It is the seed-bed which counts as well as the seed. The harmlessness of philosophic speculation in England and its destructive activity in France may be explained ultimately by the condition of the two lands. In the Island State able Ministers succeeded in popularizing an alien dynasty and promoting the well-being of the people. Retrenchment and Reform were not merely topics of conversation in salons; they were carried out in many parts of the administration. This was specially the case after the peace of 1783, which left France victorious and England prostrate. There the fruits of victory were not garnered; and the political fabric, strained by the war, was not underpinned. Thinking men talked of repair, but, thanks to the weakness of the King and the favouritism of the Queen, nothing was done. Here the ablest constructive statesman since the time of Cromwell set about the needed repairs; and his work, be it remembered, coincided with the joyous experiments of the Court of Versailles to maintain credit by a display of luxury. The steady recovery of England and the swift decline of France may be ascribed in large measure to Pitt and Calonne.
It was against definite and curable ills in the body politic that the French reformers at first directed their efforts. In May–June 1789 the ideals of Rousseau remained wholly in the background. The Nobles and Clergy (as appears in their cahiers, or instructions) were, with few exceptions, ready to give up the immunities from taxation to which they had too long clung. Those of the Tiers Etat, or Commons, laid stress on fair taxation, on the abolition of the cramping customs of Feudalism, whether social, agrarian, or judicial, on the mitigation of service in the militia, while some even demanded better lighting of the streets. The Nobles and Clergy asked for a limitation of the powers of the Crown; and the Commons desired a constitution; but it was to resemble that of England, save that larger powers were left to the King, the Ministers being responsible to him alone. Few of the cahiers of the Commons asked for a fusion of the three Orders in one Assembly; and not one breathed the thought of a Republic.[883] Their bugbear was the game laws, not the monarchy; the taille à miséricorde and the corvées, not the Nobles; the burdensome tithes, not the Church.
As at Paris and Versailles, so among the peasants. At first, even in troublous Franche Comté, their thoughts did not soar beyond taxes and feudal burdens. Arthur Young calmed a demonstration against himself by telling excited patriots near Besançon of the differences between taxes in England and France:
Gentlemen [he said] we have a great number of taxes in England which you know nothing of in France; but the tiers état, the poor, do not pay them, they are laid on the rich; every window in a man’s house pays; but if he has no more than six windows, he pays nothing; a Seigneur, with a great estate, pays the vingtièmes and taille, but the little proprietor of a garden pays nothing; the rich, for their horses, their carriages, their servants, and even for liberty to kill their own partridges; but the poor farmer nothing of all this; and what is more, we have in England a tax paid by the rich for the relief of the poor.[884]
Who would not sympathize with these people! They were staggering under burdens piled up by a monarchy absolute in name, but powerless in all that made for reform and retrenchment. Where Louis XVI by his weakness, and the Queen by her caprice, had failed to right the wrong, the nation was bent in succeeding; and it is highly probable that, if the King had shown more tact in dealing with the Commons, and they a little more patience, the popular movement might have progressed peacefully for a decade, with wholly beneficent results. We, who know how one event led on to another, find it difficult to escape from the attractive but fallacious conclusion that the sequence was inevitable. The mind loves to forge connecting links, and then to conclude that the chain could not have been made otherwise—a quite gratuitous assumption. At several points it was the exceptional which happened. A perusal of the letters of intelligent onlookers shows that they foresaw, and most naturally, a wholly different outcome of events. They looked to see a few drastic reforms, a time of unrest, and then the remodelling of the monarchy à l’Anglaise.
As for Pitt, he waited to see whither all this would tend. His attitude towards France in the early part of 1789 was distinctly friendly. He assured the French ambassador, M. de Luzerne, that France and England had the same principles, namely, not to aggrandize themselves and to oppose aggrandizement in others, and he added that he hoped for the assistance of France to assist Sweden and Turkey against the powerful Empires that were seeking their overthrow.
This declaration bespoke his fixed resolve to save Europe from the ambitious schemes of the other monarchs; and, now that France accepted Anglo-Prussian ascendancy in Holland and abandoned her forward policy in the Orient, she might serve to redress the balance of power. Such views were consonant with Pitt’s lofty aim of winning over “the natural enemy.” In truth, they were the outcome of common sense, even of self-interest. The suspicion and dislike were all on the side of the Court of Versailles. Montmorin and Luzerne were haunted by the fear that Pitt meant to pour oil on the smouldering discontent in France, and shrivel up the Bourbon power. There is not a shred of evidence that he ever entertained these notions. That they were harboured at Versailles merely showed that a Power which has rent another in twain cannot believe in the goodwill of the injured nation; and this suspicion was one of the many causes begetting irritation and alarm in Paris. On the other hand it must be remembered, as one of Pitt’s greatest services, that his protests against the American War and his subsequent efforts for an entente cordiale with France, had so far effaced resentment on this side of the Channel, that the strivings of Frenchmen after political freedom and social equality aroused the deepest interest. The majority of our people sympathized with Fox, when, on hearing of the fall of the Bastille, he exclaimed: “How much is this the greatest and best event that has happened in the world.”[885]
Official prudence or natural reserve kept Pitt silent on these affairs, and on the horrors of the ensuing Jacquerie, which speedily cooled the first transports of Britons. We know, however, that he must have viewed the financial collapse of France with secret satisfaction; for in August–September 1788 he wrote to Grenville in terms which implied that the recovery of the credit of France, then expected under the fostering care of Necker, would be a very serious blow, implying as it did the resumption of her aggressive schemes in the East.[886] Now, however, the disorders in France aroused his pity; and on 14th July, before he can have heard of the fall of the Bastille, he wrote to his mother that France was fast becoming “an object of compassion even to a rival.”[887] There is no sign that he feared the spread of democratic opinions into England. The monarchy had never been so popular as since the mental malady of the King. On the whole, then, Pitt surveyed the first events of the Revolution from the standpoint of a diplomatist and financier. France seemed to him doomed to a time of chastening and weakness which might upset the uneasy equilibrium of Europe.
Already he had come into touch with the French people at a very sensitive point, and in a way which illustrated their eager expectancy and his cool and calculating character. On 25th June Necker sent to him an urgent appeal begging that he would sanction the export of flour from Great Britain to France in order to make good the scarcity which there prevailed. If the request must come before Parliament, he trusted that the boon would speedily be granted by a generous nation, and by a statesman “whose rare virtues, sublime talents, and superb renown have long rivetted my admiration and that of all Europe.”[888]
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