Chapter IV: The Labours of the Constituent Assembly

After its arrival in Paris, the Assembly continued, amid many interruptions, the work of constructing the new constitution, and the same blind attachment to captivating theories, which had wasted so many weeks in barren discussion at Versailles, pervaded its debates and its decrees in Paris. The great bulk of the members of the Assembly were determined to carry into practice the idea of the sovereignty of the people, and to observe, as far as logic could, the natural rights of man. If facts or experience conflicted with these theories, facts and experience must go to the wall. The circumstances, needs or traditions of nations seemed to them to be of little importance in comparison with the eternal principles which philosophy had laid down for the government of the world. In pursuance of these views, the slaves in the French colony of St. Domingo were immediately emancipated, without regard to the difficulties involved in so summary a proceeding, or the disaster certain to ensue. 'Let the colonies perish,' cried a member of the Assembly, 'rather than sacrifice a principle.' In pursuance also of these views, all titles of nobility were abolished, as being 'repugnant to reason and to true liberty.' It became an offence and subsequently a crime for a nobleman to sign his name in the old style. The Assembly taught the people to regard rank as something wrong; and the people, taking up the idea, and colouring it with their own fears and ancient hatreds, soon came to look on all possessors of rank as evil-doers, who had no right to fair treatment or protection from the law, and for whom the proper destiny was the guillotine. On the same vague theories the constitution was built up. The desire to place sovereignty in the hands of the people led the Assembly to impose many complicated political duties upon the great mass of citizens, who had never as yet exercised any political functions at all. At the same time they curtailed as far as possible, and hampered by a system of elaborate checks, the power which they left to those at the head of affairs, who had long been accustomed to political duties, and who had certainly fulfilled them very ill. The result was a complete paralysis in the Government, and a constitution foredoomed to fail.

The best hope for the Revolution lay in the speedy establishment of a strong Government, composed of men thoroughly in harmony with the majority in the Assembly, possessed of power sufficient to ensure order, and of popularity sufficient to command support. The establishment of such a Government was from the first Mirabeau's object; but the Assembly soon proceeded to render it impossible. The great majority of deputies, who had accepted the proposition that all power ought to proceed from the people, regarded it as the corollary of that proposition, that executive government, which nominally proceeded from the King, was opposed to the people's interests, and that all executive agents were inimical to freedom. To their minds, naturally enough, executive power was associated with the old monarchy and the Court, and the old monarchy and the Court they justly regarded as antagonistic to the principles of liberty. The proper remedy was to render the Executive thoroughly dependent on the popular will, and to unite it with the Assembly so closely that the policy and interests of both must be the same. Instead of that, the Assembly set a barrier between itself and the Executive, which rendered cordial co-operation impossible, and early in November, 1789, it passed a most unfortunate decree, rendering all members of the House ineligible for places in the Government.

It may or it may not be fair to attribute the decree of the 7th November to the influence of Necker and Lafayette, and to their jealous fear of Mirabeau's ambition. But of all the measures of the Assembly, there was probably none which was more disastrous in its effects upon the Revolution. Only a strong Government could have coped with the rising anarchy in France; but from that day forward a strong Government became impossible, until the legislature, to escape from the difficulty which it had created, invested its own committees with dictatorial powers. From that day forward, the breach between the Assembly and the Crown inevitably widened. The members of the Assembly lost all chance of learning from the responsibilities of office the experience and stability which they so much required. Their jealousy and distrust of the Executive deepened. As they did not choose or trust the Ministers, they determined narrowly to circumscribe their powers, and limited and embarrassed them at every turn. The King, the head of this dangerous Executive, was as far as possible stripped of power. He was not allowed to veto--except for a limited time--the measures of the Assembly. He was not allowed to convoke, to adjourn or to dissolve it. It was only after a determined struggle, and owing to the extraordinary influence of Mirabeau, that the King and his Ministers were permitted to retain the initiative upon questions of war and peace. They were deprived of almost all authority over their own agents in the Government and the law. They had no power to appoint, to control, to reward, or to punish the official subordinates who nominally carried out their commands. The Assembly held them responsible for the safety of the country. It watched them with jealous carefulness. It threatened them with overwhelming penalties if they transgressed. It deliberately refused to be associated with them, or to share their responsibilities in any way. It treated them from the first as suspected persons, and reduced them to mere figure-heads, at which to point the calumnies which its own fears composed. One of the first steps taken by the Assembly towards constructing its new constitution, was thus to make the business of government an almost impossible task in France.

