The French Revolution

by Sir Charles Edward Mallet

It would not have been easy to create a system more complicated or difficult to work. The object of establishing these numerous bodies with their innumerable officials was that they might balance and control each other. The result was the paralysis of all. The immense number of the new officials rendered impossible rapidity of work. The cost of their salaries, though individually low, was cumulatively very high. The strangeness of their functions, which were very numerous, and which included the assessment and collection of the taxes, the maintenance of religion, of education, and of public works, the control of streets and highways, of sanitation, of the poor law, of prisons and of police, would in any case have been embarrassing enough; but it became far more so, when no one could tell where his own functions ended and another man's began. Half of the new officials found the other half from the first inclined to question their authority, to dispute their commands, and to accuse them of over-stepping their rights. The higher among them had no power of enforcing obedience from their subordinates, who argued against orders which they disliked, and acted on them or not, as they pleased. In the confusion of the time the habits of discipline and obedience were naturally lax, and refractory underlings could plead with some force that they were just as well qualified as their superiors to interpret the principles of the Rights of Man.

Accordingly, it soon became apparent that the real authority under the new system lay not in the high officials of the departments, or in the helpless Ministers at Paris, but in the forty-four thousand communes, which in many respects were independent of their superiors, and which managed their own affairs. To the communal authorities was entrusted the task of repressing riots and disorder, and the control for that purpose of military force. On them was thrown an immense amount of executive work, and the duty of carrying out in detail all the great social and political reforms, by which, month after month, the decrees of the National Assembly were changing the face of France. In many places the communal or municipal officials were ignorant and uneducated men, for in the country parishes there were often no bourgeois, the local priests were ineligible for office, and the local gentry were fugitives or 'suspects.' In twenty thousand of the new municipalities, it was stated in the Assembly, the officials elected could not read or write. Men of this description—men indeed of any description—overwhelmed with work, surrounded by novelties and disorder, and perplexed by the multitude of their duties and coadjutors, were certain to find their task beyond them, and speedily to fall into confusion and arrears. No sooner had the new system been established, than its servants began unwillingly to discover how impossible it was to work it with success.

One of the most prominent features of the new order was the demand which it made upon people's time. Under it, it was estimated, one out of every thirty-four men in the country held office. But even for those who escaped the troubles of office, no small burden of citizenship remained. Every active citizen was an elector and a member of the National Guard. As riots were perpetual, his service in the National Guard soon became burdensome. As elections multiplied, as every place in the municipality, in the district, in the department, in the legislature, and before long in the various branches of the law and of the Church was filled by election, and as each election presupposed meetings, committees, canvassing, and a large expenditure of time, his duties as an elector gradually became intolerable. The history of the innumerable elections held in France after the outbreak of the Revolution shows clearly that busy, working people found it impossible, after a time, to perform all the duties imposed on them by the State, and, immersed in the calls of business, drew away from politics, when their first enthusiasm had worn off, and gave up coming to the polls. Politics steadily fell more and more into the hands of those who were prepared to make their living out of them. Only the unoccupied and the ambitious were willing to give the time required to speeches, to meetings, to party organising, to all the arts of many different shades, by which minute democracies are won, and which are essential to political success, where every office in the service in the State is made the prize of the electioneer.

It is curious, however, to notice in the new constitution two points, on which the devotion of the Assembly to theoretic rights gave way to its devotion to other considerations. The two decrees, which limited the franchise, and which imposed a property qualification for office, were clearly incompatible with the high doctrines of the Rights of Man. The importance of them was specially felt in Paris, where they affected a large number of energetic politicians, including a great many journalists and workmen in irregular employment. They were at once made the subject of strong protest in the democratic Press, and the more advanced leaders seized the opportunity to point out with unanswerable force the disposition which the Assembly showed to promote the interests and influence of the bourgeois at the expense of the working-class. Nothing probably among the earlier measures of the Assembly did so much as these two decrees to give colour to that idea, and to deepen the feeling of antagonism towards the middle class, which was already perceptible among the working people in the towns.

