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.
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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[164] 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[165] 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.