158 GENERAL VIEW OF THE FRENCH SOCIAL SYSTEM. [1788. plans of taxation. Such an assembly had not been heard of for a hundred and sixty years. Mr. Jefferson, the American ambassador at Paris, announces this fact to his government. He saw its significance, writing, in a private letter, "this event, which will hardly excite any attention in America, is deemed here the most important one which has taken place in their civil line during the present century." This body met towards the end of February, 1787. Calonne shows his terrible deficit; he proposes a new land-tax, from which no proprietors,-neither noblesse, nor clergy, nor any other privileged class,-shall be exempt. The majority of the Notables. was composed of these privileged classes. They would have nothing to do with the scheme of Calonne; and the Controller, who had hoped for more effectual control over an enormous deficit than the worn-out system of borrowing, is dismissed to make way for others who may be able to manage more adroitly. At this period an Englishman visited France, who could observe more accurately, and reason more acutely, than diplomatists who moved in a narrow circle. Arthur Young travelled over various parts of that kingdom in 1787, 1788, and 1789. M. Tocqueville speaks of Young's "Travels," published in 1792, as "one of the most instructive works which exist on the former state of society in France."+ Let us see how this man of large experience, who had uniformly regarded the prosperous condition of the labourers as an essential concomitant of the prosperity of the farmers, describes the French peasantry. He proceeds on his journey south from Paris to Orleans, and having crossed the Loire finds that the cultivators are metayers-men who hire the land without ability to stock it, the proprietor finding cattle and seed and the tenant labour, and dividing the scanty produce. As he goes on he becomes excited at the wretched management and the miserable dwellings, in a country highly improveable-" the property, perhaps, of some of those glittering beings who figured in the procession the other day at Versailles. Heaven grant me patience while I see a country * Tucker-"Life of Jefferson," vol. i. p. 253. +France before the Revolution," p. 179. 1788.] GENERAL VIEW OF THE FRENCH SOCIAL SYSTEM. 159 thus neglected, and forgive me the oaths I swear at the absence and ignorance of the possessors." Having passed the Dordogne, he finds all the girls and women without shoes or stockings; and "the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor feet to their stockings." Everywhere, however, the roads are magnificent-in Languedoc "stupendous works"-"superb even to a folly "--but roads almost without traffic. There were two modes of executing these noble causeways, carried across valleys, and through levelled hills. They were either constructed by the forced labour of the peasantry, called the corvée; or by assessment of the proprietors, under which the lands held by a noble tenure were eased, and those held by a base tenure were proportionably burthened. The king of France, during the administration of Turgot, tried to abolish the system of compulsory labour. The decree of this benevolent sovereign-who truly said, "I and Turgot are the only friends of the people "-contains this avowal: "With the exception of a small number of provinces, almost all the roads throughout the kingdom have been made by the gratuitous labour of the poorest part of our subjects. . . . 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 their sole resource against want and hunger, because they are made to labour for the profit of the rich." In spite of the decree, the system of compulsory labour was reestablished in a few months. We have a striking picture of the operation of the corvée, in a description by M. Grosley, of a scene at a village near Langres. Sixty or eighty peasants arrive at night at this village, summoned from distant quarters, to begin next day a grand corvée upon the road. They could not get their carts and oxen over the mountains; they must pay a fine or go to prison; their feet were cut by the flinty by-ways; they were hungry. The little money they had was nearly exhausted by providing for the inexorable inspector. The traveller, an Englishman, who told Grosley the story, paid for the supper of twenty of these poor people, which procured him a thousand blessings. They were to go to work the next day without their teams. + And yet, with such oppression, the French peasantry were not serfs, as in most of the German states. Many were even small proprietors of land. That subdivision of landed property, which some imagine to have been caused by the Revolution, existed to a large extent before the Revolution. Young was greatly surprised to find a state of things so different from that generally prevailing in England. He averred that half the soil belonged to these small proprietors. In the country of Bearne, in a ride of twelve miles from Pau to Moneng, he saw pretty cottages, neat gardens, and every appearance of comfort. The land is all in the hands of little proprietors, without the farms being so small as to occasion a vicious and miserable population." But this was an exceptional case. "All these small landowners were, in reality, ill at ease in the cultivation of their property, and had to bear many charges or easements on the land which they could not shake off." § The ancient seignorial rights were the most oppressive; but the seigneur was not the local administrator. Neither did he select the parochial * "Travels in France," p. 12. "Travels in France," p. 42. +"Observations on England," vol. ii. P. 16. 