De Tocqueville’s description of the actual state of France during the eighteenth century has, of course, been disputed by later French writers, and notably by Babeau. Their differences are important, but for the moment we are concerned to note that in one particular they are in complete agreement. Neither Babeau, nor any other historian, has questioned the accuracy of De Tocqueville’s description of the position of the French nobles, from the day when the great cardinals crushed their conspiracies to the day when the Revolution destroyed the monarchy, whose heart and pulse had almost ceased to beat. The great scheme of unity and discipline in which Richelieu had stitched together the discords of France left no place for aristocracy. From that danger, at any rate, the French monarchy was safe. Other dangers were to overwhelm it, for Richelieu, in giving to it its final form, had secured it from the aggressions of nobles but not from the follies of kings. Tout marche, et le hasard corrige le hasard. The soliloquy of Don Carlos in Hernani contains an element of truth and hope for democracy which is wanting in all systems of personal government, where the chances of recovery all depend on a single caprice. It was the single caprice that Versailles represented. It was the single caprice that destroyed Richelieu’s great creation. When Louis XIV. took to piety and to Madame de Maintenon, he rescinded in one hour of fatal zeal the religious settlement that had given her prosperity to France. Her finance and her resources foundered in his hurricanes of temper and of arrogance. Louis XV. was known in boyhood as ‘the beloved.’ When he fell ill in the campaign of 1744 in Flanders, all France wept and prayed for him. It would have been not less happy for him than it would have been for Pompey if the intercessions of the world had died on the breeze and never ascended to the ear of Heaven. When thirty years later his scarred body passed to the royal peace of St. Denis, amid the brutal jeers and jests of Paris, the history of the French monarchy was the richer for a career as sensual and selfish and gross as that of a Commodus, and the throne which Richelieu had placed absolute and omnipotent above the tempests of faction and civil war had begun to rock in the tempests of two sovereigns’ passions.
One half-hearted attempt had indeed been made to change the form and character of the monarchy. When he became regent in 1715, Orleans played with the ideas of St. Simon and substituted for the government of secretaries a series of councils, on which the great nobles sat, with a supreme Council of Regency. As a departure from the Versailles system, the experiment at first excited enthusiasm, but it soon perished of indifference. The bureaucrats, whom Orleans could not afford to put on one side, quarrelled with the nobles: the nobles found the business tedious and uninteresting: the public soon tired of a scheme that left all the abuses untouched: and the regent, at the best a lukewarm friend to his own innovation, had his mind poisoned against it by the artful imagination of Dubois. One by one the councils flickered out; the Council of the Regency itself disappeared in 1728, and the monarchy fell back into its old ways and habits.
As at Versailles, so in France. If the noble had been reduced to a trifling but expensive cypher at the Court, the position of seigneur in the village was not very different. In the sixteenth century he had been a little king. His relations with the peasants, with whom his boyhood was often spent in the village school, were close and not seldom affectionate. But though he was in many cases a gentle ruler, a ruler he undoubtedly was, and royal ordinances had been found necessary to curb his power. By the eighteenth century his situation had been changed. There were survivals of feudal justice and feudal administration that had escaped the searching eye of Richelieu, but the seigneur had been pushed from the helm, and the government of the village had passed into other hands. It was the middle-class intendant and not the seigneur who was the master. The seigneur who still resided was become a mere rent receiver, and the people called him the ‘Hobereau.’ But the seigneur rarely lived in the village, for the Court, which had destroyed his local power, had drawn him to Paris to keep him out of mischief, and when later the Court wished to change its policy, the seigneur refused to change his habits. The new character of the French nobility found its expression in its new homes. Just as the tedious splendour of Versailles, built out of the lives and substance of an exhausted nation, recorded the decadence and the isolation of the French monarchy, so in the countryside the new palaces of the nobles revealed the tastes and the life of a class that was allowed no duties and forbidden no pleasures. The class that had once found its warlike energy reflected in the castles of Chinon and Loches was now only at home in the agreeable indolence of Azay le Rideau or the delicious extravagance of Chenonceaux. The nobles, unable to feed their pride on an authority no longer theirs, refused no stimulant to their vanity and no sop to their avarice. Their powers had passed to the intendant; their land was passing to the bourgeois or the peasant; but their privileges increased. Distinctions of rank were sharper edged. It was harder for a plebeian to become an officer under Louis XVI. than it had been under Louis XIV., and the exemptions from taxation became a more considerable and invidious privilege as the general burdens grew steadily more oppressive. Nature had made the French nobleman less, but circumstances made him more haughty than the English. Arthur Young, accustomed to the bearing of English landlords, was struck by the very distant condescension with which the French seigneur treated the farmer. The seigneur was thus on the eve of the Revolution a privileged member of the community, very jealous of his precedence, quarrelsome about trifles, with none of the responsibilities of a ruler, and with few of the obligations of a citizen. It was an unenviable and an uninspiring position. It is not surprising that Fénelon, living in the frivolous prison of Versailles, should have inspired the young Duke of Burgundy with his dream of a governing aristocracy, or that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse should have described the public-spirited members of this class as caged lions, or that a nobleman of the fierce energy of the Marquis de Mirabeau should have been driven to divide his time between the public prosecution of his noisy and interminable quarrels with his wife and his sons, and the composition of his feeling treatise on L’Ami des Hommes.
