The French Revolution

by Sir Charles Edward Mallet

Yet within this privileged order the differences of life were marked. Before the end of the eighteenth century many of the old families were ruined, and lived in the narrowest circumstances, upon incomes of a hundred, of fifty, even of twenty-five pounds a year, rigidly clinging to the titles and immunities which alone distinguished them from the poor, driven by necessity to exact from the peasants all that custom allowed them, and subsisting chiefly on the sinister pomp of caste. In striking contrast to the ruined nobles of the provinces was the much smaller and more brilliant body which composed the Court. No nobleman lived in the country, who could afford to live at Paris or Versailles. Not to be seen at Court was equivalent to obscurity or disgrace. The nobles of La Vendée incurred the Government's displeasure by their obstinate adherence to their country homes and their lamentable unwillingness to perform their duties about the person of the King. Yet the nobles of La Vendée were the only part of the French aristocracy, which in the days of the Revolution died fighting for the Crown.

At Court the leaders of society set the wild example of extravagance. It is difficult to exaggerate the pomp and profusion of Versailles. Every prince and princess had a separate establishment with its dependents multiplied in proportion to its owner's rank. The Queen's household numbered all but five hundred persons, the Comte d'Artois' almost seven hundred, the King's a thousand in the civil department alone[2]. It was the distinction of the Grand Seigneurs in those days—common minds imagine that it distinguishes their imitators now—to ignore the value of money. In this respect the King outshone all the Grand Seigneurs of his Court. Louis XIV spent thirty millions sterling on a single palace. His successor squandered three millions on a single mistress. Pensions, sinecures, allowances, were scattered with a lavish hand. When Necker first took office, the charges on the pension-list exceeded two millions and a quarter. The Duke of Orleans, with an income of a quarter of a million, received a large pension from the Crown, and died nearly six millions in debt. The art of spending money was one secret of the art of pleasing, and nowhere was the art of pleasing studied with more finish or success. In the charmed circle of that dazzling, polished Court, pleasure marched with a stately and unflagging step. Courtesy ordained that everyone should be agreeable, witty, light-hearted and well-bred. But the unceasing chase of pleasure, though attended by excellent graces, banishes all thought of others while it veils egotism with delight, and the fortunate who entered there naturally forgot the misery which reigned among the unfortunate outside[3].

Beside the privileged order of nobility stood the privileged corporation of the Church. Like the nobles, the Church owned vast landed estates, which covered about a fifth part of France, and which in many cases were managed well. Like the nobles, the dignitaries of the Church retained the ancient feudal rights which had survived from the days when they governed the country, besides a variety of dues and charges, and their special prerogative—the tithe. Like the nobles, they evaded the weight of taxation. The assembly of the clergy, meeting every five years, negotiated with the Crown its own contributions to the Exchequer, and obtained numberless concessions from the local authorities, wherever its interests were touched. Moreover, the Church still enjoyed political power. No one in France had a legal right to live outside its pale. It controlled the schools; it kept the parish registers, on which a man's title to his property and his name depended; for the sake of Catholic truth it burned its adversaries; and, through its censorship of the Press, it silenced all assailing tongues.

Then too, like the nobility, the Church offered many contrasts of condition. The great prelates who lived at Court maintained with all the lavishness of laymen the well-bred profusion of the place. Their wealth rivalled that of princes. The Archbishop of Cambrai was the feudal suzerain of seventy-five thousand people, lord of the town of Cambrai, patron of two great abbeys, and a Duke and Count to boot. The ecclesiastical income enjoyed by M. de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, besides his ministerial salary and pension, is stated to have exceeded, according to a modern standard, fifty-four thousand pounds. The Archbishop of Rouen, apart from his episcopal revenues, drew from his abbeys twenty thousand pounds a year. The Bishop of Troyes received penitents in confessionals lined with white satin. M. de Rohan, hereditary Bishop of Strasbourg, held a splendid Court in his great palace at Saverne, and exalted the dignity of a prince of the Church by having all his saucepans made of silver. When one contrasts with this delicate existence the condition of the vast majority of parish priests, whose plebeian birth shut on them the door to preferment, who lived, often in ruined and neglected parsonages, in the abandoned country districts, with no educated friends about them, dispensing the meagre charities of the august superiors who could not leave the Court to visit them, and supporting the lofty pretensions of the Catholic Church on incomes of forty, of twenty, and of sixteen pounds a year, one ceases to wonder that the priests abhorred a lot, which 'made even the stones and beams of their miserable dwellings cry aloud,' and that, when the day of retribution came, they welcomed the destroyer, and refused to lift a finger to defend the existing system in the Church of France.