160 GENERAL VIEW OF THE FRENCH SOCIAL SYSTEM. (1788. officers who exacted the various payments and services connected with the land. All the local officers were under the government and control of the central power. "The seigneur was in fact no longer anything but an inhabitant of the parish, separated by his own immunities and privileges from all the other inhabitants." The nobility had ceased to have any political power; they had no concern in maintaining public order or administering justice. Many had sold their land in small patches, and lived only on seignorial rights and rent-charges. The greater number did not dwell among the people who were the means of their support. The peasant only knew the nobleman as a living person, or an abstract power, who was exempt from the taxes which the plebeian paid; who had the exclusive right of sporting; who compelled him to grind his corn in the lord's mill, and to crush his grapes in the lord's wine press; who made him pay toll when he crossed a river, and tolled him in selling his corn in the public market; whose perpetual quit-rents, which could not be redeemed, were always an incumbrance on his little property. Arthur Young met with a poor woman who complained of the times, and said that it was a sad country. Her husband had a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse. They had to pay a quantity of wheat to one seigneur, and a larger quantity to another seigneur, "besides very heavy tailles and other taxes." The poor woman was only twenty-eight years of age, but she might, "at no great distance, have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, and her face so furrowed and hardened by labour." She said that she heard that something was to be done by some great folks for such poor ones, but she did not know by whom or how-but God send us better, for "les tailles et les droits nous écrasent." * There was no personal sympathy of the higher classes to ameliorate the burthens of their poor dependents. They knew them only as toilers from whom revenue was to be extracted. None of the gentry remained in the rural districts but such as were too poor to leave them. "Being no longer in the position of a chief, they had not the same interest as of old, to attend to, or assist, or direct, the village population; and, on the other hand, not being subject to the same burthens, they could neither feel much sympathy for poverty which they did not share, nor for grievances to which they were not exposed." + In the rural districts, as well as in the provincial towns, the real administrative functions had gone out of the hands of individuals or bodies having a natural interest in local affairs, and qualified to direct them by local influence and intelligence, to be wielded by a vast army of functionaries all deriving their existence from a central authority in the capital. The King's Council was an administrative and legislative power that decided upon all affairs of a public nature, that prepared laws, that fixed taxes, to which every question was referred, the centre from which was derived the movement that set everything in motion. The individuals composing this Council were obscure; its power appeared to be that of the throne. The Controller-general was the head of this Council. Its instruments were the Intendants of provinces; who had under them each a sub-delegate. These men were the real governors of France. The taxes, whether the ancient tax of the taille, or taxes of more recent date, were wholly under their regulation. The quota of men to serve in the Tocqueville, p. 223. Travels in France," p. 134. 1788.] GENERAL VIEW OF THE FRENCH SOCIAL SYSTEM. 161 militia for each parish was prescribed by the Intendant. All the public works, all the roads, highways and by-ways, kept up out of the public revenue, were under the care of the Council, the Intendant, and the Sub-delegate. The maréchaussée, or mounted police, distributed throughout the whole kingdom, were under the management of the Intendants. There was no provision for the Poor in the rural districts. Under circumstances of great pressure, the Intendant distributed corn or rice, and sometimes bestowed alms in the form of work at low wages. In the towns " a few families managed all the public business for their own private purposes, removed from the eye of the public, and with no public responsibility." But the Council came in, and the government, through the Intendant with his subordinate officers, "had a finger in all the concerns of every town, the least as well as the greatest." There were semblances of local freedom in the system of parochial government; but, " compared with the total impotence which was connected with them, they afford an example, in miniature, of the combination of the most absolute government with some of the forms of extreme democracy." The precise details of the complicated system of Centralization presented by M. Tocqueville, are thus summed up: "Under the social condition of France anterior to the Revolution of 1789, as well as at the present day, there was no city, town, borough, village, or hamlet, in the kingdom-there was neither hospital, church fabric, religious house, nor