For in the France whose king had no thought save for hunting, women and morbid disease, there was endless energy and intellectual life. France sparkled with ideas. The enthusiasms of the economists and philosophers filled the minds of nobles who in England would have been immersed in the practical duties of administration. The atmosphere of social sensibility melted the dry language of official reports, and the intendants themselves dropped a graceful tear over the miseries of the peasants. Amid the decadence of the monarchy and the uncivilised and untamed license of Louis XV., there flourished the emancipating minds of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and Quesnai, as well as Rousseau, the passion and the spirit of the Revolution. On the one side is Versailles, abandoned to gross and shameless pleasures, on the other a society pursuing here a warm light of reason and science with a noble rage for progress and improvement, bewitched there by the Nouvelle Héloïse and Clarissa, delighting in those storms of the senses that were sweeping over France. The memoirs, the art, the literature of the time are full of these worlds, ruled, one by philosophy and illumination, the other by the gospel of sensibility and tender feeling, the two mingling in a single atmosphere in such a salon as that of Julie de Lespinasse, or in such a mind as that of Diderot. A kind of public life tries, too, to break out of its prison in the zealous, if somewhat mistaken exertions of agricultural societies and benevolent landowners. But amid all this vitality and inspiration and energy of mind and taste, the government and the fortunes of the race depend ultimately on Versailles, who lives apart, her voluptuous sleep undisturbed by the play of thought and hope and eager curiosity, wrapt and isolated in her scarlet sins.
When Louis XVI. called to office Turgot, fresh from his reforms at Limoges, it looked as if the intellect of France might be harnessed to the monarchy. The philosophers believed that their radiant dreams were about to come gloriously true. Richelieu had planned his system for an energetic minister and a docile king; Turgot had not less energy than Richelieu, and Turgot’s master was not more ambitious than Louis XIII. But the new régime lasted less than two years, for Louis XVI., cowed by courtiers and ruled by a queen who could not sacrifice her pleasures to the peace of France, dismissed his minister, the hopes of the reformers were destroyed, and France settled down to the unrolling of events. The monarchy was almost dead. It went out in a splendid catastrophe, but it was already spent and exhausted before the States-General were summoned. This vast, centralised scheme was run down, exhausted by the extravagance of the Court, unable to discharge its functions, causing widespread misery by its portentous failure. The monarchy that the Revolution destroyed was anarchy. Spenser talks in the Faerie Queene of a little sucking-fish called the remora, which collects on the bottom of a ship and slowly and invisibly, but surely, arrests its progress. The last kings were like the remora, fastening themselves on Richelieu’s creation and steadily and gradually depriving it of power and life.
It was natural that De Tocqueville, surveying these two centuries of national life, so full of mischief, misdirection and waste, seeing, too, in the new régime the survival of many features that he condemned in the old, should have traced all the calamities of France to the absence of a ruling aristocracy. It was natural that in such a temper and with such preoccupations he should have turned wistfully and not critically to England, for if France was the State in which the nobles had least power, England was the State in which they had most. The Revolution of 1688 established Parliamentary Government. The manners and the blunders of James II. had stripped the Crown of the power that his predecessor had gained by his seductive and unscrupulous politics, and when the great families settled with the sovereign of their choice, their memories of James were too recent and vivid to allow them to concede more than they could help to William. The Revolution put the law of the land over the will of the sovereign: it abolished his suspending and dispensing powers, and it obliged him to summon Parliament every year. It set up a limited monarchy with Parliament controlling the Crown. But though the Revolution gave England a constitutional Parliamentary government, that government had no homogeneous leadership, and it looked as if its effective force might be dissipated in the chaos and confusion of ministries. In such a situation one observer at least turned his eyes to France. There exists in the British Museum a paper by Daniel Defoe, written apparently for the guidance of Harley, who was Secretary of State in 1704. In this paper Defoe dwelt on the evils of divided and dilatory government, and sketched a scheme by which his patron might contrive to build up for himself a position like that once enjoyed by Richelieu and Mazarin. Defoe saw that the experiment meant a breach with English tradition, but he does not seem to have seen, what was equally true, that success was forbidden by the conditions of Parliamentary government and the strength of the aristocracy. The scheme demanded among other things the destruction of the new Cabinet system. As it happened, this mischievous condition of heterogeneous administration, in which one minister counterworked and counteracted another, came to an end in Defoe’s lifetime, and it came to an end by the consolidation of the system which he wished to see destroyed.
