It is clear that none of these pernicious institutions could have subsisted for twenty years if they could have been brought under discussion. None of them would have been established or aggravated if the Estates had been consulted, or if their remonstrances had been listened to when by chance they were still called together. Rarely as the States-General were convoked in the last ages of the monarchy, they never ceased to protest against these abuses. On several occasions these assemblies pointed out as the origin of all these evils the power of arbitrarily levying taxes which had been arrogated by the King, or, to borrow the identical terms employed by the energetic language of the fifteenth century, ‘the right of enriching himself from the substance of the people without the consent and deliberation of the Three Estates.’ Nor did they confine themselves to their own rights alone; they demanded with energy, and frequently they obtained, greater deference to the rights of the provinces and towns. In every session some voices were raised in those bodies against the inequality of the public burdens. They frequently demanded the abolition of the system of close guilds; they attacked with increasing vigour in each successive age the venality of public employments. ‘He who sells office sells justice, which is infamous,’ was their language. When that venality was established, they still complained of the abusive creation of offices. They denounced so many useless places and dangerous privileges, but always in vain. Three institutions had been previously established against themselves; they had originated in the desire not to convoke these assemblies, and in the necessity of disguising from the French nation the taxation which it was unsafe to exhibit in its real aspect.
And it must be observed that the best kings were as prone to have recourse to these practices as the worst. Louis XII. completed the introduction of the venality of public offices; Henry IV. extended the sale of them to reversions. The vices of the system were stronger than the virtues of those who applied it.
The same desire of escaping from the control of the States-General caused the Parliaments to be entrusted with most of their political functions; the result was an intermixture of judicial and administrative offices, which proved extremely injurious to the good conduct of business. It was necessary to seem to afford some new guarantees in place of those which were taken away; for though the French support absolute power patiently enough, so long as it be not oppressive, they never like the sight of it; and it is always prudent to raise about it some appearance of barriers, which serve at least to conceal what they do not arrest.
Lastly, it was this desire of preventing the nation, when asked for its money, from asking back its freedom, which gave rise to an incessant watchfulness in separating the classes of society, so that they should never come together, or combine in a common resistance, and that the Government should never have on its hands at once more than a very small number of men separated from the rest of the nation. In the whole course of this long history, in which have figured so many princes remarkable for their ability, sometimes remarkable for their genius, almost always remarkable for their courage, not one of them ever made an effort to bring together the different classes of his people, or to unite them otherwise than by subjecting them to a common yoke. One exception there is, indeed, to this remark: one king of France there was who not only desired this end, but applied himself with his whole heart to attain it; that prince—for such are the inscrutable judgments of Providence—was Louis XVI.
The separation of classes was the crime of the old French monarchy, but it became its excuse; for when all those who constitute the rich and enlightened portion of a nation can no longer agree and co-operate in the work of government, a country can by no possibility administer itself, and a master must intervene.
‘The nation,’ said Turgot, with an air of melancholy, in a secret report addressed to the King, ‘is a community, consisting of different orders ill compacted together, and of a people whose members have very few ties among 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. They cannot even agree among themselves to carry on the public works which they require. Amidst this perpetual conflict of pretensions and of undertakings your Majesty is compelled to decide everything in person or by your agents. Your special injunctions are expected before men will contribute to the public advantage, or respect the rights of others, or even sometimes before they will exercise their own.’
It is no slight enterprise to bring more closely together fellow-citizens who have thus been living for centuries as strangers or as enemies to each other, and to teach them how to carry on their affairs in common.
To divide them was a far easier task than it then becomes to reunite them. Such has been the memorable example given by France to the world. When the different classes which divided the ancient social system of France came once more into contact sixty years ago, after having been isolated so long, and by so many barriers, they encountered each other on those points on which they felt most poignantly, and they met in mutual hatred. Even in this our day their jealousies and their animosities have survived them.