Lectures on the French Revolution

by Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton

The programme was excessively complicated, and required years to be carried out. The nobles won the day with their demand to be compensated; but Duport already spoke the menacing words: "Injustice has no right to subsist, and the price of injustice has no right to subsist." The immensity of the revolution, which these changes implied, was at once apparent. For it signified that liberty, which had been known only in the form of privilege, was henceforward identified with equality. The nobles lost their jurisdiction; the corporation of judges lost their right of holding office by purchase. All classes alike were admitted to all employments. When privilege fell, provinces lost it as well as orders. One after the other, Dauphiné, Provence, Brittany, Languedoc, declared that they renounced their historic rights, and shared none but those which were common to all Frenchmen. Servitude was abolished; and on the same principle, that all might stand on the same level before the law, justice was declared gratuitous.

Lubersac, bishop of Chartres, the friend and patron of Sieyès, moved the abolition of the game laws, which meant the right of preserving on another man's land. It was a right which necessarily followed the movement of that night; but it led men to say that the clergy gave away generously what belonged to somebody else. It was then proposed that the tithe should be commuted; and the clergy showed themselves as zealous as the laity to carry out to their own detriment the doctrine that imposed so many sacrifices.

The France of history vanished on August 4, and the France of the new democracy took its place. The transfer of property from the upper class to the lower was considerable. The peasants' income was increased by about 60 per cent. Nobody objected to the tremendous loss, or argued to diminish it. Each class, recognising what was inevitable, and reconciled to it, desired that it should be seen how willingly and how sincerely it yielded. None wished to give time for others to remind them of inconsistency, or reserve, or omission, in the clean sweep they had undertaken to make. In their competition there was hurry and disorder. One characteristic of the time was to be unintelligent in matters relating to the Church, and they did not know how far the clergy was affected by the levelling principle, or that in touching tithe they were setting an avalanche in motion. At one moment, Lally, much alarmed, had passed a note to the President begging him to adjourn, as the deputies were losing their heads. The danger arose, as was afterwards seen, when the Duke du Chatelet proposed the redemption of tithe.

The nobles awoke next day with some misgiving that they had gone too far, and with some jealousy of the clergy, who had lost less, and who had contributed to their losses. On August 7 Necker appeared before the Assembly and exposed the want of money, and the need of a loan, for the redistribution of property on August 4 did nothing to the immediate profit of the Exchequer. But the clergy, vying with their rivals in generosity, had admitted the right of the nation to apply Church property to State uses.

On the following day the Marquis de Lacoste proposed that the new debt should be paid out of the funds of the clergy, and that tithe should be simply abolished. He expressed a wish that no ecclesiastic should be a loser, and that the parish clergy should receive an accession of income. The clergy offered no resistance, and made it impossible for others to resist. They offered to raise a loan in behalf of the State; but it was considered that this would give them a position of undue influence, and it would not have satisfied the nobles, who saw the way to recover from the clergy the loss they had sustained. In this debate the Abbé Sieyès delivered his most famous speech. He had no fellow-feeling with his brethren, but he intended that the tithe should enrich the State. Instead of that it was about to be given back to the land, and the landowners would receive a sum of nearly three millions a year, divided in such a way that the richest would receive in proportion to his wealth. It would indemnify the laity. Not they, but the clergy, were now to bear the charge of August 4. There was one deputy who would be richer by 30,000 francs a year upon the whole transaction. The landlords who had bought their estates subject to the tithe had no claim to receive it. As all this argument was heard with impatience, Sieyès uttered words that have added no little to his moral stature: "They fancy that they can be free and yet not be just!" He had been, for three months, the foremost personage in the nation. He was destined in after years, and under conditions strangely altered, to be once more the dictator of France. More than once, without public favour, but by mere power of political thinking, he governed the fortunes of the State. He never again possessed the heart of the people.

The Assembly deemed it a good bargain to restore the tithe to the land; and the clergy knew so well that they had no friends that, on August 11, they solemnly renounced their claim. In this way the Assembly began the disendowment of the Church, which was the primitive cause of the Reign of Terror and the Civil War.

All these things are an episode. The business of the Assembly, from the end of July, was the Constitution. The first step towards it was to define the rights for which it exists. Such a declaration, suggested by America, had been demanded by the electors in several of the instructions, and had been faithfully reproduced by Mounier, July 9. It appeared, on the following day, that Lafayette had already got the required document in his pocket. Another text was produced, ten days later, by Sieyès, and another by Mounier, which was a revision of Lafayette's. Several more came out soon after.

On July 27 the archbishop of Bordeaux, in laying down the outline of the new institutions, observed that it was necessary to found them on principles defined and fixed. On the same day Clermont Tonnerre brought forward his analysis of the available ideas contained in the instructions. He went at once to the heart of the matter. Some instructions, he said, contemplated no more than the reform of existing institutions, with the maintenance of controlling tradition and the historic chain. Others conceived an entirely new system of laws and government. The distinction between the two was this, that some required a code of principles which must be the guide in preparing the Constitution; the others wished for no such assistance, but thought it possible to bind past and future together. The main conflict was between the authority of history and the Rights of Man. The Declaration was the signal of those who meant to rescue France from the ancestors who had given it tyranny and slavery as an inheritance. Its opponents were men who would be satisfied with good government, in the spirit of Turgot and the enlightened reformers of his time, who could be happy if they were prosperous, and would never risk prosperity and peace in the pursuit of freedom.

Those who imagined that France possessed a submerged Constitution that might be extracted from her annals had a difficult task. Lanjuinais desired to sail by a beacon and to direct the politics of 1789 by a charter of 864. There was a special reason, less grotesque than the archæology of Lanjuinais, which made men averse to the Declaration. Liberty, it was said, consists in the reign of the national will, and the national will is known by national custom. Law ought to spring from custom, and to be governed by it, not by independent, individual theory that defies custom. You have to declare the law, not to make it, and you can only declare what experience gives you. The best government devised by reason is less free than a worse government bequeathed by time. Very dimly, ideas which rose to power in other days and evolved the great force of nationality, were at work against a system which was to be new and universal, renouncing the influence both of time and place. The battle was fought against the men of the past, against a history which was an unbroken record of the defeat and frustration of freedom. But the declaration of rights was more needful still against dangers on the opposite side, those that were coming more than those that were going out. People were quite resolved to be oppressed no more by monarchy or aristocracy, but they had no experience or warning of oppression by democracy. The classes were to be harmless; but there was the new enemy, the State.

No European knew what security could be needed or provided for the individual from the collected will of the people. They were protected from government by authority or by minority; but they made the majority irresistible, and the plébiscite a tyranny.