If the reader were here to interrupt the perusal of this book, he would have but a very imperfect impression of the government of the old French monarchy, and he would not understand the state of society produced by the Revolution.
Since the citizens of France were thus divided and thus contracted within themselves, since the power of the Crown was so extensive and so great, it might be inferred that the spirit of independence had disappeared with public liberty, and that the whole French people were equally bent in subjection. Such was not the case; the Government had long conducted absolutely and alone all the common affairs of the nation; but it was as yet by no means master of every individual existence.
Amidst many institutions already prepared for absolute power some liberty survived; but it was a sort of strange liberty, which it is not easy at the present day to conceive aright, and which must be very closely scrutinised to comprehend the good and the evil resulting from it.
Whilst the Central Government superseded all local powers, and filled more and more the whole sphere of public authority, some institutions which the Government had allowed to subsist, or which it had created, some old customs, some ancient manners, some abuses even, served to check its action, to keep alive in the hearts of a large number of persons a spirit of resistance, and to preserve the consistency and the independent outline of many characters.
Centralisation had already the same tendency, the same mode of operation, the same aims as in our own time, but it had not yet the same power. Government having, in its eagerness to turn everything into money, put up to sale most of the public offices, had thus deprived itself of the power of giving or withdrawing[95] those offices at pleasure. Thus one of its passions had considerably impaired the success of another: its rapacity had balanced its ambition. The State was therefore incessantly reduced to act through instruments which it had not forged, and which it could not break. The consequence was that its most absolute will was frequently paralysed in the execution of it. This strange and vicious constitution of the public offices thus stood in stead of a sort of political guarantee against the omnipotence of the central power. It was a sort of irregular and ill-constructed breakwater, which divided the action and checked the stroke of the supreme power.
Nor did the Government of that day dispose as yet of that countless multitude of favours, assistances, honours, and moneys which it has now to distribute; it was therefore far less able to seduce as well as to compel.
The Government moreover was imperfectly acquainted with the exact limits of its power.[50] None of its rights were regularly acknowledged or firmly established; its range of action was already immense, but that action was still hesitating and uncertain, as one who gropes along a dark and unknown track. This formidable obscurity, which at that time concealed the limits of every power and enshrouded every right, though it might be favourable to the designs of princes against the freedom of their subjects, was frequently not less favourable to the defence of it.
The administrative power, conscious of the novelty of its origin and of its low extraction, was ever timid in its action when any obstacle crossed its path. It is striking to observe, in reading the correspondence of the French Ministers and Intendants of the eighteenth century, how this Government, which was so absolute and so encroaching as long as its authority is not contested, stood aghast at the aspect of the least resistance; agitated by the slightest criticism, alarmed by the slightest noise, ready on all such occasions to stop, to hesitate, to parley, to treat, and often to fall considerably below the natural limits of its power. The nerveless egotism of Louis XV., and the mild benevolence of his successor, contributed to this state of things. It never occurred to these sovereigns that they could be dethroned. They had nothing of that harsh and restless temper which fear has since often imparted to those who govern. They trampled on none but those whom they did not see.
Several of the privileges, of the prejudices, of the false notions[96] most opposed to the establishment of a regular and salutary free government, kept alive amongst many persons a spirit of independence, and disposed them to hold their ground against the abuses of authority.
The Nobles despised the Administration, properly so called, though they sometimes had occasion to apply to it. Even after they had abandoned their former power, they retained something of that pride of their forefathers which was alike adverse to servitude and to law. They cared little for the general liberty of the community, and readily allowed the hand of authority to lie heavy on all about them; but they did not admit that it should lie heavy on themselves, and they were ready in case of need to run all risks to prevent it. At the commencement of the Revolution that nobility of France which was about to fall with the throne, still held towards the King, and still more towards the King’s agents, an attitude far higher, and language far more free, than the middle class, which was so soon to overthrow the monarchy. Almost all the guarantees against the abuse of power which France possessed during the thirty-seven years of her representative government, were already loudly demanded by the nobles. In reading the instructions of that Order to the States-General, amidst its prejudices and its crotchets, the spirit and some of the great qualities of an aristocracy may still be felt.[51] It must ever be deplored that, instead of bending that nobility to the discipline of law, it was uprooted and struck to the earth. By that act the nation was deprived of a necessary portion of its substance, and a wound was given to freedom which will never be healed. A class which has marched for ages in the first rank has acquired, in this long and uncontested exercise of greatness, a certain loftiness of heart, a natural confidence in its strength, and a habit of being looked up to, which makes it the most resisting element in the frame of society. Not only is its own disposition manly, but its example serves to augment the manliness of every other class. By extirpating such an Order its very enemies are enervated. Nothing can ever completely replace it; it can be born no more; it may recover the titles and the estates, but not the soul of its progenitors.
