The Ancient Regime Part 41

"In Touraine," writes the intendant,[5421] "most of the votes have been bespoken or begged for. Trusty agents, at the moment of voting, placed filled-in ballots in the hands of the voters, and put in their way, on reaching the taverns, every doc.u.ment and suggestion calculated to excite their imaginations and determine their choice for the gentry of the bar."

"In the senechausee of Lectoure, a number of parishes have not been designated or notified to send their reports or deputies to the district a.s.sembly. In those which were notified the lawyers, attorneys and notaries of the small neighboring towns have made up the list of grievances themselves without summoning the community. . . Exact copies of this single rough draft were made and sold at a high price to the councils of each country parish".--

This is an alarming symptom, one marking out in advance the road the Revolution is to take: The man of the people is indoctrinated by the advocate, the pikeman allowing himself to be led by the spokesman.[5422]

The effect of their combination is apparent the first year. In Franche-Comte[5423] after consultation with a person named Rouget, the peasants of the Marquis de Chaila "determine to make no further payments to him, and to divide amongst themselves the product of the wood-cuttings." In his paper "the lawyer states that all the communities of the province have decided to do the same thing. . . His consultation is diffused to such an extent around the country that many of the communities are satisfied that they owe nothing more to the king nor to the seigniors. M. de Marnesia, deputy to the (National) a.s.sembly, has arrived (here) to pa.s.s a few days at home on account of his health. He has been treated in the rudest and most scandalous manner; it was even proposed to conduct him back to Paris under guard. After his departure his chateau was attacked, the doors burst open and the walls of his garden pulled down. (And yet) no gentleman has done more for the people on his domain the M. le Marquis de Marnesia. . . Excesses of every kind are on the increase; I have constant complaints of the abuse which the national militia make of their arms, and which I cannot remedy."

According to an utterance in the National a.s.sembly the police imagines that it is to be disbanded and has therefore no desire to make enemies for itself. "The baillages are as timid as the police-forces; I send them business constantly, but no culprit is punished."--"No nation enjoys liberty so indefinite and so disastrous to honest people; it is absolutely against the rights of man to see oneself constantly liable to have his throat cut by the scoundrels who daily confound liberty with license."--In other words, the pa.s.sions utilize the theory to justify themselves, and the theory appeal to pa.s.sion to be carried out. For example, near Liancourt, the Duc de Larochefoucauld possessed an uncultivated area of ground; "at the commencement of the revolution,[5424] the poor of the town declare that, as they form a part of the nation, untilled lands being national property, this belongs to them," and "with no other formality" they take possession of it, divide it up, plant hedges and clear it off. "This, says Arthur Young, shows the general disposition. . . . Pushed a little farther the consequences would not be slight for properties in this kingdom." Already, in the preceding year, near Rouen, the marauders, who cut down and sell the forests, declare, that "the people have the right to take whatever they require for their necessities." They have had the doctrine preached to them that they are sovereign, and they act as sovereigns. The condition of their intellects being given, nothing is more natural than their conduct. Several millions of savages are thus let loose by a few thousand windbags, the politics of the cafe finding an interpreter and ministrants in the mob of the streets. On the one hand brute force is at the service of the radical dogma. On the other hand radical dogma is at the service of brute force. And here, in disintegrated France, these are the only two valid powers remaining erect on the debris of the others.

NOTES:

[Footnote 5401: Necker, "De l'Administration des Finances," II. 422, 435.]

[Footnote 5402: The wages have in 1789 been estimated to be 7 sous 4 deniers of which 2 sous and 6 deniers would have to be paid for the bread. (Mercure de France, May 7, 1791.)]

[Footnote 5403: Aubertin, 345. Letter to the Comte de St. Germain (during the Seven Years War). "The soldier's hards.h.i.+ps make one's heart bleed; he pa.s.ses his days in a state of abject misery, despised and living like a chained dog to be used for combat."]

[Footnote 5404: De Tocqueville, 190, 191.]

[Footnote 5405: Archives nationales, H, 1591.]

[Footnote 5406: De Rochambeau, "Memoires," I. 427.--D'Argenson, December 24, 1752. "30,000 men have been punished for desertion since the peace of 1748; this extensive desertion is attributed to the new drill which fatigues and disheartens the soldier, and especially the veterans."--Voltaire, "Dict. Phil.," article "Punishments." "I was amazed one day on seeing the list of deserters, for eight years amounting to 60,000."]

[Footnote 5407: Archives nationales, H, 554. (Letter of M. de Bertrand, intendant of Rennes, August 17, 1785).]

[Footnote 5408: Mercier, XI, 121.]

[Footnote 5409: Now we know better. The most healthy bread is the one in which some bran is left, such bran is not only good for the digestion but contains vitamins and minerals as well. (SR).]

[Footnote 5410: De Vaublanc, 149.]

[Footnote 5411: De Segur, I, 20 (1767).]

[Footnote 5412: Augeard, "Memoires," 165.]

[Footnote 5413: Horace Walpole, September 5, 1789.]

[Footnote 5414: Laboulaye, "De l'Administration francaise sous Louis XVI." (Revue des Cours litteraires, IV, 743).--Albert Babeau, I, 111.

