Chapter I

THE CONDITION OF FRANCE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Historians have not yet determined where the French Revolution properly begins. But even warring schools agree that the object of that great movement, apart from its accidents and disappointed dreams, was to destroy the ancient society of Europe, which feudalism had founded and which time had warped, and to replace it by a more simple social system, based, as far as possible, on equality of rights. And therefore time can hardly be misspent in endeavouring to retrace some of the chief features of the old monarchy of France, at the moment when the feudal edifice was crumbling, and when the storm was gathering which was to sweep it away.

It was the pride of the later Bourbon kings to have accomplished the design, which Louis XI bequeathed to Richelieu, and Richelieu interpreted for Louis' successors, the substitution of a closely centralised despotism, for feudal and aristocratic institutions on the one hand, and for local and national liberties upon the other. By the middle of the eighteenth century the triumph of this policy was complete. The relics of the older system, indeed, remained. A multitude of officials and authorities, with various and conflicting claims, still covered the country, recalling in their origin sometimes the customs of the Middle Ages, sometimes the necessities of the Crown, sometimes the earlier traditions of freedom. Many of the feudal seigneurs still claimed rights of jurisdiction and police. Cities and towns still boasted and obeyed their own municipal constitutions. The peasants of the country side were still summoned to the church-porch by the village-bell, to take part in the election of parish officials. A few noblemen still bore the name of governors of provinces. Independent authorities with ancient titles still pretended to deal with roads and with finance. The local Parlements, with their hereditary and independent judges, maintained their dignity as sovereign courts of justice, preserved the right of debating the edicts of the King, adopted an attitude of jealous watchfulness towards the Government and the Church, and exercised considerable administrative powers. In a few outlying provinces, termed the Pays d'État, and comprising, with some smaller districts, the ancient fiefs of Languedoc, Burgundy, Brittany, Artois and Béarn, annual assemblies, representing the nobles, clergy, and commons of the province, still displayed the theory of self-government and retained large taxative and administrative rights. The Church, with its vast resources and strong, corporate feeling, still, in many matters, asserted its independence of the State, administered its own affairs, fixed its own taxes, and claimed to monopolise public education and to guard public morals and their expression in the Press.

But amid the ruins of older institutions and the confusion of innumerable conflicting rights, a new system of administration had gradually grown up and had usurped all real authority in France. At its head stood the King's Council, with its centre at Versailles. The Council represented in all departments the monopoly of the State. It was a supreme court of justice, for it had power to over-rule the judgments of all ordinary courts. It was a supreme legislature, for the States-General, the ancient representative Parliament of France, had not been summoned since the early years of the seventeenth century, and the local judicial Parlements, though they could discuss the edicts of the Council, could not in the last resort resist them. It was supreme in all matters of administration and finance. It governed the country. It raised and assessed the taxes. In it one over-burdened minister, the Comptroller-General, assumed responsibility for all home affairs.

Under the Council, and responsible to it alone, there was stationed in each of the thirty-two provinces or 'generalities' of the kingdom one all-powerful agent called the Intendant. The Intendant was drawn, not from the nobility, but from the professional class. He superintended the collection and apportionment of all taxes which were not farmed out by the Council to financial companies. He decided in individual cases what remissions of taxes should be allowed. He was responsible under the Council for constructing highways and for all great public works[1]. He enforced the hated duty of the militia service. He maintained order with the help of the Maréchaussée or mounted police. He carried out the police regulations of the local authorities and the more imperious and comprehensive regulations issued from time to time by the Council. He possessed in exceptional cases large judicial powers. As the ordinary judges were independent of the Crown, the Council multiplied extraordinary tribunals and reserved for their consideration all suits in which the rights of the Crown were even remotely concerned. In such cases the Intendant acted as judge both in civil and in criminal matters, and from his judgment an appeal lay to the Council alone. This practice, once established, was of course extended and often abused in the interests of power, for the principles of the ordinary courts, the Intendants confessed, could 'never be reconciled with those of the Government.'

