A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon / For the Use of Schools and Colleges

by John Lord

But more powerful than either of these false prophets and guides, in immediate influence, was Diderot. Diderot; and with him the whole school of bold and avowed infidels, who united open atheism with a fierce democracy. The Encyclopedists professed to know every thing, to explain every thing, and to teach every thing, they discovered that there was no God, and taught that truth was a delusion, and virtue but a name. They were learned in mathematical, statistical, and physical science, but threw contempt on elevated moral wisdom, on the lessons of experience, and the eternal truths of divine revelation. They advocated changes, experiments, fomentations, and impracticable reforms. They preached a gospel of social rights, inflamed the people with disgust of their condition, and with the belief that wisdom and virtue resided, in the greatest perfection, with congregated masses.

They incessantly boasted of the greatness of General Influence of the Philosophers. philosophy, and the obsolete character of Christianity. They believed that successive developments of human nature, without the aid of influences foreign to itself, would gradually raise society to a state of perfection. What they could not explain by their logical formularies, they utterly discarded. They denied the reality of a God in heaven, and talked about the divinity of man on earth, especially when associated masses of the ignorant and brutal asserted what they conceived to be their rights. They made truth to reside, in its greatest lustre, with passionate majorities; and virtue, in its purest radiance, with felons and vagabonds, if affiliated into a great association. They flattered the people that they were wiser and better than any classes above them, that rulers were tyrants, the clergy were hypocrites, the oracles of former days mere fools and liars. To sum up, in few words, the French Encyclopedists, "they made Nature, in her outward manifestations, to be the foundation of all great researches, man to be but a mass of organization, mind the development of our sensations, morality to consist in self-interest, and God to be but the diseased fiction of an unenlightened age. The whole intellect, being concentrated on the outward and material, gave rise, perhaps, to some improvements in physical science; but religion was disowned, morality degraded, and man made to be but the feeble link in the great chain of events by which Nature is inevitably accomplishing her blind designs." From such influences, what could we expect but infidelity, madness, anarchy, and crimes?

The second cause of the French revolution was the diffusion of the ideas of democratic liberty. Rousseau was a republican in his politics, as he was a sentimentalist in religion. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason had a great influence on the French mind, as it also had on the English and American. Moreover, the apostles of liberty in France were much excited in view of the success of the American Revolution, and fancied that the words "popular liberty," "sovereignty of the people," the "rights of man," "liberty and equality," meant the same in America as they did when pronounced by a Parisian mob. The French people were unduly flattered, and made to believe, by the demagogues, that they were philosophers, and that they were as fit for liberty as the American nation itself. Moreover, it must be confessed that the people had really made considerable advances, and discovered that there was no right or justice in the oppressions under which they groaned. The exhortations of popular leaders and the example of American patriots prepared the people to make a desperate effort to shake off their fetters. What were rights, in the abstract, if they were to be ground down to the dust? What a mockery was the watchword of liberty and equality, if they were obliged to submit to a despotism which they knew to be, in the highest degree, oppressive and tyrannical?

Hence the Sufferings of the People. real and physical evils which the people of France endured, had no small effect in producing the revolution. Abstract ideas prepared the way, and sustained the souls of the oppressed; but the absolute burdens which they bore aroused them to resistance.