college-which could have an independent will in the management of its private affairs, or which could administer its own property according to its own choice." The system of Centralization had so completely pervaded France that "no one imagined that any important affair could be properly carried out without the intervention of the state." The people had lost all power of managing their own affairs. "The French government," says M. Tocqueville, "having thus assumed the place of Providence, it was natural that every one should invoke its aid in his individual necessities." May we not add that it was equally natural that when no help came from government at a season of calamity, the people should blaspheme the Providence to which they cried in vain, and in their rage break their false idols in pieces? The pride of birth which made the aristocracy of France a caste, separating them wholly from the middle classes, was carried forward into a more hateful separation of the middle classes of the towns from those termed the common people. The great passion of the burgher was to become a public functionary. He could buy a place connected with some real or pretended duty arising out of the administrative system of Centralization. Every man wanted to be something "by command of the king." But the honour was not altogether barren. The holders of place were exempted, wholly or in part, from public burthens. They quarrelled amongst themselves; but they were agreed in one principle-to grind the people below them. "Most of the local burthens which they imposed were so contrived as to press most heavily on the lower classes."† The isolation of classes had gradually proceeded to this height under that principle of the French monarchy which sought to govern its subjects by dividing them. The separate parts of the social fabric had no coherence. The whole fell to pieces when it was attempted to repair the rotten edifice. "The * See the details of Book II., chapters 2 and 3. VOL. VII. Tocqueville, p. 170. M 162 EXPECTATIONS OF A REVOLUTION. [1788. nation," said Turgot, in a Report to the king, "is a community consisting of different orders ill-compacted together, and of a people whose members have very few ties between themselves, so that every man is exclusively engrossed by his personal interest. Nowhere is any common interest discernible. The villages, the towns, have not any stronger mutual relations than the districts to which they belong." To complete this remarkable isolation, Paris preponderated over the whole kingdom. It was the seat of all mental activity; it was the centre of all political action. "Circulation is stagnant in France," says Young in 1787. In 1789, whilst the mightiest events were passing in Paris, he found the people of Strasbourg, and other towns, perfectly ignorant of circumstances that most intimately concerned them. "That universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of feeling or alarm, with electric sensibility, from one end of the kingdom to another, and which unites in bonds of connection men of similar interests and situations, has no existence in France." * Arthur Young appears to have been almost the only observer amongst Englishmen who, after the dismissal of Calonne in 1787, thought that a Revolution was approaching. Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, had become Controller-general. Young dined with a party whose conversation was entirely political. "One opinion pervaded the whole company, that they are on the eve of some great revolution in the government; that everything points to it"-financial confusion; no minister to propose anything but palliatives; a prince on the throne with excellent dispositions, but wanting in mental resources; a court buried in pleasure and dissipation, and adding to the public distress; a great ferment amongst all ranks of men, "who are eager for some change, without knowing what to look to, or to hope for; and a strong leaven of liberty, increasing every hour since the American revolution." He adds, "all agree that the States of the kingdom cannot assemble without more liberty being the consequence; but I meet with so few men that have any just ideas of freedom, that I question much the species of this new liberty that is to arise." + Loménie de Brienne has dismissed the Notables, who were beginning to be troublesome, some uttering strange words about liberty, a national assembly, and other unwonted sounds. They had recommended some practical reforms, such as the formation of Provincial Assemblies; the suppression of Corvées; a modification of the Gabelle. These measures were announced in edicts. But the deficit presses. New taxes must be imposed by edicts. These, however, must be registered by the Parlement of Paris. Very different from a British Parliament was this ancient institution. It was originally only a court of justice; and some of the provinces had similar courts, with local jurisdiction. The members of these Parlements were formerly appointed by the king, and were removeable at his will. The appointments were afterwards sold, and those who bought the places were considered to hold them for life. The Parlements thus gradually acquired a semblance of independence, and did not always register the royal edicts without inquiry. Towards the close of the reign of Louis XV. the Parlement of Paris, refusing to register some royal edicts, was suppressed, as well |