Hardly less mischievous than its dread of executive power was the passion for electoral contrivances which possessed the Assembly. It was to some extent this passion which had guided it in its rejection of an Upper Chamber, but the depth of the feeling was more strongly illustrated by the new system of local government, which it adopted in the winter of 1789-1790. Under this system all existing divisions and provincial distinctions were swept away, and the country was as nearly as possible symmetrically divided into 83 departments. These departments were further subdivided into 574 districts, into 4,730 cantons, and lastly into 44,000 communes or municipalities[6]. Of these four divisions the cantons possessed no administrative importance, being only invented for purposes of symmetry and to facilitate the electoral operations. But each of the others, each department, district, and municipality, had its own little constitution, based upon popular election, but with many varieties and complexities of form. Every department, district, and municipality had its own council or deliberative body, and its own executive officers too. The officials of the municipalities were elected directly by the citizens within them. But the higher officials of the districts and departments were, like the deputies to the National Assembly, elected by a double system of election. The primary assemblies of the cantons--that is all the 'active' citizens in each department--chose first a body of electors, and these electors then elected the officials of their own department, the officials of the districts which lay within that department, and lastly the deputies who were to represent the department in the National Assembly at Paris. The right of voting for all these officials was restricted to 'active' citizens, that is to all citizens over twenty-five years of age, who paid in direct taxes to the State a sum equal in amount to three days' wages. The right of standing for any of the offices was further restricted to those who paid direct taxes equal in amount to a mark of silver. All active citizens were required to serve in the National Guard, of which each municipality had its own battalion. The National Guards chose their own commanders, and were under the direct control of the municipal authorities, with whom the chief responsibility for the maintenance of order lay.

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.

Closely connected with the attack upon the Church was the embarrassing question of finance. No man, on the outbreak of the Revolution, enjoyed so high a reputation for finance as Necker, and no man probably misused that reputation more. Everyone knew that the financial embarrassments of the country were the real cause of the summoning of the States-General. Everyone knew that there was, first, an enormous annual deficit amounting to at least 120 or 130 million francs, and rising for the year 1789 to a much higher figure, and, secondly, a very heavy floating debt. The natural course, and the only wise one, would have been for the Minister to have laid bare at once all the embarrassments of the State, and to have used his great popularity and credit for facing the difficulty boldly, and for setting matters on a satisfactory footing for the future. Instead of that, Necker, either for mistaken political reasons, or for more personal and less worthy causes, from the first minimised the financial difficulty, represented the deficit as much less than it was, described the work of restoring order in the finances as 'mere child's play,' and concealed the worst features of the situation from the public to whom he appealed for support. Necker's system of finance had been to proceed by raising loans on favourable terms--a system for which his financial reputation and connections gave him peculiar facilities. During the summer of 1789, he continued to carry on this system, and the State lived, for a time, upon the money which Necker raised by loan or borrowed from the Caisse d'Escompte, and upon the patriotic contributions which enthusiastic ladies and gentlemen poured into the Exchequer. But by the autumn, it had become clear, even to Necker, that this system would not do for ever, that the credit of the State was not improving, that loans could no longer be raised with success, and that the condition of the finances generally was far worse than it had been five months before. Thereupon, at the end of September, Necker came forward with a heroic remedy, and thanks to the support of Mirabeau, he induced the Assembly to consent to an extraordinary tax of one quarter of all incomes in the country, to be paid within the next three years.