(Doleances et veux des corporations de Troyes).]

[Footnote 5415: De Tocqueville, 158.]

[Footnote 5416: Ibid. 304. (The words of Burke.)]

[Footnote 5417: Travels in France, I. 240, 263.]

[Footnote 5418: What an impression this view must have made on Lenin who sought, between 1906 and 1909 in Paris, the means and ways with which to re-create the French revolution in Russia. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5419: Beugnot, I. 115, 116.]

[Footnote 5420: Archives nationales, proces-verbaux and cahiers of the States-General, vol. XIII, p. 405. (Letter of the Marquis de Fodoas, commandant of Armagnac, to M. Necker, may 29, 1789.)]

[Footnote 5421: Ibid. Vol. CL, p. 174. ( Letter from the intendant of Tours of March 25, 1789.)]

[Footnote 5422: "Lenin deviated from Marx not in preaching the necessity for violent proletarian revolution, but by advocating the creation of an elite party of professional revolutionaries to hasten this end, and by arguing for the dictators.h.i.+p of this party rather than the working cla.s.s as a whole." The Guinness Encyclopedia page 269. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5423: Archives nationales, H, 784. (Letters of M. de Langeron, military commandant at Besancon, October 16 and 18, 1789). The consultation is annexed.]

[Footnote 5424: Arthur Young, I, 344.]

CHAPTER V. SUMMARY.

I. Suicide of the Ancient Regime.

These two forces, radical dogma and brute force, are the successors and executors of the Ancient regime, and, on contemplating the way in which this regime engendered, brought forth, nourished, installed and stimulated them we cannot avoid considering its history as one long suicide, like that of a man who, having mounted to the top of an immense ladder, cuts away from under his feet the support which has kept him up.--In a case of this kind good intentions are not sufficient; to be liberal and even generous, to enter upon a few semi-reforms, is of no avail. On the contrary, through both their qualities and defects, through both their virtues and their vices, the privileged wrought their own destruction, their merits contributing to their ruin as well as their faults.--Founders of society, formerly ent.i.tled to their advantages through their services, they have preserved their rank without fulfilling their duties; their position in the local as in the central government is a sinecure, and their privileges have become abuses. At their head, a king, creating France by devoting himself to her as if his own property, ended by sacrificing her as if his own property; the public purse is his private purse, while pa.s.sions, vanities, personal weaknesses, luxurious habits, family solicitudes, the intrigues of a mistress and the caprices of a wife, govern a state of twenty-six millions of men with an arbitrariness, a heedlessness, a prodigality, a lack of skill, an absence of consistency that would scarcely be overlooked in the management of a private domain.--The king and the privileged excel in one direction, in manners, in good taste, in fas.h.i.+on, in the talent for representation and in entertaining and receiving, in the gift of graceful conversation, in finesse and in gaiety, in the art of converting life into a brilliant and ingenious festivity, regarding the world as a drawing room of refined idlers in which it suffices to be amiable and witty, whilst, actually, it is an arena where one must be strong for combats, and a laboratory in which one must work in order to be useful.--Through the habit, perfection and sway of polished intercourse they stamped on the French intellect a cla.s.sic form, which, combined with recent scientific acquisitions, produced the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the disrepute of tradition, the ambition of recasting all human inst.i.tutions according to the sole dictates of Reason, the appliance of mathematical methods to politics and morals, the catechism of the Rights of Man, and other dogmas of anarchical and despotic character in the CONTRAT SOCIAL.--Once this chimera is born they welcome it as a drawing room fancy; they use the little monster as a plaything, as yet innocent and decked with ribbons like a pastoral lambkin; they never dream of its becoming a raging, formidable brute; they nourish it, and caress it, and then, opening their doors, they let it descend into the streets.--Here among the middle cla.s.s which the government has rendered ill-disposed by compromising its fortunes, which the privileged have offended by restricting its ambition, which is wounded by inequality through injured self-esteem, the revolutionary theory gains rapid accessions, a sudden asperity, and, in a few years, it finds itself undisputed master of public opinion.--At this moment and at its summons, another colossal monster rises up, a monster with millions of heads, a blind, startled animal, an entire people pressed down, exasperated and suddenly loosened against the government whose exactions have despoiled it, against the privileged whose rights have reduced it to starvation, without, in these rural districts abandoned by their natural protectors, encountering any surviving authority; without, in these provinces subject to the yoke of universal centralization, encountering a single independent group and without the possibility of forming, in this society broken up by despotism, any centers of enterprise and resistance; without finding, in this upper cla.s.s disarmed by its very humanity, a policy devoid of illusion and capable of action. Without which all these good intentions and fine intellects shall be unable to protect themselves against the two enemies of all liberty and of all order, against the contagion of the democratic nightmare which disturbs the ablest heads and against the irruptions of the popular brutality which perverts the best of laws. At the moment of opening the States-General the course of ideas and events is not only fixed but, again, apparent. Beforehand and unconsciously, each generation bears (Page 400/296)within itself its past and its future; and to this one, long before the end, one might have been able to foretell its fate, and, if both details as well as the entire action could have been foreseen, one would readily have accepted the following fiction made up by a converted Laharpe[5501] when, at the end of the Directory, he arranged his souvenirs:

II.