The same prepossession for electoral devices appeared in the Assembly's judicial reforms. No part of its work was better conceived or, thanks to the influence of the great lawyers in the House, carried out in a better spirit than this. The old courts and Parlements, with their abuses and delays, and their objectionable system of payment by fees, were swept away. The power of arbitrary imprisonment, the practice of torture, the prosecutions for heresy, the inequalities in the administration of justice, and the disproportionate punishments for trivial offences, which then disgraced the penal codes of nearly every European country, were exchanged for a new and more equitable system. Trial by jury was made the rule in criminal cases. Counsel were permitted to be employed for the defence of the accused. Complete publicity was introduced into the proceedings of the law courts. A simple system was established for the administration of justice. A civil court was created in each district, a criminal court in each department, a final court of appeal at Paris; and, besides these tribunals, small courts of summary jurisdiction, under Juges de Paix, all over the country, and a special High Court at Orleans to try cases of treason against the nation. But, admirable in many respects as the new system was, and brightly as it contrasts with the dark practices of the Ancien Régime, there ran through it all one grave defect, which went far to diminish its value. With few exceptions, the judges and officers of the law courts were appointed by popular election for short periods of time, and were thus liable to be deprived of their posts, if their sentences and conduct did not coincide with popular feeling. Such a provision has been wisely held to be a serious danger to justice, even among a tranquil and reasonable people. It was infinitely more dangerous in a time of revolution, when reason was far less potent than suspicion, and political passion ran exceptionally high.

The Assembly carried even into military matters its dread of authority and its fondness for abstract theories and electoral schemes. Both army and navy were in a thoroughly unsatisfactory condition. The spirit of political insubordination had spread far in both services, and had produced mutiny and disaffection. The state of the army, especially, had for some time past given cause for alarm. Nowhere was the system of class distinction more jealously kept up. All the higher offices in the army were open to men of rank alone, and even in the reign of Louis XVI fresh regulations had been imposed to guard and enforce this class distinction. The pay of the upper officers was sometimes very high, and the number of generals was ridiculously large. On the other hand, the pay of the men was extremely low, and it was notorious that even the allowances made to them by the State were often curtailed by the officers through whose hands they passed. The barracks, the beds, and the food supplied for the men were, as a rule, bad and insufficient. Recruits were drawn from the lowest class in the country. The prestige and tone of the service had suffered during recent years, and the attempt made under Louis XVI to introduce a more rigid and harassing system of drills had widely increased the spirit of discontent. On an army already disaffected the doctrines of the Rights of Man, and the expectations of universal change and relief from oppression, which accompanied the Revolution, had their natural effect. On all sides signs of mutiny appeared. The men refused to obey their officers, formed committees and held meetings of their own, sent up petitions to the National Assembly, and demanded more pay and the management of their regimental chests. Desertions rapidly increased. Men and officers alike disregarded the rules of discipline, and set their superiors at defiance. On all sides the rank and file of the army showed an inclination to fraternise with the people, and refused to serve in putting down disorder. At last, in August, 1790, a serious mutiny at Nancy opened the eyes of the Assembly to the danger of the situation; and the great majority of its members concurred in the vigorous and exemplary severity, by which Bouillé, with the support of the National Guards of the district, reduced the mutinous regiments to order.

No dangers, however, could make the majority of the Assembly understand that, if an army and navy were to be maintained at all, soldiers and sailors must be subjected to stringent discipline and governed by exceptional laws, without regard to the abstract Rights of Man. They set to work, it is true, to re-organise both services. They abolished the hated militia. They refused to sanction conscription in the army, although they permitted it within certain limits for the navy. They raised the pay of the men. They threw open promotion in both services to all ranks and conditions alike. They abolished the superfluity of highly paid offices, and laid down some other reasonable regulations for both departments. They abstained, in spite of their proclivities, from making all military and naval offices elective. But they jealously restricted the King's power of appointing officers. They could not be brought to see the necessity of enforcing discipline at any cost, and endeavoured to limit, by such provisions as they could invent, the authority of the officers over their men. They gave the soldiers the right of appealing to the nearest civil magistrate against their own commander. They placed the control of the military chest in the hands of a board elected by the regiment. They permitted the men to form clubs and associations, and to petition the Assembly for the protection of their rights. They insisted on regarding the soldier as a citizen still; and although for purely military offences they left him subject to the jurisdiction of the military courts, they took special steps even in those courts to assert the rights of the accused, and to diminish the influence of the military authorities. The result of all these regulations was that the Government could no longer rely upon its forces, and that discipline in both services remained thoroughly relaxed, until the approach of national disaster taught Frenchmen the necessity which no theories could avert, and until the rigid discipline of danger drilled these disorderly and mutinous battalions into the most magnificent army which the world had seen.

But graver than its errors in regard to judicial and military reform were the Assembly's errors in regard to the Church. The attack upon the Church has been viewed in many quarters as the most conspicuous example of its unwisdom. The lower ranks of the French clergy had shared to a very large extent the enthusiasm of Frenchmen for the Revolution. Some of them were among the most enlightened members of the Assembly, and were prepared to co-operate heartily in the work of reform. But the financial difficulties of the State were never absent from the minds of the Assembly, and the great possessions of the Church seemed to offer a way out of those difficulties too tempting to be overlooked. It was on this side that the attack began. As early as the 4th August, 1789, tithes had been summarily abolished, and a portion of the income of the Church had thus been cut away, without, as Sieyès vainly pointed out, relieving anyone except the proprietors of land. In the following autumn, Mirabeau carried through the Assembly a decree declaring the possessions of the Church to be the property of the nation, and early in the new year the work of reconstitution began. In February, 1790, the monasteries and religious houses were suppressed, and their property appropriated. In April it was proposed to vote a budget for the maintenance of the clergy. In June, going further still, the Assembly undertook to re-organise the whole ecclesiastical system, and after long and animated debates the Civil Constitution of the clergy was adopted in the month of July. In August the Assembly formally took over the management of the property of the Church.