But even this drastic expedient failed. The method of assessing the tax, and the time over which the period of payment was spread, contributed to frustrate its results. The embarrassments of the State increased. The debt steadily mounted; for, after the outbreak of the Revolution, people on all sides refused to pay taxes, and the Government was compelled to use for current purposes any money on which it could lay hands. Then too, the extraordinary expenses of the year, occasioned by the circumstances of the Revolution, were exceptionally heavy, and the cost of keeping Paris quiet was heavier still. In two months alone of the winter of 1789-90, the State paid over to the Parisian authorities seventeen million francs for the purchase of corn, and it is estimated that in the year which followed, it advanced to the various municipalities in the departments no less than sixteen hundred millions, in order to cheapen the price of bread. Besides that, it was soon called on by the Parisian authorities--and the calls of Paris were rarely refused--to pay over many millions more, for keeping up relief-works for the unemployed workmen of the capital, for maintaining and equipping its National Guard, for defraying the expenses of destroying the Bastille, and even for lighting and paving its streets. Under these circumstances matters grew steadily worse, and Mirabeau fell back on the idea of appropriating the property of the Church, and of using the credit and resources so obtained in order to issue paper money to pay the pressing creditors of the State. By that means he hoped to gain a breathing-space, until a strong Government could be formed to grapple thoroughly with the whole question. The idea, once formed, was soon put into execution. Early in November, 1789, the Assembly declared that the lands and property of the Church were at the disposal of the State. In December, it directed a part of this property, to the value of four hundred millions of francs, to be sold for the national benefit. In the following March, as the land did not sell quickly, it was determined to make it over to the various municipalities, to sell at a handsome profit to themselves, and in the meantime to issue paper money, also to the extent of four hundred millions, to increase the currency and to act as bank notes. Thus, in April, 1790, there came into existence the Assignats.

It is worth while to follow for a little the history of the Assignats, for they afterwards became one of the most characteristic and disastrous features of Revolutionary finance. The intention of their authors had been to use the Assignats as a temporary convenience, to tide over the many pressing difficulties of the moment, until the State could find time to face and to settle the question of its finances. In that idea, had it been rigidly adhered to, there was nothing economically wrong. But from the first, the plan proved disappointing. The sale of the Church lands brought in comparatively little. The municipalities naturally considered their own interests first, and did not always sell the lands in the manner most profitable to the State. They permitted the buyer to take possession on payment of a very small instalment of the price; and in many cases speculators, taking advantage of this system, bought Church land largely, then cut down the timber and pulled down the houses on it, and having made what profit they could, decamped before the second instalment became due. In the existing state of the administration, it was not difficult to play tricks with the law. Moreover, purchasers of these lands were permitted to pay for them in Assignats, the idea being that all the paper money issued would thus return into the Exchequer, and pass out of circulation as the Church lands were sold off. The fact, however, that the Assignats were accepted by the municipalities at their nominal value made it the object of speculators to depreciate them, and thus from the first a powerful motive was at work to depreciate the new currency. The consequence was, that within a few months of the first issue of Assignats, the embarrassments of the State were as pressing as ever. The Assignats already issued had been spent, and the Assembly, as far as ever from financial order, could only suggest the issuing of more. Then again Mirabeau, aware of the dangers of his course, but still struggling to avert bankruptcy, and hoping for a change of Ministry which might ultimately set matters right, threw his influence into the same scale. In September, 1790, he induced the Assembly to sanction a final issue of eight hundred millions more, towards the liquidation of the National Debt; to enact that more than twelve hundred millions should never be put into circulation, and to provide that all Assignats paid into the Treasury thenceforward should be burned.

But once the Assembly had entered on the downward course, it found it impossible to stop. The strong Government and the financial readjustment, which Mirabeau had hoped for, never came. The eight hundred millions went, as the four hundred millions had gone before them, and still there seemed to be no prospect of the debt ever being redeemed, or of a balance ever being established between the income and the expenditure of the State. Again and again the Government found that it must either face bankruptcy, or else get over its difficulties for the moment by fresh issues of paper money, and again and again, when the alternative had to be faced, it naturally chose the latter course. By June, 1791, the issue of the previous September had been exhausted, and casting its own prudent limitations to the winds, the Assembly issued six hundred millions more. From that time forward the depreciation of the paper money steadily and rapidly advanced. The Treasury, departing from the original proposal, had already begun to issue Assignats of quite small value. Paper money soon became the regular currency in which wages were paid; and even the poorest classes thus learned to feel the effects of its variations, and to make such profit out of those variations as they could. With the depreciation of the Assignats and the disappearance of specie, the rage for speculation, naturally stimulated by the rapidity of political change, took hold of the public mind, and the spirit of gambling increased in all classes the unrest and fever of the time.