The Clergy, who have since frequently shown themselves so servilely submissive to the temporal sovereign in civil matters, whosoever that temporal sovereign might be, and who become his most barefaced flatterers on the slightest indication of favour to the Church, formed at that time one of the most independent bodies in[97] the nation, and the only body whose peculiar liberties would have enforced respect.[52]
The provinces had lost their franchises; the rights of the towns were reduced to a shadow. No ten noblemen could meet to deliberate together on any matter without the express permission of the King. But the Church of France retained to the last her periodical assemblies. Within her bosom even ecclesiastical power was circumscribed by limits which were respected.[53] The lower clergy enjoyed the protection of solid guarantees against the tyranny of their superiors, and was not prepared for passive obedience to the Sovereign by the uncontrolled despotism of the bishop. I do not attempt to pass any judgment on this ancient constitution of the Church; I merely assert that by this constitution the spirit of the priesthood was not fashioned to political servility.
Many of the ecclesiastics were moreover gentlemen of birth, and they brought with them into the Church the pride and indocility of their condition. All of them had, moreover, an exalted rank in the State, and certain privileges there. The exercise of those feudal rights, which had proved so fatal to the moral power of the Church, gave to its members, in their individual capacity, a spirit of independence towards the civil authority.
But that which especially contributed to give the clergy the opinions, the wants, the feelings, and often the passions of citizens, was the ownership of land. I have had the patience to read most of the reports and debates still remaining to us from the old Provincial Estates of France, and particularly those of Languedoc, a province in which the clergy participated even more than elsewhere in the details of the public administration; I have also examined the journals of the Provincial Assemblies which sat in 1779 and 1787. Bringing with me in this inquiry the impressions of our own times, I have been surprised to find bishops and priests, many of whom were equally eminent for their piety and for their learning, drawing up reports on the construction of a road or a canal, discussing with great science and skill the best methods to augment the produce of agriculture, to ensure the well-being of the inhabitants, and to encourage industry, these churchmen being always equal, and often superior, to all the laymen engaged with them in the transaction of the same affairs.
I maintain, in opposition to an opinion which is very generally[98] and very firmly established, that the nations which deprive the Roman Catholic clergy of all participation in landed property, and convert their incomes into salaries, do in fact only promote the interests of the Papacy, and those of the temporal Ruler, whilst they renounce an important element of freedom amongst themselves.
A man who, as far as the best portion of his nature is concerned, is the subject of a foreign authority, and who in the country where he dwells can have no family, will only be linked to the soil by one durable tie—namely, landed property. Break that bond, and he belongs to no place in particular. In the place where the accident of birth may have cast him, he lives like an alien in the midst of a civil community, scarcely any of whose civil interests can directly affect him. His conscience binds him to the Pope; his maintenance to the Sovereign. His only country is the Church. In every political event he perceives little more than the advantage or the loss of his own profession. Let but the Church be free and prosperous, what matters all the rest? His most natural political state is that of indifference—an excellent member of the Christian commonwealth, but elsewhere a worthless citizen. Such sentiments and such opinions as these in a body of men who are the directors of childhood, and the guardians of morality, cannot fail to enervate the soul of the entire nation in relation to public life.
A correct impression of the revolution which may be effected in the human mind by a change wrought in social conditions, may be obtained from a perusal of the Instructions given to the Delegates of the Clergy at the States-General of 1789.[54]
The clergy in those documents frequently showed their intolerance, and sometimes a tenacious attachment to several of their former privileges; but, in other respects, not less hostile to despotism, not less favourable to civil liberty, not less enamoured of political liberty, than the middle classes or the nobility, this Order proclaimed that personal liberty must be secured, not by promises alone, but by a form of procedure analogous to the Habeas Corpus Act. They demanded the destruction of the State prisons, the abolition of extraordinary jurisdictions and of the practice of calling up causes to the Council of State, publicity of procedure, the permanence of judicial officers, the admissibility of all ranks to public employments, which should be open to merit alone; a system of military recruiting less oppressive and humiliating to the people, and from which none should be exempted; the extinction by purchase of seignorial rights, which sprung from the feudal system were, they said, contrary to freedom; unrestricted freedom of[99] labour; the suppression of internal custom-houses; the multiplication of private schools, insomuch that one gratuitous school should exist in every parish; lay charitable institutions in all the rural districts, such as workhouses and workshops of charity; and every kind of encouragement to agriculture.
In the sphere of politics, properly so called, the clergy proclaimed, louder than any other class, that the nation had an indefeasible and inalienable right to assemble to enact laws and to vote taxes. No Frenchman, said the priests of that day, can be forced to pay a tax which he has not voted in person or by his representative. The clergy further demanded that States-General freely elected should annually assemble; that they should in presence of the nation discuss all its chief affairs; that they should make general laws paramount to all usages or particular privileges; that the deputies should be inviolable and the ministers of the Crown constantly responsible. The clergy also desired that assemblies of States should be created in all the provinces, and municipal corporations in all the towns. Of divine right not a word.
