The cheese was greatly appreciated, as was also the action of the State of Virginia, which ordered two busts of the Marquis to be made by the sculptor Houdon, one to be placed in the State Capitol at Richmond and the other in the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.
The United States had won its independence, though its statesmen were now perplexed with the problem of making one united nation out of thirteen separate states. But France had yet to deal with its own problem of liberty. There were many men who dreamed of equality in that nation and who hoped for it, but the King and the court were despotic, the peasants yoked to the soil, bowed down by unjust taxes, crushed by unfair laws. There was a spirit abroad that was destined to bring a temporary whirlwind. So the thinking men of France, and Lafayette one of the chief among them, turned their attention to affairs at home.
IX
HOW LAFAYETTE SOUGHT TO GIVE LIBERTY TO FRANCE
The people of the thirteen American colonies that became the United States had always had more liberty than the people of France. Most of the colonies had been settled by men who had left Europe and gone to America in order that they might enjoy civil or religious independence. They largely made their own laws, and by the time of the Revolution had become so well educated in self-government that they were able to draw up a Constitution and live by its terms with extremely little friction or unrest. The success that followed the forming of the republic of the West was a marvel to Europe; that success was mainly due to the lessons of self-restraint and the real appreciation of what liberty meant that had come to the colonists before the Revolution. Progress that is to be real progress must begin right, and Washington and Jefferson and Franklin were far-sighted and clear-headed builders. The people of France had been putting up with wrongs a thousandfold worse than those the Americans had borne, but they had never been educated in self-government, and so when they tried to win liberty they plunged headlong into turmoil.
France was still governed very much as it had been in the Middle Ages. The peasants were reduced to the very lowest form of living, starvation and ignorance were common through the country. The business classes were hampered by unjust laws. The nobility were idle, corrupt, and grossly extravagant. Almost all power lay in the King, and Louis XVI., amiable though he was, followed the lines of his Bourbon ancestors, Louis XIV. and Louis XV., the former of whom had said, “The State, it is I,” and had ruled by that principle.
Unhappily for Louis XVI., however, the world had progressed from the view-point of the Middle Ages, and men were beginning to talk of constitutions and of the duties that sovereigns owed their people. He shut his ears to such talk as well as he could, and his courtiers helped him to ignore the protests. The court continued to spend money on entertainments as if it was water, while the peasants starved. Then it was found that the expense of aiding the United States in the war had added enough to the nation’s debt to make it impossible to pay the interest and to find means to carry on the government. Either the court’s expenses must be lessened or new taxes must be levied. The nobles furiously resisted the first alternative, and the people resisted the second. Toward the end of 1786 Calonne, the Minister of Finance, had to admit that the treasury was bankrupt and advise the King to call a meeting of the Assembly of Notables to find some way out of the difficulty.
The Assembly was made up almost entirely of men of the highest rank, who failed to appreciate the distresses of the country. Lafayette was known to hold very liberal views, he was constantly talking of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and at first a part of the court opposed his membership in the Assembly. He was given his seat there, however, and with one or two others tried to convince the council of the need of reforming the laws. But the nobles would not listen. They were immovably arrogant and autocratic; they would hear nothing of reforms or constitutions or the rights of the people.
The Assembly of Notables reached no satisfactory conclusion. When it adjourned conditions grew steadily worse. The affairs of the country were in a terrible muddle, each class in the land thought only of itself, and each was divided, envious and hostile to the others. Lafayette fought heroically to bring them to the point of view of Washington’s countrymen. The Marquis, however, was too much of an enthusiast and too little of a statesman to see that the long downtrodden peasants of France were a different type from the educated American farmers. Americans in France, John Adams and Gouverneur Morris, realized better than he did that the people of France were not yet fitted to govern themselves; but he would not listen to these statesmen’s opinions. His rôle was that of a popular leader, not that of a far-seeing statesman in very difficult times. But the sufferings of the people were always present to him, and he took the most direct course he could to relieve and satisfy them.