These evils were so great, that general Degradation of the People. discontent prevailed among the middle and lower classes through the kingdom. The agricultural population was fettered by game laws and odious privileges to the aristocracy. "Game of the most destructive kind, such as wild boars and herds of deer, were permitted to go at large through spacious districts, in order that the nobles might hunt as in a savage wilderness." Numerous edicts prohibited weeding, lest young partridges should be disturbed, and mowing of hay even, lest their eggs should be destroyed. Complaints for the infraction of these edicts were carried before courts where every species of oppression and fraud prevailed. Fines were imposed at every change of property and at every sale. The people were compelled to grind their corn at their landlord's mill, to press their grapes in his press, and bake their bread in his oven. In consequence of these feudal laws and customs, the people were very poor, their houses dark and comfortless, their dress ragged and miserable, their food coarse and scanty. Not half of the enormous taxes which they paid reached the royal treasury, or even the pockets of the great proprietors. Officers were indefinitely multiplied. The governing classes looked upon the people only to be robbed. Their cry was unheard in the courts of justice, while the tear of sorrow was unnoticed amid the pageantry of the great, whose extravagance, insolence, and pride were only surpassed by the misery and degradation of those unfortunate beings on whose toils they lived. Justice was bought and sold like any other commodity, and the decisions of judges were influenced by the magnitude of the bribes which were offered them. Besides feudal taxes, the clergy imposed additional burdens, and swarmed wherever there was plunder to be obtained. The people were so extravagantly taxed that it was no object to be frugal or industrious. Every thing beyond the merest necessaries of life was seized by various tax-gatherers. In England, severe as is taxation, three fourths of the produce of the land go to the farmer, while in France only one twelfth went to the poor peasant. Two thirds of his earnings went to the king. Nor was there any appeal from this excessive taxation, which ground down the middle and lower classes, while the clergy and the nobles were entirely exempted themselves. Nor did the rich proprietor live upon his estates. He was a non-resident, and squandered in the cities the money which was extorted from his dependents. He took no interest in the condition of the peasantry, with whom he was not united by any common ties. Added to this oppression, the landlord was cruel, haughty, and selfish; and he irritated by his insolence as well as oppressed by his injustice. All situations in the army, the navy, the church, the court, the bench, and in diplomacy were exclusively filled by the aristocracy, of whom there were one hundred and fifty thousand people—a class insolent, haughty, effeminate, untaxed; who disdained useful employments, who sought to live by the labor of others, and who regarded those by whose toils they were enabled to lead lives of dissipation and pleasure, as ignoble minions, who were unworthy of a better destiny, and unfit to enjoy those rights which God designed should be possessed by the whole human race.

The privileges and pursuits of the aristocratic class, from the king to a lieutenant in his army, were another cause of revolution. Louis XV. squandered twenty million pounds sterling in pleasures too ignominious to be even named in the public accounts, and enjoyed almost absolute power. He could send any one in his dominions to rot in an ignominious prison, without a hearing or a trial. The odious lettre de cachet could consign the most powerful noble to a dungeon, and all were sent to prison who were offensive to government. The king's mistresses sometimes had the power of sending their enemies to prison without consulting the king. The lives and property of the people were at his absolute disposal, and he did not scruple to exercise his power with thoughtless, and sometimes inhuman cruelty.

But these evils would have ended only in disaffection, and hatred, and unsuccessful resistance, had not the royal finances been Derangement of Finances. deranged. So long as the king and his ministers could obtain money, there was no immediate danger of revolution. So long as he could pay the army, it would, if decently treated, support an absolute throne.

But the king at last found it difficult to raise a sufficient revenue for his pleasures and his wars. The annual deficit was one hundred and ninety million of francs a year. The greater the deficit, the greater was the taxation, which, of course, increased the popular discontent.

Such was the state of things when Louis XVI. ascended the throne of Hugh Capet, (1774,) in his twentieth year, having married, four years before, Marie Antoinette, daughter of Maria Theresa, empress of Austria. He was grandson of Louis XV., who bequeathed to him a debt of four thousand millions of livres.

The new king was amiable and moral, and would have ruled France in peaceful times, but was unequal to a revolutionary crisis. "Of all the monarchs," says Alison, "of the Capetian line, he was the least able to stem, and yet the least likely to provoke, a revolution. The people were tired of the arbitrary powers of their monarch, and he was disposed to abandon them; they were provoked at the expensive corruptions of the court, and he was both innocent in his manners, and unexpensive in his habits; they demanded reformation in the administration of affairs, and he placed his chief glory in yielding to the public voice. His reign, from his accession to the throne to the meeting of the States General, was nothing but a series of ameliorations, without calming the public effervescence. He had the misfortune to wish sincerely for the public good, without possessing the firmness necessary to secure it; and with truth it may be said that reforms were more fatal to him than the continuance of abuses would have been to another sovereign."