As the common people of France had not appeared for one single moment on the theatre of public affairs for upwards of one hundred and forty years, no one any longer imagined that they could ever again resume their position. They appeared unconscious, and were therefore believed to be deaf; accordingly, those who began to take an interest in their condition talked about them in their presence just as if they had not been there. It seemed as if these remarks could only be heard by those who were placed above the common people, and that the only danger to be apprehended was that they might not be fully understood by the upper classes.
The very men who had most to fear from the fury of the people declaimed loudly in their presence on the cruel injustice under which the people had always suffered. They pointed out to each other the monstrous vices of those institutions which had weighed most heavily upon the lower orders: they employed all their powers of rhetoric in depicting the miseries of the common people and their ill-paid labour; and thus they infuriated while they endeavoured to relieve them. I do not speak of the writers, but of the Government, of its chief agents, and of those belonging to the privileged class itself.
When the King, thirteen years before the Revolution, tried to abolish the use of compulsory labour, he said, in the preamble to this decree, ‘With the exception of a small number of provinces (the pays d’état), almost all the roads throughout the kingdom have been made by the gratuitous labour of the poorest part of our subjects. Thus the whole burden has fallen on those who possess nothing but their hands, and who are interested only in a secondary degree in the existence of roads; those really interested are the landowners, nearly all privileged persons, whose estates are increased in value by the construction of roads. By forcing the poor to keep them up unaided, and by compelling them to give their time and labour without remuneration, they are deprived of[156] their sole resource against want and hunger, because they are made to labour for the profit of the rich.’
When, at the same period, an attempt was made to abolish the restrictions which the system of trading companies or guilds imposed on artisans, it was proclaimed, in the King’s name, ‘that the right to work is the most sacred of all possessions; that every law by which it is infringed violates the natural rights of man, and is null and void in itself; that the existing corporations are moreover grotesque and tyrannical institutions, the result of selfishness, avarice, and violence.’ Such words as these were dangerous, no doubt, but, what was infinitely more so, was that they were spoken in vain. A few months later the corporations and the system of compulsory labour were again established.
It is said that Turgot was the Minister who put this language into the King’s mouth, but most of Turgot’s successors made him hold no other. When, in 1780, the King announced to his subjects that the increase of the taille would, for the future, be subject to public registration, he took care to add, by way of commentary, ‘Those persons who are subject to the taille, besides being harassed by the vexations incident to its collection, have likewise hitherto been exposed to unexpected augmentations of the tax, insomuch that the contributions paid by the poorest part of our subjects have increased in a much greater proportion than those paid by all the rest.’ When the King, not yet venturing to place all the public burdens on an equal footing, attempted at least to establish equality of taxation in those which were already imposed on the middle class, he said, ‘His Majesty hopes that rich persons will not consider themselves aggrieved by being placed on the common level, and made to bear their part of a burden which they ought long since to have shared more equally.’
But it was, above all, at periods of scarcity that nothing was left untried to inflame the passions of the people far more than to provide for their wants. In order to stimulate the charity of the rich, one Intendant talked of ‘the injustice and insensibility of those landowners who owe all they possess to the labours of the poor, and who let them die of hunger at the very moment they are toiling to augment the returns of landed property.’ The King, too, thus expressed himself on a similar occasion: ‘His Majesty is determined to defend the people against man?uvres which expose them to the want of the most needful food, by forcing them to give their labour at any price that the rich choose to bestow. The King will not suffer one part of his subjects to be sacrificed to the avidity of the other.’
[157]
Until the very end of the monarchy the strife which subsisted among the different administrative powers gave occasion for all sorts of demonstrations of this kind; the contending parties readily imputed to each other the miseries of the people. A strong instance of this appeared in the quarrel which arose, in 1772, between the Parliament of Toulouse and the King, with reference to the transport of grain. ‘The Government, by its bad measures, places the poor in danger of dying of hunger,’ said the Parliament. ‘The ambition of the Parliament and the avidity of the rich are the cause of the general distress,’ retorted the King. Thus both the parties were endeavouring to impress the minds of the common people with the belief that their superiors are always to blame for their sufferings.
These things are not contained in the secret correspondence of the time, but in public documents which the Government and the Parliaments themselves took care to have printed and published by thousands. The King took occasion incidentally to tell very harsh truths both to his predecessors and to himself. ‘The treasure of the State,’ said he on one occasion, ‘has been burdened by the lavish expenditure of several successive reigns. Many of our inalienable domains have been granted on leases at nominal rents.’ On another occasion he was made to say, with more truth than prudence, ‘The privileged trading companies mainly owed their origin to the fiscal avidity of the Crown.’ Farther on, he remarked that ‘if useless expenses have often been incurred, and if the taille has increased beyond all bounds, it has been because the Board of Finance found an increase of the taille the easiest resource inasmuch as it was clandestine, and was therefore employed, although many other expedients would have been less burdensome to our people.’[77]
All this was addressed to the enlightened part of the nation, in order to convince it of the utility of certain measures which private interests rendered unpopular. As for the common people, it was assumed that if they listened they did not understand.
It must be admitted that at the bottom of all these charitable feelings there remained a strong bias of contempt for these wretched beings whose miseries the higher classes so sincerely wished to relieve: and that we are somewhat reminded, by this display of compassion, of the notion of Madame Duchatelet, who, as Voltaire’s secretary tells us, did not scruple to undress herself before her attendants, not thinking it by any means proved that lackeys are men. And let it not be supposed that Louis XVI.[158] or his ministers were the only persons who held the dangerous language which I have just cited; the privileged persons, who were about to become the first objects of the popular fury, expressed themselves in exactly the same manner before their inferiors. It must be admitted that in France the higher classes of society had begun to pay attention to the condition of the poor before they had any reason to fear them; they interested themselves in their fate at a time when they had not begun to believe that the sufferings of the poor were the precursors of their own perdition. This was peculiarly visible in the ten years which preceded 1789; the peasants were the constant objects of compassion, their condition was continually discussed, the means of affording them relief were examined, the chief abuses from which they suffered were exposed, and the fiscal laws which pressed most heavily upon them were condemned; but the manner in which this new-born sympathy was expressed was as imprudent as the long-continued insensibility which had preceded it.
If we read the reports of the Provincial Assemblies which met in some parts of France in 1779, and subsequently throughout the kingdom, and if we study the other public records left by them, we shall be touched by the generous sentiments expressed in them, and astonished at the wonderful imprudence of the language in which they are expressed.
The Provincial Assembly of Lower Normandy said, in 1787, ‘We have too frequently seen the money destined by the King for roads serve only to increase the prosperity of the rich without any benefit to the people. It has often been employed to embellish the approach to a country mansion instead of making a more convenient entrance to a town or village.’ In the same assembly the Orders of nobility and clergy, after describing the abuses of compulsory labour, spontaneously offered to contribute out of their own funds 50,000 livres towards the improvement of the roads, in order, as they said, that the roads of the province might be made practicable without any further cost to the people. It would probably have cost these privileged classes less to abolish the compulsory system, and to substitute for it a general tax of which they should pay their quota; but though willing to give up the profit derived from inequality of taxation, they liked to maintain the appearance of the privilege. While they gave up that part of their rights which was profitable, they carefully retained that which was odious.
Other assemblies, composed entirely of landowners exempt from the taille, and who fully intended to continue so, nevertheless[159] 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[160] 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[161] 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.