In the eighteenth century the French peasantry could no longer be preyed upon by petty feudal despots; they were seldom the object of violence on the part of the Government; they enjoyed civil liberty, and were owners of a portion of the soil; but all the other classes of society stood aloof from this class, and perhaps in no other part of the world had the peasantry ever lived so entirely alone. The effects of this novel and singular kind of oppression deserve a very attentive separate consideration.
As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV. complained, as we learn from Péréfix, that the nobles were quitting the rural districts. In the middle of the eighteenth century this desertion had become almost general; all the records of the time indicate and deplore the fact, economists in their writings, the Intendants in their reports, agricultural societies in their proceedings. A more authentic proof of the same fact is to be found in the registers of the capitation tax. The capitation tax was levied at the actual place of residence, and it was paid by the whole of the great nobility and by a portion of the landed gentry at Paris.
In the rural districts none remained but such of the gentry as their limited means compelled to stay there. These persons must have found themselves placed in a position with reference to the peasants, his neighbours, such as no rich proprietor can be conceived to have occupied before.[59] 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 burdens, they could neither feel much sympathy with poverty which they did not share, nor with grievances to which they were not exposed. The peasantry were no longer the subjects of the gentry; the gentry were not yet the fellow-citizens of the peasantry—a state of things unparalleled in history.
This gave rise to a sort of absenteeism of feeling, if I may so express myself, even more frequent and more effectual than absenteeism properly so called. Hence it arose that a gentleman residing on his estate frequently displayed the views and sentiments which his steward would have entertained in his absence; like his steward, he learned to look upon his tenants as his debtors, and he rigorously exacted from them all that he could claim by law or by custom, which sometimes rendered the application of the last remnant of feudal rights more harsh than it had been in the feudal times.
Often embarrassed, and always needy, the small gentry lived shabbily in their country-houses, caring only to amass money enough to spend in town during the winter. The people, who often find an expression which hits the truth, had given to these small squires the name of the least of the birds of prey, a hobereau, a sort of Squire Kite.
No doubt individual exceptions might be presented to these observations: I speak of classes, which ought alone to detain the attention of history. That there were in those times many rich landowners who, without any necessary occasion and without a common interest, attended to the welfare of the peasantry, who will deny? But these were persons who struggled successfully against the law of their new condition, which, in spite of themselves, was driving them into indifference, as it was driving their former vassals into hatred.
This abandonment of a country life by the nobility has often been attributed to the peculiar influence of certain ministers and certain kings—by some to Richelieu, by others to Louis XIV. It was, no doubt, an idea almost always pursued by the Kings of France, during the three last centuries of the monarchy, to separate the gentry from the people, and to attract the former to Court and to public employments. This was especially the case in the seventeenth century, when the nobility were still an object of fear to royalty. Amongst the questions addressed to the Intendants, they were sometimes asked—‘Do the gentry of your province like to stay at home, or to go abroad?’
A letter from an Intendant has been found giving his answer on this subject: he laments that the gentry of his province like to remain with their peasants, instead of fulfilling their duties about the King. And let it here be well remarked, that the province of which this Intendant was speaking was Anjou—that province which was afterwards La Vendée. These country gentlemen who refused, as he said, to fulfil their duties about the King, were the only country gentlemen who defended with arms in their hands the monarchy in France, and died there fighting for the Crown; they owed this glorious distinction simply to the fact that they had found means to retain their hold over the peasantry—that peasantry with whom they were blamed for wishing to live.
Nevertheless the abandonment of the country by the class which then formed the head of the French nation must not be mainly attributed to the direct influence of some of the French kings. The principal and permanent cause of this fact lay not so much in the will of certain men as in the slow and incessant influence of institutions; and the proof is, that when, in the eighteenth century, the Government endeavoured to combat this evil, it could not even check the progress of it. In proportion as the nobility completely lost its political rights without acquiring others, and as local freedom disappeared, this emigration of the nobles increased. It became unnecessary to entice them from their homes; they cared not to remain there. Rural life had become distasteful to them.
What I here say of the nobles applies in all countries to rich landowners. In all centralised countries the rural districts lose their wealthy and enlightened inhabitants. I might add that in all centralised countries the art of cultivation remains imperfect and unimproved—a commentary on the profound remark of Montesquieu, which determines his meaning, when he says that ‘land produces less by reason of its own fertility than of the freedom of its inhabitants.’ But I will not transgress the limits of my subject.