The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789

Other assemblies, composed entirely of landowners exempt from the taille, and who fully intended to continue so, nevertheless depicted in the darkest colours the hardships which the taille inflicted on the poor. They drew a frightful picture of all its abuses, which they circulated in all directions. But the most singular part of the affair is that to these strong marks of the interest they felt in the common people, they from time to time added public expressions of contempt for them. The people had already become the object of their sympathy without having ceased to be the object of their disdain.

The Provincial Assembly of Upper Guienne, speaking of the peasants whose cause they so warmly pleaded, called them coarse and ignorant creatures, turbulent spirits, and rough and intractable characters. Turgot, who did so much for the people, seldom spoke of them otherwise.78

These harsh expressions were used in acts intended for the greatest publicity, and meant to meet the eyes of the peasants themselves. It seemed as though the framers of them imagined that they were living in a country like Galicia, where the higher classes speak a different language from the lower, and cannot be understood by them. The feudalists of the eighteenth century, who frequently displayed towards the ratepayers and others who owed them feudal services, a disposition to indulgence, moderation, and justice, unknown to their predecessors, still spoke occasionally of ‘vile peasants.’ These insults seem to have been ‘in proper form,’ as the lawyers say.

The nearer we approach towards 1789, the more lively and imprudent does this sympathy with the hardships of the common people become. I have held in my hands the circulars addressed by several Provincial Assemblies in the very beginning of 1788 to the inhabitants of the different parishes, calling upon them to state in detail all the grievances of which they might have to complain.

One of these circulars is signed by an abbé, a great lord, three nobles, and a man of the middle class, all members of the Assembly, and acting in its name. This committee directed the Syndic of each parish to convoke all the peasants, and to inquire of them what they had to say against the manner in which the various taxes which they paid were assessed and collected. ‘We are generally aware,’ they say, ‘that most of the taxes, especially the gabelle and the taille, have disastrous consequences for the cultivators, but we are anxious to be acquainted with every single abuse.’ The curiosity of the Provincial Assembly did not stop there; it investigated the number of persons in the parish enjoying any privileges with respect to taxes, whether nobles, ecclesiastics, or roturiers, and the precise nature of these privileges; the value of the property of those thus exempted; whether or not they resided on their estates; whether there was much Church property, or, as the phrase then was, land in mortmain, which was out of the market, and its value. All this even was not enough to satisfy them; they wanted to be told the share of duties, taille, additional dues, poll-tax, and forced labour-rate which the privileged class would have to pay, supposing equality of taxation existed.

This was to inflame every man individually by the catalogue of his own grievances; it pointed out to him the authors of his wrongs, emboldened him by showing him how few they were in number, and fired his heart with cupidity, envy, and hatred. It seemed as if the Jacquerie, the Maillotins, and the Sixteen were totally forgotten, and that no one was aware that the French people, which is the quietest and most kindly disposed in the world, so long as it remains in its natural frame of mind, becomes the most barbarous as soon as it is roused by violent passions.

Unfortunately I have not been able to procure all the returns sent in by the peasants in reply to these fatal questions; but I have found enough to show the general spirit which pervaded them.

In these reports the name of every privileged person, whether of the nobility or the middle class, is carefully mentioned; his mode of life is frequently described, and always in an unfavourable manner. The value of his property is curiously examined; the number and extent of his privileges are insisted on at length, and especially the injury they do to all the other inhabitants of the village. The bushels of corn which have to be paid to him as dues are reckoned up; his income is calculated in an envious tone—an income by which no one profits, they say. The casual dues of the parish priest—his stipend, as it was already called—are pronounced to be excessive; it is remarked with bitterness that everything at church must be paid for, and that a poor man cannot even get buried gratis. As to the taxes, they are all unfairly assessed and oppressive; not one of them finds favour, and they are all spoken of in a tone of violence which betrays exasperation.

‘The indirect taxes are detestable,’ they say; ‘there is not a household in which the clerk of the excise does not come and search, nothing is sacred from his eyes and hands. The registration dues are crushing. The collector of the taille is a tyrant, whose rapacity leads him to avail himself of every means of harassing the poor. The bailiffs are no better; no honest farmer can be secure from their ferocity. The collectors are forced to ruin their neighbours in order to avoid exposing themselves to the voracity of these despots.’

The Revolution not only announces its approach in this inquiry; it is already there, speaking its own proper language and showing its face without disguise.

Amid all the differences which exist between the religious Revolution of the sixteenth century and the French Revolution of the eighteenth, one contrast is peculiarly striking: in the sixteenth century most of the great nobles changed their religion from motives of ambition or cupidity; the people, on the contrary, from conviction and without any hope of profit. In the eighteenth century the reverse was the case; disinterested convictions and generous sympathies then agitated the enlightened classes and incited them to revolution, while a bitter feeling of their wrongs and an ardent desire to alter their position excited the common people. The enthusiasm of the former put the last stroke to inflaming and arming the rage and the desires of the latter.

