In 1786 Saint Domingo alone ships back to France for 131 millions of its products, and in return receives 44 millions in merchandise. As a result of these exchanges we see, at Nantes, and at Bordeaux, the creation of colossal commercial houses. "I consider Bordeaux, says Arthur Young, as richer and doing more business than any city in England except London; . . . of late years the progress of maritime commerce has been more rapid in France than even in England."[4305] According to an administrator of the day, if the taxes on the consumption of products daily increase the revenue, this is because the industry since 1774 has developed a number of new products[4306]. And this progress is regular and constant. "We may calculate," says Necker in 1781, "on an increase of two millions a year on all the duties on consumption."—In this great exertion of innovation, labor and engineering, Paris, constantly growing, is the central workshop. It enjoys, to a much greater extent than today, the monopoly of all works of intelligence and taste, books, pictures, engravings, statues, jewelry, toilet details, carriages, furniture, articles of fashion and rarity, whatever affords pleasure and ornamentation for an elegant worldly society; all Europe is supplied by it. In 1774 its trade in books is estimated at 45 millions, and that of London at only one-quarter of that sum[4307]. Upon the profits many immense and even more numerous moderate fortunes were built up, and these now became available for investment.—In fact, we see the noblest hands stretching out to receive them, princes of the blood, provincial assemblies, assemblies of the clergy, and, at the head of all, the king, who, the most needy, borrows at ten percent and is always in search of additional lenders. Already under Fleury, the debt has augmented to 18 millions in interests, and during the Seven years' War, to 34 millions. Under Louis XVI., M. Necker borrows a capital of 530 millions; M. Joly de Fleury, 300 millions; M. de Calonne, 800 millions; in all 1630 millions over a period of ten years. The interest of the public debt, only 45 millions in 1755, reaches 106 millions in 1776 and amounts to 206 millions in 1789[4308]. What creditors which these few figures tell us about! As the Third-Estate, it must be noted, is the sole class making and saving money, nearly all these creditors belong it. Thousands of others must be added to these. In the first place, the financiers who make advances to the government, advances that are indispensable, because, from time immemorial, it has eaten its corn on the blade, so the present year is always gnawing into the product of coming years; there are 80 millions of advances in 1759, and 170 millions in 1783. In the second place there are so many suppliers, large and small, who, on all parts of the territory, keep accounts with the government for their supplies and for public works, a veritable army and increasing daily, since the government, impelled by centralization, takes sole responsibility for all ventures, and, requested by public opinion, it increases the number of undertakings useful to the public. Under Louis XV. the State builds six thousand leagues of roads, and under Louis XVI. in 1788, to guard against famine, it purchases grain to the amount of forty millions.
Through this increase of activity and its demands for capital the State becomes the universal debtor; henceforth public affairs are no longer exclusively the king's business. His creditors become uneasy at his expenditures; for it is their money he wastes, and, if he proves a bad administrator, they will be ruined. They want to know something of his budget, to examine his books: a lender always has the right to look after his securities. We accordingly see the bourgeois raising his head and beginning to pay close attention to the great machine whose performances, hitherto concealed from vulgar eyes, have, up to the present time, been kept a state secret. He becomes a politician, and, at the same time, discontented. For it cannot be denied that these matters, in which he is interested, are badly conducted. Any young man of good family managing affairs in the same way would be checked. The expenses of the administration of the State are always in excess of the revenue[4309]. According to official admissions[4310] the annual deficit amounted to 70 in 1770, and 80 millions in 1783; when one has attempted to reduce this it has been through bankruptcies; one to the tune of two milliards at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, and another almost equal to it in the time of Law, and another on from a third to a half of all the interests in the time of Terray, without mentioning suppressions in detail, reductions, indefinite delays in payment, and other violent and fraudulent means which a powerful debtor employs with impunity against a feeble creditor. "Fifty-six violations of public faith have occurred from Henry IV down to the ministry of M. de Loménie inclusive,"[4311] while a last bankruptcy, more frightful than the others, loom up on the horizon. Several persons, Bezenval and Linguet for instance, earnestly recommend it as a necessary and salutary amputation. Not only are there precedents for this, and in this respect the government will do no more than follow its own example, but such is its daily practice, since it lives only from day to day, by dint of expedients and delays, digging one hole to stop up another, and escaping failure only through the forced patience which it imposes on its creditors. With it, says a contemporary, people were never sure of anything, being always obliged to wait[4312]. "Were their capital invested in its loans, they could never rely on a fixed date for the payment of interest. Did they build ships, repair highways, or the soldiers clothed, they had no guarantees for their advances, no certificates of repayment, being reduced to calculate the chances involved in a ministerial contract as they would the risks of a bold speculation." It pays if it can and only when it can, even the members of the household, the purveyors of the table and the personal attendants of the king. In 1753 the domestics of Louis XV had received nothing for three years. We have seen how his grooms went out to beg during the night in the streets of Versailles; how his purveyors "hid themselves;" how, under Louis XVI in 1778, there were 792,620 francs due to the wine-merchant, and 3,467,980 francs to the purveyor of fish and meat[4313]. In 1788, so great is the distress, the Minister de Loménie appropriates and expends the funds of a private subscription raised for a hospital, and, at the time of his resignation, the treasury is empty, save 450,000 francs, half of which he puts in his pocket. What an administration!—In the presence of this debtor, evidently becoming insolvent, all people, far and near, interested in his business, consult together with alarm, and debtors are innumerable, consisting of bankers, merchants, manufacturers, employees, lenders of every kind and degree, and, in the front rank, the capitalists, who have put all their means for life into his hands, and who are to beg should he not pay them annually the 44 millions he owes them; the industrialists and traders who have entrusted their commercial integrity to him and who would shrink with horror from failure as its issue; and after these come their creditors, their clerks, their relations, in short, the largest portion of the laboring and peaceable class which, thus far, had obeyed without a murmur and never dreamed of bringing the established order of things under its control. Henceforth this class will exercise control attentively, distrustfully and angrily. Woe to those who are at fault, for they well know that the ruin of the State is their ruin.