The new constitution of the clergy was simplicity itself. Monasteries, chapters, canons, dioceses, all impediments to uniformity, were abolished. One bishop was appointed for each department, and one priest for every parish. Incomes, ranging from about fifty thousand francs for the wealthiest bishops to about six thousand francs for the poorest priests—incomes in themselves thoroughly equitable and a marked improvement upon the mingled poverty and extravagance of the older system—were voted for the maintenance of the new hierarchy. The fondness of the Assembly for deliberative bodies was satisfied by giving the bishops ecclesiastical councils to advise them, and its attachment to elective principles was shown by the astonishing decree, which declared that in future both bishops and priests were to be elected by the votes of their flocks. It was inevitable that so sweeping a change should excite opposition and result in failure. Even on the financial side, which on paper showed a very large saving to the State, difficulties speedily arose. The Assembly, fully intending to act fairly, undertook to pension the numerous ecclesiastics whose interests suffered vitally from the reforms. But money was scarce, and the charges undertaken by the State were very heavy. The dispossessed ecclesiastics, the monks and nuns, soon began to feel the meaning of the change, and their history soon began to exhibit many pitiful cases of want and distress. With the disestablishment of the monastic foundations, the institutions which they had maintained declined, and their schools and asylums languished. The destruction of so ancient and widespread a system could not, however necessary it might be, be carried through, in a time of revolution, without a good deal of suffering and injustice. But the methods of the Assembly aggravated the violence of the change. They had the power, and probably the right, to disestablish and to disendow the old Church. But they had neither the right nor the power to force men's consciences to accept their substitute for it, whether they would or not. Moreover, they did not understand that the new constitution of the clergy was absolutely repugnant to the spirit of Roman Catholicism, and involved ideas which that spirit could not possibly accept. They believed that all authority and government ought to begin with the people, to come from below; and in accordance with that view they framed the new system of their Church. But if there was one principle which the Roman Church held dear, and which it had clung to even more closely than to its dogmas, ever since it established its ascendency in Europe, it was the principle that all authority in the Church proceeded from above. To every faithful Catholic the Pope held a spiritual power derived from Heaven; without the Pope's consent no share of that spiritual power could pass to bishop or to priest; and without such sanctions and authority from above, no man, whatever civil force might lie behind him, could administer with God's approval the services and sacraments of the Church. Beliefs of that kind, founded on conscience, and fixed in immemorial habit, could not be uprooted by any decrees. Even had the Assembly secured the Pope's consent, it seems doubtful whether its scheme would have been finally accepted in the country. Instead of that, it took no steps to conciliate the Papacy, but ostentatiously held itself aloof from Rome, and by various provocative measures showed its intention to set the Pope's authority at defiance.

The consequences were immediate and disastrous. The clergy as a whole fought the new scheme at every stage. The Assembly, conscious of the strength of their resistance, endeavoured to overcome it by compelling them all to take an oath to observe the new Civil Constitution. When the clergy procrastinated and refused, the Assembly found itself driven into more stringent measures, and at the end of 1790, obliged either to abandon its position or to take a more aggressive line, it demanded the King's consent to a decree enforcing compliance under penalties of dismissal and prosecution. From that time forward, the Revolution declared war upon the Church, and upon all the devout Catholics who adopted the cause of their pastors. From that time forward, the King, though he yielded to the pressure of the Assembly, gave up all hope of reconciling himself with the principles of the Revolution. From that time forward the Church in France was divided into two camps, the one consisting of those who took the oath and accepted the new system, and including, among a very few prelates and a large number of dispossessed monks, perhaps half of the old clergy of France, the other consisting of those who refused it, and including nearly all the prelates, all the most distinguished names, and most of the secular clergy of the ancient Church. On the one side were the sanctions of the law, the support of the State, and the assistance of all the new civil authorities. On the other side were the commands of the Pope, the sympathies of the great majority of pious Catholics, and the strength derived from conscientious opposition to severity and persecution. Both sides inevitably had their partisans in many towns and villages in France; and the virulence of religious partisanship before long produced, in the South and West, trouble, rebellions and civil war, and still further embittered the divisions, and aggravated the general confusion, which accompanied the Assembly's endeavours to reform and regenerate France.