CHAPTER XVIII

CONCERNING SOME PRACTICES BY WHICH THE GOVERNMENT COMPLETED THE REVOLUTIONARY EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE

The Government itself had long been at work to instil into and rivet upon the mind of the common people many of the ideas which have been called revolutionary—ideas hostile to individual liberty, opposed to private rights, and favourable to violence.

The King was the first to show with how much contempt it was possible to treat the most ancient, and apparently the best established, institutions. Louis XV. shook the monarchy and hastened the Revolution quite as much by his innovations as by his vices, by his energy as by his indolence. When the people beheld the fall and disappearance of a Parliament almost contemporary with the monarchy itself, and which had until then seemed as immovable as the throne, they vaguely perceived that they were drawing near a time of violence and of chance when everything may become possible, when nothing, however ancient, is respected, and nothing, however new, may not be tried.

During the whole course of his reign Louis XVI. did nothing but talk of reforms to be accomplished. There are few institutions of which he did not foreshadow the approaching ruin, before the Revolution came to effect it. After removing from the statute-book some of the worst of these institutions he very soon replaced them; it seemed as if he wanted only to loosen their roots, leaving to others the task of striking them down. By some of the reforms which he effected himself, ancient and venerable customs were suddenly changed without sufficient preparation, and established rights were occasionally violated. These reforms prepared the way for the Revolution, not so much by overthrowing the obstacles in its way, as by showing the people how to set about making it. The evil was increased by the very purity and disinterestedness of the intentions which actuated the King and his ministers; for no example is more dangerous than that of violence exerted for a good purpose by honest and well-meaning men.

At a much earlier period Louis XIV. had publicly broached in his edicts the theory that all the land throughout the kingdom had originally been granted conditionally by the State, which was thus declared to be the only true landowner, and that all others were possessors whose titles might be contested, and whose rights were imperfect. This doctrine had arisen out of the feudal system of legislation; but it was not proclaimed in France until feudalism was dying out, and was never adopted by the Courts of justice. It is, in fact, the germ of modern socialism, and it is curious enough to see it first springing up under royal despotism.

During the reigns which followed that of Louis XIV., the administration day by day instilled into the people in a manner still more practical and comprehensible the contempt in which private property was to be held. When during the latter half of the eighteenth century the taste for public works, especially for roads, began to prevail, the Government did not scruple to seize all the land needed for its undertakings, and to pull down the houses which stood in the way. The French Board of Works was already just as enamoured of the geometrical beauty of straight lines as it has been ever since; it carefully avoided following the existing roads if they were at all crooked, and rather than make the slightest deviation it cut through innumerable estates. The ground thus damaged or destroyed was never paid for but at an arbitrary rate and after long delay, or frequently not at all.79

When the Provincial Assembly of Lower Normandy took the administration out of the hands of the Intendant, it was discovered that the price of all the land seized by authority in the preceding twenty years for making roads was still unpaid. The debt thus contracted by the State, and not discharged, in this small corner of France, amounted to 250,000 livres. The number of large proprietors thus injured was limited; but the small ones who suffered were very numerous, for even then the land was much subdivided.80 Every one of these persons had learnt by his own experience how little respect the rights of an individual can claim when the interest of the public requires that they should be invaded—a doctrine which he was not likely to forget when the time came for applying it to others for his own advantage.

In a great number of parishes charitable endowments had formerly existed, destined by their founders to relieve the inhabitants in certain cases, and in conformity to testamentary bequest. Most of these endowments were destroyed during the later days of the monarchy, or diverted from their original objects by mere Orders in Council, that is to say, by the arbitrary act of Government. In most instances the funds thus left to particular villages were taken from them for the benefit of neighbouring hospitals. At the same time the property of these hospitals was in its turn diverted to purposes which the founder had never had in view, and would undoubtedly not have approved. An edict of 1780 authorised all these establishments to sell the lands which had been devised to them at various times to be held by them for ever, and permitted them to hand over the purchase-money to the State, which was to pay the interest upon it. This, they said, was making a better use of the charity of their forefathers than they had done themselves. They forgot that the surest way of teaching mankind to violate the rights of the living is to pay no regard to the will of the dead. The contempt displayed by the Administration of the old French monarchy for testamentary dispositions has never been surpassed by any succeeding power. Nothing could be more unlike the scrupulous anxiety which leads the English to invest every individual citizen with the force of the whole social body in order to assist him in maintaining the effect of his last dispositions, and which induces them to pay even more respect to his memory than to himself.

