These nobles shortly regretted their concessions and sought to evade them.[49] The aristocrats whom they represented soon denied the right of their deputies to make these concessions, and soon after repudiated them.[50]
How could it be otherwise? When you speak of concessions by a caste habituated to oppression, you do not mean that they give away a single, simple, tangible thing, and that that is the end of it;—not at all. You mean that they give up old habits of thought,—habits of action. You mean that every day of their lives thereafter they are to give up a habit, or a fancy, or a comfort. No mere promises of theirs to do this can be trusted. There must be guarantees fixed immutably, bedded into the constitution,—clamped into the laws. That same anchoring of liberties, and not "transports et l'effusion de sentiments genereux," is statesmanship.
These concessions were not thus secured. The old habits of oppression again got the upper hand. The upper class became as hostile to liberty and peace as ever.
Then thundered through France the Revolution. It must come;—that great and good French Revolution which did more to advance mankind in ten years than had been done politically in ten centuries,—which cost fewer lives to establish great principles than the Grand Monarque had flung away to gratify his whimsies! The right hand of the Almighty was behind it.
I refuse at the will of English Tory historians to lament more over the sufferings that besotted caste of oppressors brought upon themselves during those three years, than over the sufferings they brought upon the people during three times three centuries.[51]
The great thing was now partially done which Louis XI. and Richelieu had left entirely undone. The lower class were not merely freed from serfdom; they received guarantees of full civil rights.[52]
So far all was well, but at another point the constituent assembly stumbled. They were not bold enough to give full political rights. They thought the peasantry too ignorant—too much debased by a long servitude, to be entrusted with political rights,—therefore they denied them, and invented for them "passive citizenship."[53]
It was skillfully devised, but none the less fatal. The denial of political rights to the enfranchised was one of the two great causes of the destruction of the Constitution of 1791, and of the inauguration of the Reign of Terror.
Political rights could not be refused long. As they could not be obtained in peace the freed peasantry never allowed France rest until it gained them by long years of bloodshed and anarchy. Revolution after revolution has failed of full results. Dynasty after dynasty has failed to give quiet until a great statesman in our own time, Napoleon III., has been bold enough to make suffrage universal.
Whatever the first French Revolution failed to do, it failed to do mainly by lack of bold faith in giving political rights;—whatever it succeeded in doing, it succeeded by giving full civil rights.