Apart, however, from the advantages of rank, the middle class had its privileges and exemptions too. Some enjoyed immunities as servants of the Government; others, as members of powerful corporations; others, again, of a lower grade, driven from the country districts by the exactions of the Government and by the demands of the seigneurs, who insisted on their tribute while they disdained their company, took refuge in the towns, and there formed a caste of their own. In early times, most of the important towns in France had possessed two governing assemblies, one composed of magistrates and officials, who owed their offices originally to popular election and afterwards to purchase from the Crown, the other composed originally of all the towns-people and afterwards of local 'notables' representing the different companies and guilds. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the popular spirit, which had once given life to all these institutions, had long died out. The municipal officers bought their places from the Government, and handed them down from father to son. The representative assembly had ceased to represent any but the substantial burghers of the town. What had once been public honours conferred by the voices of free citizens had everywhere crystallised into private rights, the prerogative of one class or of a few important families.

Accordingly, the possessors of these rights were bribed to uphold the existing order by a thousand little dignities and exemptions, in which relief from taxation played a large part, and they maintained the pride of their position by drawing a jealous line between themselves and the unrepresented artisans below. The guilds, originally created to foster, still survived to fetter the commerce of the towns. But in process of time these guilds had been multiplied for every branch of trade; the privilege of managing them had been in most cases usurped or bought by a narrow group of members; and the fees and rules which they imposed tended readily to further class-interests and class-divisions. All artisans who were not the sons of masters, went by the name of 'strangers,' and found innumerable barriers placed in the way of their advancement. The passion for place, which to some observers seems inherent in the French middle class, was sedulously encouraged by Ministers, who, by multiplying small posts and dignities, filled the Exchequer, appeased complaints, and won supporters. Each of these little places carried its special perquisites and distinctions; and thus, in the minds of thousands, the aspiration to possess some petty advantage over their neighbours tended to oust the larger aspirations which might have led to public freedom. In one small town the notables were divided into thirty-six distinct bodies, with different rights and degrees. Every tradesman delighted in a special mark of rank. The owner of a shop sat on a higher seat than his assistants. The tailor could wear only one buckle to his wig, while the proud apothecary might boast of three. On one occasion the periwig-makers of La Flèche ceased working in a body, in order to show their 'well-founded grief occasioned by the precedence granted to the bakers.' The evils begotten of caste and privilege could hardly be carried to more ludicrous extremes.

But while each of the educated classes thus possessed its distinguishing marks to arm revolution and to point hatred, one class, the lowest, had nothing but the privileges of its superiors to mark its position in the State. In the towns the great majority of the labouring community were excluded by the guild monopolies from any prospect except that of perpetual subjection. Their wages, both in town and country, were but little more than half of what they earn to-day, while the purchasing power which those wages represented was very much less. And if the outlook in the towns was gloomy, their situation in the country was infinitely worse. It was there that the people felt most nearly the relentless assiduity of life. Everyone knows La Bruyère's picture of the wild-looking peasantry of France, their faces blackened by want and toil and sun, the slaves of the soil, at which they laboured with such unconquerable patience, who 'seemed just capable of speech, and when they stood erect displayed the lineaments of men.' Their dwellings were often windowless cabins, their clothing a rough woollen covering, their food buckwheat and chestnuts and the coarsest bread. And yet these unfortunate beings were in many cases the owners of the soil they tilled. The passionate love of the land, which distinguishes the French peasant of our own day, was not taught him by the Revolution. For generations before it his one object of ambition, the only aim which made it worth his while to live, had been the hope of acquiring a portion of the land he worked upon. Living wretchedly, he yet kept that object steadily in view. For that end he hoarded and toiled and starved. The impoverished gentry came easily to terms; and thus an immense number of small holdings sprang up almost imperceptibly in France, estimated by the genial, observant eyes of Arthur Young to cover as much as 'one-third of the kingdom.'