Compulsory requisitions, the forced sale of provisions, and the maximum, are measures not without their precedents under the old monarchy. I have discovered instances in which the officers of Government, during periods of scarcity, fixed beforehand the price of the provisions which the peasants brought to market; and when the latter stayed away from fear of this constraint, ordinances were promulgated to compel them to come under penalty of a fine.

But nothing taught a more pernicious lesson than some of the forms adopted by criminal justice when the common people were in question. The poor were even then far better protected than has generally been supposed against the aggressions of any citizen richer or more powerful than themselves; but when they had to do with the State, they found only, as I have already described, exceptional tribunals, prejudiced judges, a hasty and illusory procedure, and a sentence executed summarily and without appeal. ‘The Provost of the Constables and his lieutenant are to take cognisance of the disturbances and gatherings which may be occasioned by the scarcity of corn; the prosecution is to take place in due form, and judgment to be passed by the Provost, and without appeal. His Majesty inhibits the jurisdiction of all courts of justice in these cases.’ We learn by the Reports of the Constables, that on these occasions suspected villages were surrounded during the night, that houses were entered before daybreak, and peasants who had been denounced were arrested without further warrant. A man thus arrested frequently remained for a long time in prison before he could speak to his judge, although the edicts directed that every accused person should be examined within four-and-twenty hours. This regulation was as precise and as little respected then as it is now.

By these means a mild and stable government daily taught the people the code of criminal procedure most appropriate to a period of revolution, and best adapted to arbitrary power. These lessons were constantly before their eyes; and to the very last the old monarchy gave the lower classes this dangerous education. Even Turgot himself, in this respect, faithfully imitated his predecessors. When, in 1775, his change in the corn-laws occasioned resistance in the Parliament and disturbances in the rural districts, he obtained a Royal ordonnance transferring the mutineers from the jurisdiction of the tribunals to that of the Provost-Marshal, ‘which is chiefly destined,’ so the phrase runs, ‘to repress popular tumults when it is desirable that examples should be quickly made.’ Nay, worse than this, every peasant leaving his parish without being provided with a certificate signed by the parish priest and by the Syndic, was to be prosecuted, arrested, and tried before the Provost-Marshal as a vagabond.

It is true that under this monarchy of the eighteenth century, though the forms of procedure were terrific, the punishment was almost always light. The object was to inspire fear rather than to inflict pain; or rather, perhaps, those in power were violent and arbitrary from habit or from indifference, and mild by temperament. But this only increased the taste for this summary kind of justice. The lighter the penalty the more readily was the manner forgotten in which it had been pronounced. The mildness of the sentence served to veil the horror of the mode of procedure.

I may venture to affirm, from the facts I have in my possession, that a great number of the proceedings adopted by the Revolutionary Government had precedents and examples in the measures taken with regard to the common people during the last two centuries of the monarchy. The monarchy gave to the Revolution many of its forms; the latter only added to them the atrocity of its own spirit.

CHAPTER XIX

SHOWING THAT A GREAT ADMINISTRATIVE REVOLUTION HAD PRECEDED THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION, AND WHAT WERE THE CONSEQUENCES IT PRODUCED

Nothing had yet been changed in the form of the French Government, but already the greater part of the secondary laws which regulated the condition of persons and the administration of affairs had been abolished or modified.

The destruction of the Guilds, followed by their partial and incomplete restoration, had totally changed all the old relations between workmen and their employers. These relations had become not only different, but uncertain and difficult. The police of the masters was at an end; the authority of the State over the trades was imperfectly established; and the artisan, placed in a constrained and undecided position between the Government and his employer, did not know to whom he was to look for protection, or from whom he was to submit to restraint. This state of discontent and anarchy, into which the whole lower class of the towns had been plunged at one blow, produced very great consequences as soon as the people began to reappear on the political stage.

One year before the Revolution a Royal edict had disturbed the order of the administration of justice in all its parts; several new jurisdictions had been created, a multitude of others abolished, and all the rules of judicial competence changed. Now in France, as I have already shown, the number of persons engaged in administering justice and in executing the sentences of the law was enormous. In fact, it may be said that the whole of the middle class was more or less connected with the tribunals. The effect of this law, therefore, was to unsettle the station and property of thousands of families, and to place them in a new and precarious position. The edict was little less inconvenient to litigants, who found it difficult, in the midst of this judicial revolution, to discover what laws were applicable to their cases, and by what tribunals they were to be decided.

But it was the radical reform which the Administration, properly so called, underwent in 1787, which more than all the rest first threw public affairs into disorder, and shook the private existence of every individual citizen.

I have already mentioned that in what were termed the pays d’élection, that is to say, in about three-quarters of France, the whole administration of each district was abandoned to one man, the Intendant, who acted not only without control, but without advice.

