Let us here pause for a moment as we proceed to consider, amidst all these minute particulars which I have been describing, one of the greatest laws of Providence in the government of human societies.
The French nobility persisted in standing aloof from the other classes; the landed gentry ended by obtaining exemptions from most of the public burdens which rested upon them; they imagined that they should preserve their rank whilst they evaded its duties, and for a time this seemed to be so. But soon an internal and invisible malady appeared to have infected their condition; it dwindled away though no one touched it, and whilst their immunities increased their substance declined. The middle classes, with which they had been so reluctant to mingle, grew in wealth and in intelligence beside them, without them, and against them; they had rejected the middle classes as associates and as fellow-citizens; but they were about to find in those classes their rivals, soon their enemies, at length their masters. A superior power had relieved them from the care of directing, of protecting, of assisting their vassals; but as that power had left them in the full enjoyment of their pecuniary rights and their honorary privileges, they conceived that nothing was lost to them. As they still marched first, they still thought they were leading; and indeed they had still about them men whom, in the language of the law, they named their subjects—others were called their vassals, their tenants, their farmers. But, in reality, none followed them; they were alone, and when those very classes rose against them, flight was their only resource.
Although the destinies of the nobility and the middle classes have differed materially from each other, they have had one point of resemblance: the men of the middle classes had ended by living as much apart from the common people as those of the upper classes. Far from drawing nearer to the peasantry, they had withdrawn from all contact with their hardships; instead of uniting themselves closely to the lower orders, to struggle in common against a common inequality, they only sought to establish fresh preferences in their own favour; and they were as eager to obtain exemptions for themselves as the nobles were to maintain their privileges. These peasants, from whom the middle classes had sprung, were not only become strangers to their descendants, but were literally unknown by them; and it was not until arms had been placed by the middle classes in their hands that those classes perceived what unknown passions they had kindled—passions which they could neither guide nor control, and which ended by turning the instigators of those passions into their victims.
In all future ages the ruins of that great House of France, which had seemed destined to extend over the whole of Europe, will be the wonder of mankind; but those who read its history with attention will understand without difficulty its fall. Almost all the vices, almost all the errors, almost all the fatal prejudices I have had occasion to describe, owed either their origin, or their duration, or their extent to the arts practised by most of the kings of France to divide their subjects in order to govern them more absolutely.
But when the middle classes were thus thoroughly severed from the nobility, and the peasantry from the nobility, as well as from the middle classes—when, by the progress of the same influences within each class, each of them was internally subdivided into minute bodies, almost as isolated from each other as the classes to which they belonged, the result was one homogeneous mass, the parts of which no longer cohered. Nothing was any longer so organised as to thwart the Government—nothing so as to assist it; insomuch that the whole fabric of the grandeur of the monarchy might fall to pieces at once and in a moment as soon as the society on which it rested was disturbed.
And the people, which alone seem to have learnt something from the misconduct and the mistakes of all its masters, if indeed it escaped their empire, failed to shake off the false notions, the vicious habits, the evil tendencies which those masters had imparted to it, or allowed it to assume. Sometimes that people has carried the predilections of a slave into the enjoyment of its liberty, alike incapable of self-government and hostile to those who would have directed it.
I now resume my track; and, losing sight of the old and general facts which have prepared the great Revolution I design to paint, I proceed to the more particular and more recent incidents which finally determined its occurrence, its origin, and its character.
CHAPTER XIII.
SHOWING THAT TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MEN OF LETTERS BECAME THE LEADING POLITICAL MEN OF FRANCE, AND OF THE EFFECTS OF THIS OCCURRENCE.