By the side of these small properties, which tended to grow smaller under a process of incessant sub-division, lay the large estates of the nobles, the clergy, the magistrates and financiers. In some cases these estates were farmed on a large scale by tenants holding leases at a money-rent, and in the North these farms were numerous and answered well. But the backwardness and the want of capital, which blighted all French agriculture in the eighteenth century, helped to render farm-leases unpopular, and most large proprietors fell back on the system of Métayage, or farming at half profits, under which the landlord supplied and stocked the land, while the labourer gave his labour, and the profits were shared between the two. In Anjou, where the landlords resided on their estates, knew their Métayers personally, and supervised their labours, this system prospered. But in much the greater part of France the Métayers were left to themselves by the landlords, and struggled on in the greatest distress, without enterprise, without capital, often deeply in debt, hardly making enough to yield them the bare means of subsistence, and loath to exert themselves to swell the profits, which they had to divide with a master, who neither knew nor cared for them. 'The Métayer,' says a compassionate seigneur, 'is kept in an abject state by men who are not at all inhuman, but whose prejudices ... lead them to regard him as a different species of being.' Before the outbreak of the Revolution, serfdom, except in some outlying districts, had been extinguished in France; but the condition of the Métayer materially was little above the serf's. In some cases, it is true, he had managed to purchase, independently of his Métairie, a little plot of land of his own, which he cultivated with minute and arduous attention; and in certain districts these plots of ground repaid the toil spent on them, and taught their owners the self-respect of ownership and the dignity which independence gives. But, generally speaking, even these small allotments, numerous as they were, were wretchedly unproductive, and the Métayers and day-labourers who owned them shared the common depression of their class.

Apart, however, from his bad farming and the poverty of his land, the French peasant had worse troubles to encounter. The shadow of feudalism still lay heavily across his path. Even where he was the owner of the soil, he held it subject to innumerable dues and charges, from which he could not escape and which he could not redeem. Whenever the peasant's property changed hands, the seigneur stepped in to claim his fine. On the roads and at the bridges the seigneur claimed his tolls. At markets and fairs the seigneur claimed his dues, and sold to the peasant the right to sell to others the produce of his farm. Occasionally the seigneur still claimed the peasant's time and labour for nothing. Everywhere the rights of the seigneur compelled him to grind his wheat only at the feudal mill and to crush his grapes only in the feudal wine-press. And even worse than these claims was the scourge of the game-laws. The seigneur alone could fish in the stream which flowed through the peasant's farm. The seigneur alone could shoot the game which ruined the peasant's crops. The seigneur alone could hunt over the peasant's land. In the vast Capitaineries, which covered some four hundred square leagues of territory in France, the deer and big game, preserved for the sport of princes, wandered unchecked, devouring the fields and vineyards of the inhabitants, and woe be to the peasant who dared to interfere with their freedom! Every summer the villagers in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, where the Capitaineries stretched far, were compelled to organise watch companies and to watch all night for six months in the year, in order to save their vines and harvests from destruction. If the peasant dared to dispute any of these rights, there were the seigneur's courts to overawe him, to weary him out with incessant litigation, and to teach him that, though he had ceased to be a serf, the seigneur was his master still. Sometimes all these claims were sold by an impoverished seigneur to a group of speculators, and the pity of speculators is necessarily limited by considerations of gain. When the seigneur had done with the peasant, the emissaries of the Church stepped in, to take their tithe for spiritual purposes, and to remind him how much he owed to them for the development of his intellect and the guardianship of his soul.

But the Crown itself took a prominent part in the spoliation of the poor. Adopting for public purposes the old feudal institution of the Corvée, the Government summoned the peasants at certain seasons of the year to leave their fields, without compensation, in order to make and repair the highways; and by a peculiar irony, although the great thoroughfares were thus maintained solely at the peasants' expense, the roads which the peasants really needed, the cross-roads in agricultural districts, were left to ruin and neglect. More odious still were the demands of the militia service. Every unmarried man up to forty years of age could be called upon for this oppressive duty. No substitution was allowed. Although for the wealthy the exemptions were innumerable, for the poorest class no exemption was permitted. Improvident marriages offered the only means of escape. The approach of the Government's agent was the signal for panic and disorder, and the miserable villagers fled for concealment to the woods.