III. Social Promotion.
He rises on the social ladder.—The noble draws near to him.
—He becomes cultivated.—He enters into society.—He
regards himself as the equal of the noble.—Privileges an
annoyance.
Meanwhile this class has climbed up the social ladder, and, through its élite, rejoined those in the highest position. Formerly between Dorante and M. Jourdain, between Don Juan and M. Dimanche,[4314] between M. Sotenville himself and Georges Dandin, the distance was vast; everything was different—dress, house, habits, characters, points of honor, ideas and language. On the one hand the nobles are drawn nearer to the Third-Estate and, on the other, the Third-Estate is drawn nearer to the nobles, actual equality having preceded equality as a right.—On the approach of the year 1789 it was difficult to distinguish one from the other in the street. The sword is no longer worn by gentlemen in the city; they have abandoned embroideries and laces, and walk about in plain frock-coats, or drive themselves in their cabriolets[4315]. "The simplicity of English customs," and the customs of the Third-Estate seem to them better adapted to ordinary life. Their prominence proves irksome to them and they grow weary of being always on parade. Henceforth they accept familiarity that they may enjoy freedom of action, and are content "to mingle with their fellow-citizens without obstacle or ostentation.——"It is certainly a grave sign, and the old feudal spirits have reason to tremble. The Marquis de Mirabeau, on learning that his son wishes to act as his own lawyer, consoles himself by seeing others, of still higher rank, do much worse[4316].
"As it was difficult to accept the idea that the grandson of my father, whom we just had seen pass by on the promenade, everybody, young and old, raising their hats to him from afar, would soon be seen at the bar of a lower tribunal, there to contest minor legal matters with pettifoggers; but I said to myself, however, that Louis XIV would be still more astonished had he seen the wife of his grand-successor dressed in a peasant's frock and apron, with no attendants, not a page or any one else, running about the palace and the terraces, requesting the first scamp in a frock-coat she encountered to give her his hand, which he simply does, all the way down to the foot of the steps."
But the leveling of manners and appearances of life reflected, indeed, only an equalization of minds and tempers. The antique scenery being torn away indicates the disappearance of the sentiments to which it belonged. It indicated gravity, dignity, custom of self-control and of exposed, in authority and command. It was the rigid and sumptuous parade of a social corps of staff-officers. At this time the parade is discontinued because the corps has been dissolved. If the nobles dress like the bourgeoisie it is owing to their having become bourgeois, that is to say, idlers retired from business, with nothing to do but to talk and amuse themselves.—Undoubtedly they amuse themselves and converse like people of refinement; but it is not very difficult to equal them in this respect. Now that the Third-Estate has acquired its wealth a good many commoners have become people of society. The successors of Samuel Bernard are no longer so many Turcarets, but Paris-Duverneys, Saint-Jameses, Labordes, refined men, people of culture and of feeling, possessing tact, literary and philosophical attainments, benevolent, giving parties and knowing how to entertain[4317]. With them, slightly different, we find the same company as with a grand lord, the same ideas and the same tone. Their sons, messieurs de Villemer, de Francueil, d'Epinay, throw money out of the window with as much elegance as the young dukes with whom they sup. A parvenu with money and intellect soon learns the ropes, and his son, if not himself, is initiated: a few years' exercises in an academy, a dancing-master, and one of the four thousand public offices which confer nobility, supply him with the deficient appearances. Now, in these times, as soon as one knows how to conform to the laws of good-breeding, how to bow and how to converse, one possesses a patent for admission everywhere. An Englishman[4318] remarks that one of the first expressions employed in praise of a man is, "he has a very graceful address." The Maréchale de Luxembourg, so high-spirited, always selects Laharpe as her cavalier, because "he offers his arm so well."—The commoner not only enters the drawing-room, if he is fitted for it, but he stands foremost in it if he has any talent. The first place in conversation, and even in public consideration, is for Voltaire, the son of a notary, for Diderot, the son of a cutler, for Rousseau, the son of a watchmaker, for d'Alembert, a foundling brought up by a glazier; and, after the great men have disappeared, and no writers of the second grade are left, the leading duchesses are still content to have the seats at their tables occupied by Champfort, another foundling, Beaumarchais, the son of another watchmaker, Laharpe, supported and raised on charity, Marmontel, the son of a village tailor, and may others of less note, in short, every parvenu possessing wit.
