As a general constitutional proposition d'Argenson's plan is admirable enough; but when considered in relation to the paramount need of France at that particular moment it becomes a very master-work of statesmanship and sagacity. He alone could diagnose the conditions of the disease and discern the only remedy it was possible to apply. It is scarcely half the truth to say that the French Revolution was induced by bad government; there were times when the Government had been infinitely worse. The cause lay deeper. It lay in a social revolution which was already complete, and which the Crown refused to recognise.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the institutions of France had drifted into a condition of which history perhaps can afford no parallel. The aristocratic corporations of the Church, the law, and the land, whose influence the Crown for its own purposes had so often used and abused, were losing every particle of vital force; and the Monarchy found itself burdened and overborne by the weight of the great classes upon whom in times past it had leaned for support. The history of its last forty years is the history of a series of spasmodic efforts to rise to the grandeur of its great position: and the continual frustration of those efforts through the stolid egotism of the privileged orders.
Why was it, it may be asked, that what had once been an inexhaustible source of strength had become a fatal element of weakness? The cause is to be found in a social revolution which had been silently proceeding for nearly a century. Ever since the time of Colbert, the middle classes, the class of tax-farmers, merchants and manufacturers, had been increasing rapidly in wealth and importance. It was not the mere growth of a bourgeoisie; it was the rise of a new society, whose leaders were ready to sow their wealth in the garden of art and letters. So it was that while lordly ineptitude upon the field of battle made the French Government a byword in Europe, the name of France was rendered illustrious by bourgeois triumphs in literature and the arts.
Coincident with the rise of the middle class was the declining influence of the Church and the Nobility. For fifty years the Church had been engaged in one of the most despicable party fights which history records; its most successful men were witty libertines, who officiated at the unhallowed sacrament of the "petit souper," and whose only belief in heaven or earth was in the redeeming virtues of a cardinal's hat. The nobles were despised by the best among them. They were hopelessly sunk in debt; and those whose magnificence paid no interest were subsisting on pensions dispensed by favourites and wrung from wretches who fed on grass and had no stomach for resistance. The nobles were outshone by the farmers-general; the Church had ceded her empire to the "Philosophes"; while financier and "philosophe" were the social and intellectual leaders of a great society whose growth was transforming the aspect of France.
Had Fortune dealt as kindly with the Bourbon House as she had lately done with the failing Hapsburgs: could she have given to France in Louis XV. the latest and greatest of her kings, the Revolution might have been undreamed of, and the Bourbons absolute to this day. Such a man would have discerned the tendency of events: he would have thrown himself into line with it.[435] He would have sent his nobles beyond the Rhine, with a mission to die or to justify their existence; he would have crushed with an iron hand the pretensions of the Church; and turning Versailles into a national museum, he would have transferred his Court to the Louvre or the Tuileries, nor would he have allowed it to be surpassed in brilliance by the salons of the farmers-general.
By putting himself at the head of the new France, he might have renewed the tradition of the French Monarchy. Such might have been the work of a great King; but the Great King reviewed his squadrons on the plain of Potsdam, and devoted to France but a passing jest; and she was left to the guidance of one of the most pitiable and mean of men, who could do no more than watch
"C'est la déportation qui constitue principalement l'esclavage; nul n'est facilement esclave dans son pays."—"Considérations" (1784).
the clouds and predict the bursting of "Le Déluge."
Effort to avert it there was none. Versailles displayed perhaps as strange a combination of pomp and vanity as was ever known in the history of the world. It retained the profusion, without the dignity, of the Grand Age; and public affairs went as they could while incapable nobles and dissolute Churchmen exchanged the shuttle of an endless intrigue. In tradition and spirit it was utterly alien from the new society. But one representative of the rising classes won her way into the charmed circle; she entered the Court as Madame d'Etioles; but before long the wife of the farmer-general was lost in Madame la Marquise de Pompadour. In public affairs the blindness was equally insensate. The King consented to trail his ermine in the slush of ecclesiastical quarrels; and such men as Tencin were the rulers of France, while Voltaire was reduced to crave the favour of some obscure lieutenant of police. When at last a man arises who will not take Madame's gifts, but will consent to copy her music, and who will not accept a hundred louis for work worth a dozen francs, he is spoken of as some strange kind of wild animal, "un original d'une nouvelle espèce," in Madame's own words.[436] And meanwhile the silver-tongued "bourreau" went on correcting his proofs—of the "Contrat Social"—and inditing the charter of those great classes which the French Monarchy continued to ignore.