The arguments put forward by the Magistracy in support of their demands were not less novel than the demands themselves. The King, they said, was only the administrator and not the owner of the public fortune: the representative and chief officer of the nation, not its master. Sovereignty resided in the nation itself. The nation alone could decide great questions: its rights were not dependent on the will of the sovereign; they took their being from the nature of man; they were as inalienable and indestructible as human nature itself. ‘The institution of the States-General,’ they declared, ‘is a principle founded on the rights of man and confirmed by reason.’[100] ‘Common interest has combined men in society, and given rise to governments: that alone can maintain them.’[101] ‘No prescription of the States-General can run against the nature of things or against the imperishable rights of the nation.’[102] ‘Public opinion is rarely mistaken: it is rare that men receive impressions contrary to truth.’[103]
The King having exiled the Parliament from Paris, that body protested that liberty of speech and action was an inalienable right of man, and could not be wrested from him without tyranny, save by the regular forms of judicial procedure.
It must not be supposed that the Parliaments alleged these principles as novelties:[104] they were, on the contrary, very industriously traced up to the cradle of the monarchy. The judgments or decrees of the Parliament of Paris were crammed with historical quotations, frequently borrowed from the Middle Ages, in barbarous Latin. They are full of provincial capitulations, royal ordinances, beds of justice, rules, privileges, and precedents, which lost themselves in the shadows of the past.
Strangely enough, at the same moment that the Parliament of Franche-Comté proclaimed the indestructible rights of the nation, it protested against any infraction of the peculiar privileges of the province as they existed at the period of annexation under Louis XIV. So again the Parliament of Normandy invoked the States-General of the kingdom ‘to inaugurate a new order of things,’ but not the less did it demand, in the name of its own feudal traditions, the restoration of the States of Normandy, as the peculiar privilege of that province: so curiously were ideas, just born into the world, enclosed and swathed in these remains of antiquity.
It was a tradition of the old monarchy that the Parliament should use in its remonstrances animated and almost violent language: a certain exaggeration of words was conceded to it. The most absolute sovereigns had tolerated this licence of speech, by reason, indeed, of the powerlessness of those who uttered it: as they were certain in the end to be reduced to obedience and compressed within narrow limits, the indulgence of a free utterance was readily left to them. The Parliament, moreover, was wont to make a great deal of noise for a small result: what it said went beyond what it meant: this franchise had become a sort of right of the magistracy.
On this occasion the Parliament carried their ancient freedom to a degree of licence never heard before; for a new-born fire was burning in their hearts and unconsciously inflamed their language. Certainly, among the governments of our own time, which are almost all, nevertheless, governments maintained by the sword, not one could allow its ministers and its measures to be attacked in such terms by the representatives of its own authority.
‘Despotism, Sire,’ said the Parliament of Paris, ‘is substituted for the laws of the realm, and the magistracy is no more than the instrument of arbitrary power.... Would that Your Majesty could interrogate the victims of that power, confined forgotten in impenetrable prisons, the abode of silence and injustice; those whom intrigue, cupidity, the jealousy of power, the thirst of vengeance, the fear or the hatred of justice, private pique or personal convenience, have caused to be put there.’ Then drawing a parallel between two citizens, one rich and the other poor, the latter being oppressed by the former, the Parliament added—‘Is indigence then a crime? Have flesh and blood no claims? Does a man without credit, or a poor man, cease to be a citizen?’
It was especially on the subject of taxation and against the collectors of the revenue that, even in the calmest times, the judicial bodies were accustomed to inveigh with extreme violence. No sooner was the new tax announced than the Parliament of Paris declared it to be disastrous; consternation followed the proposal; its adoption would give rise to a general mourning.[105] The population, harassed by fiscal exactions, were at their wits’ end.[106] To arrogate to one’s self the power of levying tribute without the States-General was to declare aloud that the sovereign seeks not to be a king of France, but a king of serfs.[107] The substance of the people was become the prey of the cupidity of courtiers and the rapacity of contractors.[108]
Great as was the excitement of that time, it would still be very difficult to account for the language of these magistrates without recalling what had been said so many times before on the same subject. As under the old monarchy most of the taxes were levied on account of private persons, who held them on farm, or by their agents; for centuries past men had accustomed themselves to look upon taxation as it bore on the private emolument of certain individuals, and not as the common income of the nation. Taxes were commonly denounced as odious exactions. The salt duty was styled the infernal machine of the gabelle: those who collected the taxes were spoken of as public robbers, enriched by the poverty of everybody else. So said the tax-payers; the courts of justice held the same language; and even the Government, which had leased to these very farmers the rights they exercised, scarcely spoke differently of them. It seemed as if their business was not its own, and that it sought a way of escape amidst the clamour which pursued its own agents.