Upon the whole, and notwithstanding the notorious vices of some of its members, I question if there ever existed in the world a clergy more remarkable than the Catholic clergy of France at the moment when it was overtaken by the Revolution—a clergy more enlightened, more national, less circumscribed within the bounds of private duty and more alive to public obligations, and at the same time more zealous for the faith:—persecution proved it. I entered on the study of these forgotten institutions full of prejudices against the clergy of that day: I conclude that study full of respect for them. They had in truth no defects but those inherent in all corporate bodies, whether political or religious, when they are strongly constituted and knit together; such as a tendency to aggression, a certain intolerance of disposition, and an instinctive—sometimes a blind—attachment to the particular rights of their Order.
The Middle Classes of the time preceding the Revolution were also much better prepared than those of the present day to show a spirit of independence. Many even of the defects of their social constitution contributed to this result. We have already seen that the public employments occupied by these classes were even more numerous than at present, and that the passion for obtaining these situations was equally intense. But mark the difference of the age. Most of those places being neither given nor taken away by the Government, increased the importance of those who filled them without placing them at the mercy of the ruler; hence, the very[100] cause which now completes the subjection of so many persons was precisely that which most powerfully enabled them at that time to maintain their independence.
The immunities of all kinds which so unhappily separated the middle from the lower classes, converted the former into a spurious aristocracy, which often displayed the pride and the spirit of resistance of the real aristocracy. In each of those small particular associations which divided the middle classes into so many sections, the general advantage was readily overlooked, but the interests and the rights of each body were always kept in view. The common dignity, the common privileges were to be defended.[55] No man could ever lose himself in the crowd, or find a hiding-place for base subserviency. Every man stood, as it were, on a stage, extremely contracted it is true, but in a glare of light, and there he found himself in presence of the same audience, ever ready to applaud or to condemn him.
The art of stifling every murmur of resistance was at that time far less perfected than it is at present. France had not yet become that dumb region in which we dwell: every sound on the contrary had an echo, though political liberty was still unknown, and every voice that was raised might be heard afar.
That which more especially in those times ensured to the oppressed the means of being heard was the constitution of the Courts of Justice. France had become a land of absolute government by her political and administrative institutions, but her people were still free by her institutions of justice. The judicial administration of the old monarchy was complicated, troublesome, tedious, and expensive: these were no doubt great faults, but servility towards the Government was not to be met with there—that servility which is but another form of venality, and the worst form. That capital vice, which not only corrupts the judge, but soon infects the whole body of the people, was altogether unknown to the elder magistracy. The judges could not be removed, and they sought no promotion—two things alike necessary to their independence; for what matters it that a judge cannot be coerced if there are a thousand means of seduction?
It is true that the power of the Crown had succeeded in depriving the Courts of ordinary jurisdiction of the cognisance of almost all the suits in which the public authorities were interested; but though they had been stripped, they still were feared. Though they might be prevented from recording their judgments, the Government did not always dare to prevent them from receiving[101] complaints or from recording their opinions; and as the language of the Courts still preserved the tone of that old language of France which loved to call things by their right names, the magistrates not unfrequently stigmatised the acts of the Government as arbitrary and despotic.[56] The irregular intervention of the Courts in the affairs of government, which often disturbed the conduct of them, thus served occasionally to protect the liberties of the subject. The evil was great, but it served to curb a greater evil.
In these judicial bodies and all around them the vigour of the ancient manners of the nation was preserved in the midst of modern opinions. The Parliaments of France doubtless thought more of themselves than of the commonwealth; but it must be acknowledged that, in defence of their own independence and honour, they always bore themselves with intrepidity, and that they imparted their spirit to all that came near them.
When in 1770 the Parliament of Paris was broken, the magistrates who belonged to it submitted to the loss of their profession and their power without a single instance of any individual yielding to the will of the sovereign. Nay, more, some Courts of a different kind, such as the Court of Aids, which were neither affected nor menaced, voluntarily exposed themselves to the same harsh treatment, when that treatment had become certain. Nor is this all: the leading advocates who practised before the Parliament resolved of their own accord to share its fortune; they renounced all that made their glory and their wealth, and condemned themselves to silence rather than appear before dishonoured judges. I know of nothing in the history of free nations grander than what occurred on this occasion, and yet this happened in the eighteenth century, hard by the court of Louis XV.