In 1787, in addition to the Intendant, a Provincial Assembly was created, which assumed the real administration of the country. In each village an elective municipal body likewise took the place of the ancient parochial assemblies, and in most cases of the Syndic.

A state of the law so opposed to that which had preceded it, and which so completely changed not only the whole course of affairs, but the relative position of persons, was applied in all places at the same moment and almost in the same manner, without the slightest regard to previous usages or to the peculiar situation of each province, so fully had the passion for unity which characterised the Revolution taken possession of the ancient Government, which the Revolution was about to destroy.

These changes served to display the force of habit in the action of political institutions, and to show how much easier it is to deal with obscure and complicated laws, which have long been in use, than with a totally new system of legislation, however simple.

Under the old French monarchy there existed all sorts of authorities, which varied almost infinitely, according to the provinces; but as none of these authorities had any fixed or definite limits, the field of action of each of them was always common to several others besides. Nevertheless, affairs had come to be transacted with a certain regularity and convenience; whereas the newly established authorities, which were fewer in number, carefully circumscribed, and exactly similar, instantly conflicted and became entangled in hopeless confusion, frequently reducing each other mutually to impotence.

Moreover the new law had one great vice which in itself would have sufficed, especially at first, to render it difficult of execution: all the powers it created were collective81 or corporate.

Under the old monarchy there had been only two methods of administration. Where the administration was entrusted to one man, he acted without the assistance of any assembly; wherever assemblies existed, as in the pays d’état or in the towns, the executive power was not vested in any particular person; the Assembly not only governed and superintended the administration, but administered itself, or by means of temporary commissions which it appointed.

As these were the only two modes of operation which were then understood, when one was given up the other was adopted. It is strange that in the midst of a community so enlightened, and where the administration of the Government had long played so prominent a part, no one ever thought of uniting the two systems and of drawing a distinction, without making a separation, between the power which has to execute and that which superintends and directs. This idea, which appears so simple, never occurred to any one; it was not discovered until the present century, and may be said to be the only great invention in the field of public administration which we can claim. We shall see hereafter the results of the contrary practice when these administrative habits were transferred to political life, and when, in obedience to the traditions of the old institutions of the monarchy, hated as they were, the system which had been followed by the provincial estates and the small municipalities of the towns was applied in the National Convention; and the causes which had formerly occasioned a certain embarrassment in the transaction of business suddenly engendered the Reign of Terror.

The Provincial Assemblies of 1787 were invested with the right of governing themselves in most of the cases in which, until then, the Intendant had acted alone; they were charged, under the authority of the Central Government, with the assessment of the taille and with the superintendence of its collection—with the power of deciding what public works were to be undertaken, and with their execution. All the persons employed in public works, from the inspector down to the driver of the road-gang, were under their control. They were to order what they thought proper, to render an account of the services performed to the Minister, and to suggest to him the fitting remuneration. The parochial trusts were almost entirely placed under the direction of these assemblies; they were to decide, in the first instance, most of the litigated matters which had until then been tried before the Intendant. Many of these functions were unsuitable for a collective and irresponsible body, and moreover they were to be performed by men who were now, for the first time, to take a part in the administration.

The confusion was made complete by depriving the Intendant of all power, though his office was not suppressed. After taking from him the absolute right of doing everything, he was charged with the task of assisting and superintending all that was to be done by the Assembly; as if it were possible for a degraded public officer to enter into the spirit of the law by which he has been dispossessed and to assist its operation.

That which had been done to the Intendant was now extended to his Sub-delegate. By his side, and in the place which he had formerly occupied, was placed a District Assembly, which was to act under the direction of the Provincial Assembly, and upon analogous principles.

All that we know of the acts of the Provincial Assemblies of 1787,82 and even their own reports, show that as soon as they were created they engaged in covert hostilities and often in open war with the Intendants, who made use of their superior experience only to embarrass the movements of their successors. Here an Assembly complained that it was only with difficulty that it could extract the most necessary documents from the hands of the Intendant. There an Intendant accused the members of the Assembly of endeavouring to usurp functions, which, as he said, the edicts had still left to himself. He appealed to the Minister, who often returned no answer, or merely expressed doubts, for the subject was as new and as obscure to him as to every one else. Sometimes the Assembly resolved that the Intendant had administered badly, that the roads which he had caused to be made were ill planned or ill kept up, and that the corporate bodies under his trust have gone to ruin. Frequently these assemblies hesitated in the obscurity of laws so imperfectly known; they sent great distances to consult one another, and constantly sent each other advice. The Intendant of Auch asserted that he had the right to oppose the will of the Provincial Assembly which had authorised a parish to tax itself; the Assembly maintained that this was a subject on which the Intendant could no longer give orders, but only advice, and it asks the Assembly of the Ile de France for its opinion.