Besides this, the Intendant was a benefactor too. He repressed mendicity and arrested vagabonds. He distributed the funds, which, in the absence of any legal provision for the poor, and in the abandonment by the seigneurs of the old feudal duty of providing for their destitute dependents, the Council annually apportioned for the purpose. He controlled the charitable workshops which the Council annually set up. In times of scarcity it was he who must find food for the people, or, if food were not forthcoming, suppress the riots which the want of it provoked. In the country districts the Intendant dispensed his lofty patronage to farmers and encouraged agricultural improvements. In the villages, though the force of ancient custom still drew the inhabitants to village-meetings, these meetings could not be held without the Intendants leave; they retained only the academic privilege of debate; and when they elected their syndic and collector, they often elected merely the Intendant's nominees. Even in the towns which possessed municipal freedom, the Intendant constantly interfered in all matters of importance and in many little matters of detail, and the burghers protested their eager submission to 'all the commands of his Greatness.' In each of the provinces of France the Intendant represented the omnipotence and wielded the authority of Government; the commands which he received from the Comptroller-General he dictated in turn to a staff of agents termed Sub-Delegates, and dependent on him; and these Sub-Delegates, distributed through the different cantons of the province, carried out their Intendant's orders, assisted his designs, and were responsible only to their superior, as he was responsible to the Council at Versailles.

It is not difficult to see the evils of such a system. The excessive centralisation of the Government and the vast scope of its powers threw upon the Comptroller-General and his agents a heavy burden of detail. Reports and documents multiplied. The waste of time and effort was profuse. 'The administrative formalities,' declared the Council in one of its minutes, 'lead to infinite delays.' Any little local matter--the building of a shelter for the poor, the repairing of a corner of the village church--must be considered by the Minister at Versailles. No action could be taken until the Sub-Delegate had reported to the Intendant, the Intendant had reported to the Comptroller-General, and that harassed official--combining in his single person all the duties and perplexities which in England are distributed between the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, the Minister of Agriculture, the President of the Board of Trade, the President of the Local Government Board and the Chief Commissioner of Works--had personally attended to the matter, and had transmitted his decision through the Intendant to the Sub-Delegate again. Moreover, apart from its vexatious delays, the system was very liable to abuse. The power of the Government's agents was as extended as the power of the Government itself. Arrest and imprisonment were counted among their ordinary weapons. Armed with all the authority of the State, it was no wonder if they sometimes imitated its arbitrary ways, and failed to separate their private inclinations and their private grudges from the public needs.

Yet the action of the central Government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to have been often hesitating and rarely deliberately harsh. The letter of the law was often barbarous and rigid, where its administration was easy and lax. To criticism the Government was not indisposed to listen. Its intentions were amiable and were recognised as such. Any man above the rank of the lowest class could protest, if treated unjustly, and he could generally make his protest heard. The shadow of an older liberty had not quite departed from the face of France. It was only the lowest and most miserable class, which needed the means of resistance most, which had no means of resisting except by force. But beneficent as were the aims of the all-pervading State, its influence was blighting. Leaning always upon their Government, and taught to look to it for initiative, encouragement, protection in every department of life, the people of France forgot both the practices of public freedom and the value of private independence; and as the Bourbon despotism directly paved the way for revolution by levelling many of those inequalities which save a State, so it left the vast majority of Frenchmen devoid both of the political understanding and of the sense of personal responsibility, which the habit of self-government alone creates.