This was the work of Walpole, whose career, so uninviting to those who ask for the sublime or the heroic in politics, for it is as unromantic a story as can be desired of perseverance, and coarse method, and art without grace, and fruits without flowers, is one of the capital facts of English history. Walpole took advantage of the fortunate accident that had placed on the throne a foreigner, who took no interest in England and did not speak her language, and laid the foundations of Cabinet government. Walpole saw that if Parliamentary supremacy was to be a reality, it was essential that ministers should be collectively responsible, and that they should severally recognise a common aim and interest; otherwise, by choosing incompatible ministers, the king could make himself stronger than the Cabinet and stronger than Parliament. It is true that George III., disdaining the docility of his predecessors, disputed later the Parliamentary supremacy which Walpole had thus established, and disputed it by Walpole’s own methods of corruption and intrigue. But George III., though he assailed the liberal ideas of his time, and assailed them with an unhappy success, did not threaten the power of the aristocracy. He wanted ministers to be eclectic and incoherent, because he wanted them to obey him rather than Parliament, but his impulse was mere love of authority and not any sense or feeling for a State released from this monopoly of class. Self-willed without originality, ambitious without imagination, he wanted to cut the knot that tethered the Crown to the Cabinet, but he had neither the will nor the power to put a knife in the system of aristocracy itself. He wished to set back the clock, but only by half a century, to the days when kings could play minister against minister, and party against party, and not to the days of the more resolute and daring dreams of the Stuart fancy. The large ideas of a sovereign like Henry of Navarre were still further from his petty and dusty vision. He was so far successful in his intrigues as to check and defeat the better mind of his generation, but if he had won outright, England would have been ruled less wisely indeed, but not less deliberately in the interests of the governing families. Thus it comes that though his interventions are an important and demoralising chapter in the history of the century, they do not disturb or qualify the general progress of aristocratic power.
In France there was no institution, central or local, in which the aristocracy held power: in England there was no institution, central or local, which the aristocracy did not control. This is clear from a slight survey of Parliament and of local administration.
The extent to which this is true had probably not been generally grasped before the publication of the studies of Messrs. Redlich and Hirst, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb, on the history of local government or the recent works of Dr. Slater and Professor Hasbach on the great enclosures. Most persons were aware of the enormous power of the aristocracy, but many did not know that that power was greater at the end than at the beginning of the century. England was, in fact, less like a democracy, and more remote from the promise of democracy when the French Revolution broke out, than it had been when the governing families and the governing Church, whose cautions and compromises and restraint Burke solemnly commended to the impatient idealists of 1789, settled their account with the Crown in the Revolution of 1688.
The corruptions that turned Parliamentary representation into the web of picturesque paradoxes that fascinated Burke, were not new in the eighteenth century. As soon as a seat in the House of Commons came to be considered a prize, which was at least as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, the avarice and ambition of powerful interests began to eat away the democratic simplicity of the old English franchise. Thus, by the time of James I., England had travelled far from the days when there was a uniform franchise, when every householder who did watch and ward could vote at a Parliamentary election, and when the practice of throwing the provision of the Members’ wages upon the electorate discouraged the attempt to restrict the franchise, and thereby increase the burden of the voters. Indeed, when the Whig families took over the government of England, the case for Parliamentary Reform was already pressing. It had been admitted by sovereigns like Elizabeth and James I., and it had been temporarily and partially achieved by Cromwell. But the monopolies which had been created and the abuses which had been introduced had nothing to fear from the great governing families, and the first acts of the Revolution Parliament, so far from threatening them, tended to give them sanction and permanence. Down to this time there had been a constant conflict within the boroughs between those who had been excluded from the franchise and the minorities, consisting of burgage-holders or corrupt corporations or freemen, who had appropriated it. These conflicts, which were carried to Parliament, were extinguished by two Acts, one of 1696, the other of 1729, which declared that the last determination in each case was final and irrevocable. No borough whose fate had been so decided by a Parliamentary committee could ever hope to recover its stolen franchise, and all these local reform movements settled down to their undisturbed euthanasia. These Acts were modified by a later Act of 1784, which allowed a determination to be disputed within twelve months, but by that time 127 boroughs had already received their final verdict: in the others, where the franchise was determined after 1784, there was some revival of local agitation.