"It seems to me," he says, "as if it were but yesterday, and yet it is at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our fellow members of the Academy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The company was numerous and of every profession, courtiers, advocates, men of letters and academicians, all had feasted luxuriously according to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance contributed to the social gaiety a sort of freedom not always kept within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at which everything may be expressed that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had listened to these without recourse to their fans. Hence a deluge of witticisms against religion, one quoting a tirade from 'La Pucelle,'

another bringing forward certain philosophical stanzas by Diderot. . . .

and with unbounded applause. . . . The conversation becomes more serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution accomplished by Voltaire, and all agree in its being the first t.i.tle to his fame. 'He gave the tone to his century, finding readers in the antechambers as well as in the drawing-room.' One of the guests narrates, bursting with laughter, what a hairdresser said to him while powdering his hair: 'You see, sir, although I am a miserable scrub, I have no more religion than any one else.' They conclude that the Revolution will soon be consummated, that superst.i.tion and fanaticism must wholly give way to philosophy, and they thus calculate the probabilities of the epoch and those of the future society which will see the reign of reason. The most aged lament not being able to flatter themselves that they will see it; the young rejoice in a reasonable prospect of seeing it, and especially do they congratulate the Academy on having paved the way for the great work, and on having been the headquarters, the center, the inspirer of freedom of thought."

"One of the guests had taken no part in this gay conversation a person named Cazotte, an amiable and original man, but, unfortunately, infatuated with the delusions of the visionary. In the most serious tone he begins: 'Gentlemen,' says he, 'be content; you will witness this great revolution that you so much desire. You know that I am something of a prophet, and I repeat it, you will witness it. . . . Do you know the result of this revolution, for all of you, so long as you remain here?'--'Ah!' exclaims Condorcet with his shrewd, simple air and smile, 'let us see, a philosopher is not sorry to encounter a prophet.'--'You, Monsieur de Condorcet, will expire stretched on the floor of a dungeon; you will die of the poison you take to escape the executioner, of the poison which the felicity of that era will compel you always to carry about your person!'--At first, great astonishment, and then came an outburst of laughter. 'What has all this in common with philosophy and the reign of reason?'--'Precisely what I have just remarked to you; in the name of philosophy, of humanity, of freedom, under the reign of reason, you will thus reach your end; and, evidently, the reign of reason will arrive, for there will be temples of reason, and, in those days, in all France, the temples will be those alone of reason. . . .

You, Monsieur de Champfort, you will sever your veins with twenty-two strokes of a razor and yet you will not die for months afterwards. You, Monsieur Vicq-d'Azir, you will not open your own veins but you will have them opened six times in one day, in the agonies of gout, so as to be more certain of success, and you will die that night. You, Monsieur de Nicolai, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur Bailly, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur de Malesherbes, on the scaffold;. . . you, Monsieur Roucher, also on the scaffold.'--'But then we shall have been overcome by Turks or Tartars?'--'By no means; you will be governed, as I have already told you, solely by philosophy and reason. Those who are to treat you in this manner will all be philosophers, will all, at every moment, have on their lips the phrases you have uttered within the hour, will repeat your maxims, will quote, like yourselves, the stanzas of Diderot and of "La Pucelle."'--'And when will all this happen?'--'Six years will not pa.s.s before what I tell you will be accomplished.'--'Well, these are miracles,' exclaims La Harpe, 'and you leave me out?'--'You will be no less a miracle, for you will then be a Christian.'--'Ah,' interposes Champfort, I breathe again; if we are to die only when La Harpe becomes a Christian we are immortals.'--'As to that, we women,' says the d.u.c.h.esse de Gramont, 'are extremely fortunate in being of no consequence in revolutions. It is understood that we are not to blame, and our s.e.x.'

--'Your s.e.x, ladies, will not protect you this time. . . . You will be treated precisely as men, with no difference whatever. . . . You, Madame la d.u.c.h.esse, will be led to the scaffold, you and many ladies besides yourself in a cart with your hands tied behind your back.'--'Ah, in that event, I hope to have at least a carriage covered with black.'--'No, Madame, greater ladies than yourself will go, like yourself in a cart and with their hands tied like yours.'--'Greater ladies! What! Princesses of the blood!'--'Still greater ladies than those. . .'They began to think the jest carried too far. Madame de Gramont, to dispel the gloom, did not insist on a reply to her last exclamation, contenting herself by saying in the lightest tone, 'And they will not even leave one a confessor!'--'No, Madame, neither you nor any other person will be allowed a confessor; the last of the condemned that will have one, as an act of grace, will be. . .' He stopped a moment. 'Tell me, now, who is the fortunate mortal enjoying this prerogative?'--'It is the last that will remain to him, and it will be the King of France.'"

NOTE:

[Footnote 5501: Laharpe, or La Harpe, Jean Francois. (Paris 1739-1803).

Author and critic, made a member of the Academy in 1776. (SR).]