware of the nation's extremity, began to undertake reforms without reference to class prejudice, and on his own authority. He decreed a stamp-tax, and the equal distribution of the land-tax. He strove to compel the unwilling parliament of Paris, a court of justice which, though ancient, he himself had but recently reconstituted, to register his decrees, and then banished it from the capital because it would not. That court had been the last remaining check on absolutism in the country, and, as such, an ally of the people; so that although the motives and the measures of Louis were just, the high-handed means to which he resorted in order to carry them alienated him still further from the affections of the nation. The parliament, in justifying its opposition, had declared that taxes in France could be laid only by the Estates-General. The people had almost forgotten the very name, and were entirely ignorant of what that body was, vaguely supposing that, like the English Parliament or the American Congress, it was in some sense a legislative assembly. They therefore made their voice heard in no uncertain sound, demanding that the Estates should meet. Louis abandoned his attitude of independence, and recalled the Paris parliament from Troyes, but only to exasperate its members still further by insisting on a huge loan, on the restoration of civil rights to the Protestants, and on restricting, not only its powers, but those of all similar courts throughout the realm. The parliament then declared that France was a limited monarchy with constitutional checks on the power of the crown, and exasperated men flocked to the city to remonstrate against the menace to their liberties in the degradation of all the parliaments by the King's action in regard to that of Paris. Those from Brittany formed an association, which soon admitted other members, and developed into the notorious Jacobin Club, so called from its meeting-place, a convent on the Rue St. Honoré, once occupied by Dominican monks who had moved thither from the Rue St. Jacques.

To summon the Estates was a virtual confession that absolutism in France was at an end. In the seventeenth century the three estates deliberated separately. Such matters came before them as were submitted by the crown, chiefly demands for revenue. A decision was reached by the agreement of any two of the three, and whatever proposition the crown submitted was either accepted or rejected. There was no real legislation. Louis no doubt hoped that the eighteenth-century assembly would be like that of the seventeenth. He could then, by the coalition of the nobles and the clergy against the burghers, or by any other arrangement of two to one, secure authorization either for his loans or for his reforms, as the case might be, and so carry both. But the France of 1789 was not the France of 1614. As soon as the call for the meeting was issued, and the decisive steps were taken, the whole country was flooded with pamphlets. Most of them were ephemeral; one was epochal. In it the Abbé Sieyès asked the question, "What is the third estate?" and answered so as to strengthen the already spreading conviction that the people of France were really the nation. The King was so far convinced as to agree that the third estate should be represented by delegates equal in number to those of the clergy and nobles combined. The elections passed quietly, and on May fifth, 1789, the Estates met at Versailles, under the shadow of the court. It was immediately evident that the hands of the clock could not be put back two centuries, and that here was gathered an assembly unlike any that had ever met in the country, determined to express the sentiments, and to be the executive, of the masses who in their opinion constituted the nation. On June seventeenth, therefore, after long talk and much hesitation, the representatives of the third estate declared themselves the representatives of the whole nation, and invited their colleagues of the clergy and nobles to join them. Their meeting-place having been closed in consequence of this decision, they gathered without authorization in the royal tennis-court on June twentieth, and bound themselves by oath not to disperse until they had introduced a new order. Louis was nevertheless nearly successful in his plan of keeping the sittings of the three estates separate. He was thwarted by the eloquence and courage of Mirabeau. On June twenty-seventh a majority of the delegates from the two upper estates joined those of the third estate in constituting a national assembly.

At this juncture the court party began the disastrous policy which in the end was responsible for most of the terrible excesses of the French Revolution, by insisting that troops should be called to restrain the Assembly, and that Necker should be banished. Louis showed the same vacillating spirit now that he had displayed in yielding to the Assembly, and assented. The noble officers had lately shown themselves untrustworthy, and the men in the ranks refused to obey when called to fight against the people. The baser social elements of the whole country had long since swarmed to the capital. Their leaders now fanned the flame of popular discontent until at last resort was had to violence. On July twelfth the barriers of Paris were burned, and the regular troops were defeated by the mob in the Place Vendôme; on July fourteenth the Bastille, in itself a harmless anachronism, but considered by the masses to typify all the tyrannical shifts and inhuman oppressions known to despotism, was razed to the ground. As if to crown their baseness, the extreme conservatives among the nobles, the very men who had brought the King to such straits, now abandoned him and fled.

Louis finally bowed to the storm, and came to reside among his people in Paris, as a sign of submission. Bailly, an excellent and judicious man, was made mayor of the city, and Lafayette, with his American laurels still unfaded, was made commander of a newly organized force, to be known as the National Guard. On July seventeenth the King accepted the red, white, and blue—the recognized colors of liberty—as national. The insignia of a dynasty were exchanged for the badge of a principle. A similar transformation took place throughout the land, and administration everywhere passed quietly into the hands of the popular representatives. The flying nobles found their châteaux hotter than Paris. Not only must the old feudal privileges go, but with them the old feudal grants, the charters of oppression in the muniment chests. These charters the peasants insisted must be destroyed. If they could not otherwise gain possession of them, they resorted to violence, and sometimes in the intoxication of the hour they exceeded the bounds of reason, abusing both the persons and the legitimate property of their enemies. Death or surrender was often the alternative. So it was that there was no refuge on their estates, not even a temporary one, for those who had so long possessed them. Many had already passed into foreign lands; the emigration increased, and continued in a steady stream. The moderate nobles, honest patriots to whom life in exile was not life at all, now clearly saw that their order must yield: in the night session of August fourth, sometimes called the "St. Bartholomew of privilege," they surrendered their privileges in a mass. Every vestige, not only of feudal, but also of chartered privilege, was to be swept away; even the King's hunting-grounds were to be reduced to the dimensions permitted to a private gentleman. All men alike, it was agreed, were to renounce the conventional and arbitrary distinctions which had created inequality in civil and political life, and accept the absolute equality of citizenship. Liberty and fraternity were the two springers of the new arch; its keystone was to be equality. On August twenty-third the Assembly decreed freedom of religious opinion; on the next day freedom of the press.