The habits of the French Courts of justice had become in many respects the habits of the nation. The Courts of justice had given birth to the notion that every question was open to discussion and every decision subject to appeal, and likewise to the use of publicity, and to a taste for forms of proceeding—things adverse to servitude: this was the only part of the education of a free people which the institutions of the old monarchy had given to France. The administration itself had borrowed largely from the language and the practice of the Courts. The King considered himself obliged to assign motives for his edicts, and to state his reasons before he drew the conclusion; the Council of State caused its orders to be preceded by long preambles; the Intendants promulgated[102] their ordinances in the forms of judicial procedure. In all the administrative bodies of any antiquity, such, for example, as the body of the Treasurers of France or that of the élus (who assessed the taille), the cases were publicly debated and decided after argument at the bar. All these usages, all these formalities, were so many barriers to the arbitrary power of the sovereign.
The people alone, applying that term to the lower orders of society, and especially the people of the rural districts, were almost always unable to offer any resistance to oppression except by violence.
Most of the means of defence which I have here passed in review were, in fact, beyond their reach; to employ those means, a place in society where they could be seen, or a voice loud enough to make itself heard, was requisite; But above the ranks of the lower orders there was not a man in France who, if he had the courage, might not contest his obedience and resist in giving way.
The King spoke as the chief of the nation rather than as its master. ‘We glory,’ said Louis XVI., at his accession, in the preamble of a decree, ‘we glory to command a free and generous nation.’ One of his ancestors had already expressed the same idea in older language, when, thanking the States-General for the boldness of their remonstrances, he said, ‘We like better to speak to freemen than to serfs.’
The men of the eighteenth century knew little of that sort of passion for comfort which is the mother of servitude—a relaxing passion, though it be tenacious and unalterable, which mingles and intertwines itself with many private virtues, such as domestic affections, regularity of life, respect for religion, and even with the lukewarm, though assiduous, practice of public worship, which favours propriety but proscribes heroism, and excels in making decent livers but base citizens. The men of the eighteenth century were better and they were worse.
The French of that age were addicted to joy and passionately fond of amusement; they were perhaps more lax in their habits, and more vehement in their passions and opinions than those of the present day, but they were strangers to the temperate and decorous sensualism that we see about us. In the upper classes men thought more of adorning life than of rendering it comfortable; they sought to be illustrious rather than to be rich. Even in the middle ranks the pursuit of comfort never absorbed every faculty of the mind; that pursuit was often abandoned for higher and more refined enjoyments; every man placed some object beyond the love of money before his eyes. ‘I know my countrymen,[103]’ said a contemporary writer, in language which, though eccentric, is spirited, ‘apt to melt and dissipate the metals, they are not prone to pay them habitual reverence, and they will not be slow to turn again to their former idols, to valour, to glory, and, I will add, to magnanimity.’
The baseness of mankind is, moreover, not to be estimated by the degree of their subserviency to a sovereign power; that standard would be an incorrect one. However submissive the French may have been before the Revolution to the will of the King, one sort of obedience was altogether unknown to them: they knew not what it was to bow before an illegitimate and contested power—a power but little honoured, frequently despised, but which is willingly endured because it may be serviceable or because it may hurt. To this degrading form of servitude they were ever strangers. The King inspired them with feelings which none of the most absolute princes who have since appeared in the world have been able to call forth, and which are become incomprehensible to the present generation, so entirely has the Revolution extirpated them from the hearts of the nation. They loved him with the affection due to a father; they revered him with the respect due to God. In submitting to the most arbitrary of his commands they yielded less to compulsion than to loyalty, and thus they frequently preserved great freedom of mind even in the most complete dependence. To them the greatest evil of obedience was compulsion; to us it is the least: the worst is in that servile sentiment which leads men to obey. We have no right to despise our forefathers. Would to God that we could recover, with their prejudices and their faults, something of their greatness!
It would then be a mistake to think that the state of society in France before the Revolution was one of servility and dependence.[57] Much more liberty existed in that society than in our own time; but it was a species of irregular and intermittent liberty, always contracted within the bounds of certain classes, linked to the notion of exemption and of privilege, which rendered it almost as easy to defy the law as to defy arbitrary power, and scarcely ever went far enough to furnish to all classes of the community the most natural and necessary securities.[58] Thus reduced, and thus deformed, liberty was still not unfruitful. It was this liberty which, at the very time when centralisation was tending more and more to equalise, to emasculate, and to dim the character of the nation, still preserved[104] amongst a large class of private persons their native vigour, their colour, and their outline, fostered self-respect in the heart, and often caused the love of glory to predominate over every other taste. By this liberty were formed those vigorous characters, those proud and daring spirits which were about to appear, and were to make the French Revolution at once the object of the admiration and the terror of succeeding generations. It would have been so strange that virtues so masculine should have grown on a soil where freedom was no more.
But if this sort of ill-regulated and morbid liberty prepared the French to overflow despotism, perhaps it likewise rendered them less fit than any other people to establish in lieu of that despotism the free and peaceful empire of constitutional law.