The Seigneur, therefore, only figured in this Assembly in a position of absolute subjection to his former vassals, who were all at once become his masters; he was their prisoner rather than their chief. In gathering men together by such means as these, it seemed as if the object was not so much to connect them more closely with each other as to render more palpable the differences of their condition and the incompatibility of their interests.
Was or was not the village Syndic still that discredited officer whose duties no one would accept but upon compulsion, or was the condition of the Syndic raised with that of the community to which he belonged as its chief agent?[83] Even this question was not easily answered. I have found the letter of a village bailiff, written in 1788, in which he expresses his indignation at having been elected to the office of Syndic, ‘which was,’ he said, ‘contrary to all the privileges of his other post.’ To this the Comptroller-General replies that this individual must be set right: that he must be made to understand that he ought to be proud of the choice of his fellow-citizens; and that moreover the new Syndics were not to resemble the local officers who had formerly borne the same appellation, and that they would be treated with more consideration by the Government.
On the other hand some of the chief inhabitants of parishes, and even men of rank, began at once to draw nearer to the peasantry, as soon as the peasantry had become a power in the State. A landed proprietor exercising a heritable jurisdiction over a village near Paris complained that the King’s Edict debarred him from taking part, even as a mere inhabitant, in the proceedings of the Parochial Assembly. Others consented, from mere public spirit, as they said, to accept even the office of Syndic.
It was too late: but as the members of the higher classes of society in France thus began to approach the rural population and sought to combine with the people, the people drew back into the isolation to which it had been condemned and maintained that position. Some parochial assemblies refused to allow the Seigneur of the place to take his seat among them; others practised every kind of trick to evade the reception of persons as low-born as themselves, but who were rich. ‘We are informed,’ said the Provincial Assembly of Lower Normandy, ‘that several municipal bodies have refused to receive among their members landowners not being noble and not domiciled in the parish, though these persons have an undoubted right to sit in such meetings. Some other bodies have even refused to admit farmers not having any property in land in the parish.’
Thus then the whole reform of these secondary enactments was already novel, obscure, and conflicting before the principal laws affecting the government of the State had yet been touched at all. But all that was still untouched was already shaken, and it could barely be said that any law was in existence which had not already been threatened with abolition or a speedy change by the Central Government itself.
This sudden and comprehensive renovation of all the laws and all the administrative habits of France, which preceded the political Revolution of 1789, is a thing scarcely thought of at the present time, yet it was one of the severest perturbations which ever occurred in the history of a great people. This first revolution exercised a prodigious influence on the Revolution which was about to succeed it, and caused the latter to be an event different from all the events of the same kind which had ever till then happened in the world and from those which have happened since.[84]
The first English Revolution, which overthrew the whole political constitution of the country and abolished the monarchy itself, touched but superficially the secondary laws of the land and changed scarcely any of the customs and usages of the nation. The administration of justice and the conduct of public business retained their old forms and followed even their past aberrations. In the heat of the Civil Wars the twelve judges of England are said to have continued to go the circuit twice a year. Everything was not, therefore, abandoned to agitation at the same time. The Revolution was circumscribed in its effects, and English society, though shaken at its apex, remained firm upon its base.
France herself has since 1789 witnessed several revolutions which have fundamentally changed the whole structure of her government. Most of them have been very sudden and brought about by force, in open violation of the existing laws. Yet the disorder they have caused has never been either long or general; scarcely have they been felt by the bulk of the nation, sometimes they have been unperceived.
The reason is that since 1789 the administrative constitution of France has ever remained standing amidst the ruins of her political constitutions. The person of the sovereign or the form of the government was changed, but the daily course of affairs was neither interrupted nor disturbed: every man still remained submissive, in the small concerns which interested himself, to the rules and usages with which he was already familiar; he was dependent on the secondary powers to which it had always been his custom to defer; and in most cases he had still to do with the very same agents; for, if at each revolution the administration was decapitated, its trunk still remained unmutilated and alive; the same public duties were discharged by the same public officers, who carried with them through all the vicissitudes of political legislation the same temper and the same practice. They judged and they administered in the name of the King, afterwards in the name of the Republic, at last in the name of the Emperor. And when Fortune had again given the same turn to her wheel, they began once more to judge and to administer for the King, for the Republic, and for the Emperor, the same persons doing the same thing, for what is there in the name of a master? Their business was not so much to be good citizens as to be good administrators and good judicial officers. As soon as the first shock was over, it seemed, therefore, as if nothing had stirred in the country.
But when the Revolution of 1789 broke out, that part of the Government which, though subordinate, makes itself daily felt by every member of the commonwealth, and which affects his well-being more constantly and decisively than anything else, had just been totally subverted: the administrative offices of France had just changed all their agents and revised all their principles. The State had not at first appeared to receive a violent shock from this immense reform; but there was not a man in the country who had not felt it in his own particular sphere. Every one had been shaken in his condition, disturbed in his habits, or put to inconvenience in his calling. A certain order still prevailed in the more important and general affairs of the nation; but already no one knew whom to obey, whom to apply to, nor how to proceed in those lesser and private affairs which form the staple of social life. The nation having lost its balance in all these details, one more blow sufficed to upset it altogether, and to produce the widest catastrophe and the most frightful confusion that the world had ever beheld.