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

by Alexis de Tocqueville

ON THE PAYS D’ÉTATS, AND ESPECIALLY ON THE CONSTITUTIONS OF LANGUEDOC.

It is not my intention minutely to investigate in this place how public business was carried on in each of the provinces called Pays d’États, which were still in existence at the outbreak of the Revolution. I wish only to indicate the number of them; to point out those in which local life was still most active; to show what were the relations of these provinces with the administration of the Crown; how far they formed an exception to the general rules I have previously established; how far they fell within those rules; and lastly, to show by the example of one of these provinces what they might all have easily become.

Estates had existed in most of the provinces of France—that is, each of them had been administered under the King’s government by the gens des trois états, as they were then called, which meant the representatives of the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commons. This provincial constitution, like most of the other political institutions of the Middle Ages, occurred, with the same features, in almost all the civilised parts of Europe—in all those parts, at least, into which Germanic manners and ideas had penetrated. In many of the provinces of Germany these States subsisted down to the French Revolution; in those provinces in which they had been previously destroyed they had only disappeared in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everywhere, for two hundred years, the sovereigns had carried on a clandestine or an open warfare against them. Nowhere had they attempted to improve this institution with the progress of time, but only to destroy and deform it whenever an opportunity presented itself and when they could not do worse.

In France, in 1789, these States only existed in five provinces of a certain extent and in some insignificant districts. Provincial liberty could, in truth, only be said to exist in two provinces—in Brittany and in Languedoc: everywhere else the institution had entirely lost its virility, and was reduced to a mere shadow.

I shall take the case of Languedoc separately, and devote to it in this place a closer examination.

Languedoc was the most extensive and the most populous of all the pays d’états. It contained more than two thousand parishes, or, as they were then called, ‘communities,’ and nearly two millions of inhabitants. It was, besides, the best ordered and the most prosperous of all these provinces as well as the largest. Languedoc is, therefore, the fairest specimen of what provincial liberty might be under the old French monarchy, and to what an extent, even in the districts where it appeared strongest, it had been subjected to the power of the Crown.

In Languedoc the Estates could only assemble upon the express order of the King, and under a writ of summons addressed by the King individually every year to the members of whom they were composed, which caused one of the malcontents of the time to say, ‘Of the three bodies composing our Estates, one—that of the clergy—sits at the nomination of the King, since he names to the bishoprics and benefices; and the two others may be supposed to be so, since an order of the Court may prevent any member it pleases from attending the Assembly, and this without exiling or prosecuting him, by merely not summoning him.’

The Estates were not only to meet, but to be prorogued on certain days appointed by the King. The customary duration of their session had been fixed at forty days by an Order in Council. The King was represented in the Assembly by commissioners, who had always free access when they required it, and whose business it was to explain the will of the Government. The Assembly was, moreover, strictly held in restraint. They could take no resolution of any importance, they could determine on no financial measure at all, until their deliberations had been approved by an Order in Council; for a tax, a loan, or a suit at law they require the express permission of the King. All their standing orders, down to that which related to the order of their meetings, had to be authorised before they became operative. The aggregate of their receipts and expenditure—their budget, as it would now be called—was subjected every year to the same control.

The Central Power, moreover, exercised in Languedoc the same political rights which were everywhere else acknowledged to belong to it. The laws which the Crown was pleased to promulgate, the general ordinances it was continually passing, the general measures of its policy, were applicable there as well as in the rest of the kingdom. The Crown exercised there all the natural functions of government; it had there the same police and the same agents; there, as well as everywhere else, it created numerous new public officers, whose places the province was compelled to buy up at a large price.