The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 / And the Causes Which Led to That Event

by Alexis de Tocqueville

We have seen elsewhere that the middle classes, equally ready to quit the rural districts, sought refuge from all sides in the towns. On no point are all the records of French society anterior to the Revolution more agreed. They show that a second generation of rich peasants was a thing almost unknown. No sooner had a farmer made a little money by his industry than he took his son from the plough, sent him to the town, and bought him a small appointment. From that period may be dated the sort of strange aversion which the French husbandman often displays, even in our own times, for the calling which has enriched him. The effect has survived the cause.

To say the truth, the only man of education—or, as he would be called in England, the only gentleman—who permanently resided amongst the peasantry and in constant intercourse with them, was the parish priest. The result was that the priest would have become the master of the rural populations, in spite of Voltaire, if he had not been himself so nearly and ostensibly linked to the political order of things; the possession of several political privileges exposed him in some degree to the hatred inspired by those political institutions.[60]

The peasant was thus almost entirely separated from the upper classes; he was removed from those of his fellow-creatures who might have assisted and directed him. In proportion as they attained to enlightenment or competency, they turned their backs on him; he stood, as it were, tabooed and set apart in the midst of the nation.

This state of things did not exist in an equal degree amongst any of the other civilized nations of Europe, and even in France it was comparatively recent. The peasantry of the fourteenth century were at once more oppressed and more relieved. The aristocracy sometimes tyrannised over them, but never forsook them.

In the eighteenth century, a French village was a community of persons, all of whom were poor, ignorant, and coarse; its magistrates were as rude and as contemned as the people; its syndic could not read; its collector could not record in his own handwriting the accounts on which the income of his neighbours and his own depended. Not only had the former lord of the manor lost the right of governing this community, but he had brought himself to consider it a sort of degradation to take any part in the government of it. To assess the taille, to call out the militia, to regulate the forced labour, were servile offices, devolving on the syndic. The central power of the State alone took any care of the matter, and as that power was very remote, and had as yet nothing to fear from the inhabitants of the villages, the only care it took of them was to extract revenue.

Let me show you what a forsaken class of society becomes which no one desires to oppress, but which no one attempts to enlighten or to serve.

The heaviest burdens which the feudal system had imposed on the rural population had without doubt been withdrawn and mitigated; but it is not sufficiently known that for these burdens others had been substituted, perhaps more onerous. The peasant had not to endure all the evils endured by his forefathers, but he supported many hardships which his forefathers had never known.

The taille had been decupled, almost exclusively at the cost of the peasantry, in the preceding two centuries. And here a word must be said of the manner in which this tax was levied, to show what barbarous laws may be founded and maintained in civilised ages, when the most enlightened men in the nation have no personal interest in changing them.

I find in a confidential letter, written by the Comptroller-General himself, in 1772, to the Intendants, a description of this tax, which is a model of brevity and accuracy. ‘The taille,’ said that minister, ‘arbitrarily assessed, collectively levied as a personal, not a real, tax in the great part of France, is subject to continual variations from all the changes which happen every year in the fortunes of the taxpayers.’ The whole is in these three phrases. It is impossible to depict more ably the evil by which the writer profited.