The nobility, to perfect their own accomplishments, borrow their pens and aspire to their successes. "We have recovered from those old Gothic and absurd prejudices against literary culture," says the Prince de Hénin;[4319] "as for myself I would compose a comedy to-morrow if I had the talent, and if I happened to be made a little angry, I would perform in it." And, in fact, "the Vicomte de Ségur, son of the minister of war, plays the part of the lover in 'Nina' on Mlle. de Guimard's stage with the actors of the Italian Comedy."[4320] One of Mme. de Genlis's personages, returning to Paris after five years' absence, says that "he left men wholly devoted to play, hunting, and their small houses, and he finds them all turned authors."[4321] They hawk about their tragedies, comedies, novels, eclogues, dissertations and treatises of all kinds from one drawing room to another. They strive to get their pieces played; they previously submit them to the judgment of actors; they solicit a word of praise from the Mercure; they read fables at the sittings of the Academy. They become involved in the bickering, in the vainglory, in the pettiness of literary life, and still worse, of the life of the stage, inasmuch as they are themselves performers and play in company with real actors in hundreds of private theaters. Add to this, if you please, other petty amateur talents such as sketching in water-colors, writing songs, and playing the flute.—After this amalgamation of classes and this transfer of parts what remains of the superiority of the nobles? By what special merit, through what recognized capacity are they to secure respect of a member of the Third-Estate? Outside of fashionable elegance and a few points of breeding, in what respect they differ from him? What superior education, what familiarity with affairs, what experience with government, what political instruction, what local ascendancy, what moral authority can be alleged to sanction their pretensions to the highest places?—In the way of practice, the Third-Estate already does the work, providing the qualified men, the intendants, the ministerial head-clerks, the lay and ecclesiastical administrators, the competent laborers of all kinds and degrees. Call to mind the Marquis of whom we have just spoken, a former captain in the French guards, a man of feeling and of loyalty, admitting at the elections of 1789 that "the knowledge essential to a deputy would most generally be found in the Third-Estate, the mind there being accustomed to business."—In the way of theory: the commoner is as well-informed as the noble, and he thinks he is still better informed, because, having read the same books and arrived at the same principles, he does not, like him, stop half-way on the road to their consequences, but plunges headlong to the very depths of the doctrine, convinced that his logic is clairvoyance and that he is more enlightened because he is the least prejudiced.—Consider the young men who, about twenty years of age in 1780, born in industrious families, accustomed to effort and able to work twelve hours a day, a Barnave, a Carnot, a Roederer, a Merlin de Thionville, a Robespierre, an energetic stock, feeling their strength, criticizing their rivals, aware of their weakness, comparing their own application and education to their levity and incompetence, and, at the moment when youthful ambition stirs within them, seeing themselves excluded in advance from any superior position, consigned for life to subaltern employment, and subjected in every career to the precedence of superiors who they hardly recognize as their equals. At the artillery examinations where Chérin, the genealogist, refuses commoners, and where the Abbé Bosen, a mathematician, rejects the ignorant, it is discovered that capacity is wanting among the noble pupils and nobility among the capable pupils,[4322] the two qualities of gentility and intelligence seeming to exclude each other, as there are but four or five out of a hundred pupils who combine the two conditions. Now, as society at this time is mixed, such tests are frequent and easy. Whether lawyer, physician, or man of letters, a member of the Third-Estate with whom a duke converses familiarly, who sits in a diligence alongside of a count-colonel of hussars,[4323] can appreciate his companion or his interlocutor, weigh his ideas, test his merit and esteem him at his correct value, and I am sure that he does not overrate him.—Now that the nobles have lost their special capacities and the Third-Estate have acquired general competence, and as they are on the same level in education and competence, the inequality which separates them has become offensive because it has become useless. Nobility being instituted by custom is no longer sanctified by conscience; the Third-Estate being justly excited against privileges that have no justification, whether in the capacity of the noble or in the incapacity of the bourgeois.