More fatal, however, to national prosperity, were the deep divisions which separated classes--divisions maintained and emphasized by privileges obviously unjust. The nobility, the clergy, the middle class, each formed a distinct order in the State, with its own defined rank and prerogatives. The nobles, who have been roughly estimated at about one hundred and forty thousand persons, formed a separate caste. All born noble remained noble, and not even younger sons descended into the ranks of the commons. The nobles owned perhaps a fifth part of the soil, and they retained the ancient rights attached to it, which had once been the reward of their feudal obligations, but which survived when those obligations had long ceased to be obeyed. Fines and dues, tolls and charges, the sole right of hunting, of shooting, of fishing, of keeping pigeons and doves, the privilege of maintaining the seigneurial mill and wine-press, the seigneurial slaughter-house and oven--helped to support the noble's dignity and to swell his income. The more his actual power departed, the more he clung to his hereditary rights. When the Government usurped his place as local ruler, he only entrenched himself more jealously in his feudal position. He never met his neighbours, for there were no public concerns to unite them, and all business was in the Government's hands. He lost all interest in local affairs. If he were rich, he went to live in Paris or Versailles. If he were poor, he shut himself up in his country-house, and consoled himself with the contemplation of his pride. But in return for the powers of which it stripped him, the Government conferred on the nobleman privileges which completed his isolation from those around him. He and he alone could be the companion of his Sovereign. He and he alone could rise to high place in the Army or the Church. He and his dependents were exempted from oppressive duties like serving in the militia or working on the roads. He knew nothing of the terrible burden of taxation which crippled and oppressed the poor. He was generally exempted from paying the Taille, the most grievous of all the taxes; and even those imposts--the Poll-tax and the Vingtièmes--to which he was subject, were collected from him in a specially indulgent manner. The greater a man's wealth or station, the better was his chance of securing easy terms. The Government's agents felt bound to act 'with marked consideration' in collecting the taxes of people of rank. 'I settle matters with the Intendants,' said the Duke of Orleans, the richest man in France, 'and pay just what I please.'

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.

Even more grievous than the Corvée and the militia were the abuses which pervaded the whole system of taxation. The heaviest of all the taxes was the terrible burden of the Taille, a direct tax levied sometimes on property and sometimes on income, falling almost entirely on the poor--alike on the struggling landowner and on the landless labourer--assessed without order or method, constantly varying and constantly increased. Every year in the rural districts some unfortunate villager was selected to act as collector of the Taille. He alone had to decide how much each of his neighbours was worth, and how much he must extort from them to satisfy the Government, and if his efforts or his calculations failed, his own property and person were responsible for the amount. The opportunities for abuse in such a system, for the satisfaction of personal jealousies and grudges, are as obvious as its unfairness towards those on whom the office was inflicted. 'The office of collector,' cried Turgot, 'drives to despair and frequently to ruin all those on whom it is imposed.' In order to escape the Taille, the peasant strenuously concealed his savings. If, in spite of his Government, he prospered, he dared do nothing to give an air of comfort to his home. We find him in one case entreating his landlord not to tile the roof of his cottage, because such a sign of prosperity would mean for him an increase of taxation. It was the object of every man to seem desperately poor. Then besides the Taille, the peasant had to pay the accessory taxes, which in process of time had been assimilated with it; the Poll-tax and the Vingtièmes, imposts imposed by Louis XIV on all alike, but the weight of which the powerful classes had contrived to shift on to the shoulders of the weak; the road-tax, when the Corvées were abolished; the tax of the franc-fief, whenever he happened to own lands which had once been the lands of nobles; and always, apart from the demands of the Exchequer, his seigneur's dues and his pastor's tithe. Statistics may sometimes be misleading, but an able statistician has calculated, upon evidence which it is difficult to deny, that, allowing for all these direct charges, the peasant in many parts of France paid away four-fifths of his income to the Treasury, the seigneur, and the Church, and out of every hundred francs he earned, retained little more than eighteen francs himself[4].

But the record of his troubles did not end there. The Gabelle, perhaps the most exasperating impost ever devised by an empty Exchequer, compelled all citizens over seven years of age to purchase yearly seven pounds of salt from the agents of the State. But this salt was reserved for cooking and eating alone, and if salt for any other purpose were needed, the agents of the State had the right to make its subjects purchase more. The whole system of indirect taxation was conceived in the same spirit as this monument of fiscal folly. The face of the country was covered by barriers and custom-houses, occupied by an army of revenue officers, who purchased from the Government the right of collecting the customs and excise. Twelve hundred leagues of artificial frontiers separated the various provinces of France, impeded trade, and played havoc with prices. The small vine-growers were almost ruined by the excise levied upon wine, which even in those days was conspicuous for its severity and for the inquisitorial practices of those who enforced it. Calonne declared that the salt tax alone produced every year nearly four thousand sentences, of imprisonment, flogging, exile and the galleys. Under such auspices smuggling multiplied, and the Government retorted by heavy punishments. Bodies of armed banditti were organised in disturbed districts, and carried on for years together a guerilla war against the forces of the Crown. Unemployed labourers and ruined peasants found a livelihood in swelling the ranks of disaffection, and in the absence of any poor-law administration, mendicancy and vagabondage rapidly increased.

