To shake off the yoke by their own efforts was an impossibility. The nearest ally on whom they could count was the king. He too was opposed to the domination of the nobles, for as long as they could disregard his orders with impunity, he was king in name alone. He was, in fact, but one nobleman amongst many, with a higher title than the rest.
Dwellers in towns could more readily coalesce and resist the authority of the seigneurs than dwellers in the country. By trade they acquired wealth, and with wealth influence. In the twelfth century they formed themselves into municipal communities, and, bidding defiance to their seigneurs, called upon their king to aid them in achieving independence. From that time to the end of the seventeenth century the power of the Monarchy grew stronger with every succeeding generation. The king was the dispenser of law and order, while the enemies of law and order were the feudal nobles. When Louis XIV. took the government into his own hands, in 1661, his will was law. Justice was administered by parliaments or law courts acting in the name of the king. The affairs of the provinces were administered by intendants, acting by his commission. No nobleman, however wealthy or highly placed, dared to resist his authority. With the frank gaiety of their nation the nobles themselves accepted the position, and crowded to his court or confronted death in his armies. He was able to say, without fear of contradiction, ‘I am the State.’
Unhappily for his people, he could not say ‘I am the Nation.’ In him the Monarchy had been victorious over its enemies, but it had not accomplished its task. The nation wanted more work from its kings, wanted simply that they should go on in the path which had been trodden by their ancestors. The national wish was too feebly expressed to reach the ears of Louis. He was thinking of military glory and courtly display, not of the grievances of his people. He had overthrown the power of the nobility so far as it threatened his own. He did not care to inquire whether there was enough left to produce cruel wrong far off from the splendid palace of Versailles. His great-grandson, the vile, profligate Louis XV., had even less thought for the exercise of the duties of a king, as father of his people. The Monarchy was in its decline, not because it was intentionally tyrannical, but because it had ceased to do its duty. The French people were not Republican. They needed a government, and government in any true sense there was none.
Social condition of France.
In consequence of the king thus deserting the path trodden by his ancestors, a state of things arose in France such as was found in no other country. Nowhere did the nobility as a class do so little for the service of their countrymen, yet nowhere were they in possession of more social influence or greater privileges. Nowhere were the mercantile and trading classes comparatively more wealthy and intellectual, yet nowhere was the distinction between the noble and the plebeian or bourgeois more rigorously maintained. Finally, in no other country where, as was the case in France, the mass of peasants were free men, did the owners of fiefs retain so many rights over the dwellers on their estates, and yet live in such complete separation from them.
After the nobles had lost political power they were cut off from all healthy communication with their fellow subjects. In France all sons and daughters of noblemen were noble, and their families did not blend with those of other classes like the family of an English peer. Nobles contemned the service of the administration as beneath their birth; on the contrary, no one who was not of noble birth could hold the rank of an officer in the army. The great lords flocked to Paris and Versailles, where they wasted their substance in extravagant living; the lesser nobles, men who in England would have occupied the position of country gentlemen, were often through poverty compelled to reside in their châteaux, where they lived in isolation, having no common interests with their neighbours, while clinging tenaciously to the possession of their rights as proprietors and feudal lords. ♦Feudal rights.♦ These feudal rights varied in every province, but were of three general kinds. (1) Rights which had their origin when the seigneur was also ruler—as, for instance, the right of administering justice, though this he now almost invariably farmed to the highest bidder; the right of levying tolls at fairs and bridges; and the exclusive right of fishing and hunting. (2) Peasants in the position of serfs were only to be found in Alsace and Lorraine; but rights still existed all over the country which betrayed a servile origin. Thus, the farmer might not grind his corn but at the seigneur’s mill, nor the vine-grower press his grapes but at the seigneur’s press; and every man living on the fief must labour for the seigneur without return so many days in the year. (3) Finally, the courts ruled that wherever land was held by a peasant from the owner of a fief, there was a presumption that the owner retained a claim to enforce cultivation and the payment of annual dues. Land so held was termed a censive—resembling an English copyhold. The granting of land on these terms never stopped from the close of the Middle Ages down to the Revolution. The dues retained were often petty. One tenant might pay a small measure of oats; another a couple of chickens. Yet the payments were often sufficiently numerous to form the chief maintenance of many of the nobles. The holders of these censives possessed however, all the rights of proprietors. They could not be dispossessed so long as they paid the dues to which they were liable, and they could sell and devise the land without the consent of the owners of the fief. Properties held on these terms abounded in all parts of France, and though the extent of each censive was often no more than a couple of acres, it is probable that before the Revolution at least a fifth of the soil had by these means passed into the possession of the peasantry.
The existence of feudal rights produced three results exceedingly detrimental to the national prosperity. It impeded a good cultivation of the soil; it prevented the country from being inhabited by men of the middle class, who preferred to reside in towns rather than recognise the social superiority claimed by the seigneur; and, finally, it was an incessant source of irritation to the whole rural population. By the rights due to a seigneur as ruler, and by those of servile origin, all dwellers upon the fief were affected, whether occupiers of land or not. The cultivator suffered at every turn—in the prohibition to plant what crops he pleased; in the prohibition to destroy the seigneur’s deer and rabbits that roamed at will over his fields and devoured his green corn; in the toll he paid for leave to guard his crops while growing, and to sell them after they were gathered in; and in many other ways. Such a system had become in the course of centuries both excessively complicated and wholly unsuited to existing social conditions. Sometimes half-a-dozen different persons claimed dues from the same piece of land. The proprietorship of fiefs and the ownership of feudal rights, or the greater part of them, were constantly separated. Poverty induced the resident seigneur to sell his rights, which, bought by a townsman, passed from hand to hand in the market, like any other property, and were the more sought after because their possession was held a sign of social superiority. Non-resident owners farmed them, and middle-men were harsh and exacting in their collection. The peasant, ignorant and poor, but thrifty and cunning, and fondly attached to his plot of ground, disputed claims made upon him to pay dues now to this man, now to that, in virtue of concessions of which, in a vast number of cases, the origin was completely lost. Innumerable lawsuits resulted, which left stored up in the peasant’s mind bitter feelings of resentment against both judge and seigneur, one of whom he accused of partiality, the other of rapacity and extortion.
The Church.
The maintenance of feudal relations between classes, when neither government nor society rested on the same bases as in feudal times, could only be productive of harm. In right of birth privileges and advantages were claimed by nobles without regard to principles of justice or of public utility. On every side, in the army, the navy, the profession of the law, distinction between the nobleman and the bourgeois still prevailed. But no institution suffered in consequence of the privileges of the nobility so great moral detriment as the Church. The Church was a rich, self-governed corporation, in possession of an annual revenue of more than 8,750,000l., providing for about 130,000 persons, including monks and nuns. This great wealth was unfairly distributed, and to a large extent misapplied. As a rule, all higher posts were reserved for portionless daughters and younger sons of noble families. Bishops and abbots, who revelled in wealth, were nobles; parish priests, who had barely enough for subsistence, were bourgeois and peasants. Thus the Church teemed with abuses, and exerted little moral influence. Her wealth excited the jealousy of the middle classes, whilst the luxurious and profligate lives led by many prelates and holders of sinecures brought disgrace on the ecclesiastical profession. Of reform there was no hope, since the lower clergy, who had interest in effecting it, were excluded from all part in Church government.
Government and administration.