THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE ABOUT 1785.
were often conducted by hospitals or religious houses. The best known are the Fair of Saint Germain and the Fair of Saint Laurent, both the left and the right banks being served by these two entertainments. There were side shows and mountebanks of all kinds, and some old verses say that “as one approaches his ears are as full as bottles with noise.”
In summing up the causes of the Revolution soon to let loose the pent-up fury of generations of repression, the economic and social reasons are easily seen. To English minds the only wonder is that the people endured so long the steady curtailment of opportunity and that they were so long deluded by the magnificence of royalty. The lower classes were taxed inordinately, even on necessities. The nobility (of whom there were some two hundred thousand as against England’s five hundred) and the clergy were not taxed at all, and when the Minister of Finance suggested to the assembled Notables, whom Louis was forced to summon, that they should bear their share of the government support, they resented the idea as insulting. Not only were the taxes heavy, their collection was farmed out to tax-gatherers who were permitted to take in lieu of salary as much more than the original tax as they could squeeze out of their victims. And, as if this drain, long continued and ever increasing, were not enough, Louis XV had collected advance taxes.
Politically, the power of the French monarch was practically absolute. The nobility and clergy almost invariably supported him, voting two to one against the Third Estate in the States General, and, as this body had not convened for nearly two hundred years before Louis XVI summoned it, it hardly could be regarded as a check to absolutism. Trial by jury had fallen into complete disuse and no man was sure of his personal liberty or of undisturbed ownership of his property, and, at the same time, he was denied freedom of belief and of speech.
But independence of belief and of speech was fast increasing, and its growth is an evidence of the intellectual change which is one of the causes of the Revolution, less evident but not less powerful than those which affected the economic, social and political status of Frenchmen. Paris was the center of this intellectual and literary activity. In Paris lived or sojourned the men whose advanced thinking was percolating through all classes of society—Voltaire and Montesquieu, who pleaded for liberty and a constitutional government, and Rousseau whose appeals for individual freedom of politics, religion and speech subordinated to the good of the whole, crystallized in the war cry “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” which has become the watchword of modern France. In Paris, too, were published the famous philosophical and economic articles of the Encyclopedia, often with difficulty in evading the police, and often interrupted by the prison visits of its contributors, Diderot being sent to the Bastille immediately upon the appearance of the first volume.
Skepticism permeated the upper classes, irreligion the lower.
Paris, indeed, was the very crater of the Revolution. In the scholars’ attics on the left bank argument was growing loud where only whispers had been heard before; in the crowded tenements of the eastern quarter around the Saint Antoine Gate, and especially amid the fallen grandeurs of the once fashionable Marais people were talking now where once they had hardly dared to think. The mob that was soon to take unspeakable license in the name of Liberty was watching for an opportunity to test its strength.