The records of the last years of the Ancien Régime are consequently full of evidence of alarming and growing disorder. Townspeople complained that the beggars, driven from the country, flocked into the cities for shelter. The Intendants reported to the Council that the chief highways of the kingdom were infested with dangerous vagrants. In vain the Government multiplied its corn-laws and arrests, and endeavoured to stifle the clamours of indigence by feeding some and by punishing others. In 1767, fifty thousand beggars were arrested; but in 1777, the numbers of that unfortunate class had risen to nearly a million and a quarter. In Paris the census of 1791 declared that out of a population of six hundred and fifty thousand, over one hundred and eighteen thousand were without the means of regular subsistence. It is easy to understand how, pressed by hunger, and pursued by a rigorous penal code, many of these wandering mendicants crossed the thin line which separates extreme want from crime, and how, when the Old Monarchy suddenly collapsed, and when in the search for freedom law was for the moment lost, this large group of miserable beings, armed with brief power and long-accumulated hatred, exacted a terrible revenge for the wrongs of the labouring community in France, from whose ranks they and their ancestors had been driven by a system politically and socially unjust.

Such, in the eighteenth century, were some of the conditions of life in France. Each class lived apart, entrenched in its own chilling traditions. 'Nobody,' cried Turgot, 'cares for any interest but his own.' Local patriotism, common intercourse, friendly feeling, no longer drew men of different ranks together. The sense of citizenship had generally died out. Below the others the peasant stood alone. His poverty clung to him as a garment of shame. His commonest impulses were want and fear. His love of legend made him superstitious. His ignorance made him credulous, bigoted, suspicious, easily persuaded to believe in evil. Isolated from the world, conscious of belonging to an inferior caste, encountering on all sides the privileges of his masters, and yet with no superior to care for him and no wise counsellor to guide him, blunted in feeling by long endurance, gentle, submissive, often gay, but more often brooding on the indignities which he suffered, and resenting the injustice even more than the hardship of his lot, he heard and welcomed with passionate illusion the new doctrine of human dominion, which proclaimed that men were equal, whatever their station, whatever their distress, and from that moment the attainment of equality, so easy to imagine, so hard to approach, became the commanding ideal of the poor.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It will be understood that in the Pays d'État, the powers of the Intendants, as regarded taxation and public works, were limited and controlled by the rights of the local assemblies.]

[Footnote 2: The expenses of the royal table amounted to nearly three hundred thousand pounds a year.]

[Footnote 3: I have taken all these figures from M. Taine's _Ancien Régime_, and have reduced them roughly to their equivalents in English money of our own day. I have, however, throughout calculated the _livre_ at 10_d._, although Arthur Young puts it as high as 10-1/2_d._; so that the amounts in the text are, if anything, understated.]

[Footnote 4: One part of the _taille_, that which fell upon the cultivator, reached the privileged orders indirectly through their farmers, but even then there were certain exemptions in their favour. The franc-fief was the tax of one year's revenue levied every twenty years on non-noble holders of noble lands. The calculation of income given here I take from the note on the subject contained in the appendix to M. Taine's volume on the _Ancien Régime_, which is founded on the _procès-verbaux_ of the provincial assemblies. On an income of 100 francs, he estimates the _taille_ (with its accessories), the poll-tax, and the road-tax together, at 42 fr. 15 c.; the two _vingtièmes_ at 11 fr., the tithe at 14 fr. 28 c., and the feudal dues at 14 fr. 28 c.; total 81 fr. 71 c.]