The Assembly, it is true, did at length endeavour to face the whole financial position, and to establish at any rate its current finances on a firm and permanent footing. But the manner in which it made the attempt was sufficient to ensure its failure. The expenses of the Revolution had necessarily been very large. The Assembly had, no doubt, cut down the expenses of the Court, of the army, and of the Church; but it had at the same time undertaken new and very heavy burdens. The cost of the new system of local government and of the new system of administering justice involved a large increase in the annual expenditure. The cost of compensating the officers suppressed in the Law, the Church, and the public services, of pensioning off the dispossessed ecclesiastics, and of buying out the innumerable vested interests at which the reforms of the Assembly had struck, alone amounted to an enormous sum. There were all the debts of the Ancien Régime to be taken over, and besides that all the deficits in the current accounts, which steadily accumulated, month after month, down to the end of 1790. The property of the Church, which was at first regarded as an inexhaustible treasure, and estimated at much beyond its real value, disappointed the expectations of its new possessors, as they saw it frittered away in issues of Assignats. The abolition of tithes, though a great benefit to the proprietors of land, had in no way enriched the Exchequer. The abolition of feudal dues, though a heavy loss to their old possessors and an infinite gain to the nation at large, had brought nothing into the coffers of the State. The cessation of the hated Gabelle and of many other indirect taxes, which the people had refused any longer to pay, and which the Assembly, making a virtue of necessity, had accordingly abolished, had cut away one large source of revenue. It remained to find the means of making good the deficiency and of providing for the charges which the Revolution had imposed.

It is in the steps taken to balance the accounts of the nation that one sees perhaps most clearly the fatal optimism of the Assembly, and its rooted and culpable unwillingness to face disagreeable facts. There was no doubt that the Revolution had been extremely costly. Its advantages, the reforms which it had instituted, and the facilities for attaining prosperity which it had opened up to Frenchmen, were obvious and clear. It was equally obvious that those advantages and reforms must entail considerable expenditure, and must be paid for by those who enjoyed them. Instead, however, of taking that line, as in duty it was bound to do, the Assembly seems to have determined that, whatever its needs and difficulties might be, it would so frame its budget, that no one should be able to say that the Revolution had increased the taxation of the people. Accordingly it proceeded to draw up a list of its expenses, which was from beginning to end fallacious. The financiers of the Assembly fixed the votes for each department at a figure which could not possibly cover the expenses, and set down the total expenditure at many millions below its real cost. They then proceeded to reckon up the revenue, over-estimating each item here, as they had under-estimated each item on the other side. They set down as a part of the revenue two or three large items of a purely temporary and exceptional kind. They made no allowance whatever for extraordinary expenses, which they had already estimated at seventy-six millions of francs. They sacrificed to democratic feeling many of those indirect taxes which democracies always resent,--the taxes on salt, tobacco, wine and spirits, and other commodities of less importance. They remodelled the whole system of internal tariffs and swept away its objectionable features. They took some steps in the direction of free trade, and abolished the guilds and the restrictions upon labour. But they by no means entirely abandoned the protective system, and they maintained all indirect taxes which escaped notice, and against which no popular outcry was raised. It is significant of the overwhelming influence which Paris exercised on the deliberations of the Assembly, that the octrois of the city of Paris remained undiminished and untouched, in spite of the general attack made upon the system of indirect taxation. The reason was that the municipality of Paris could not afford to dispense with these duties, and the Assembly dared not abolish what the municipality of Paris wished to maintain. It was not until the working classes of Paris compelled the municipality to suggest the abolition of the impost, that the octrois of Paris were swept away.

Having thus lost a great deal of the revenue raised by indirect taxation, the Assembly proceeded to make up the deficit by imposing two direct taxes, a Poll-tax which was inconsiderable and light, and a tax upon land which was overwhelmingly heavy. The burden of the new land-tax was in itself disproportionate and probably unjust; it was aggravated by a perverse system of rating; and the ignorance of the new civil authorities, who were entrusted with the assessment and collection of the taxes, tended further to defeat the expectations of the Exchequer. As the political fever increased, the system of taxation became an engine by which the party in power in any locality could annoy and oppress its political opponents; and there is no doubt that it led in many cases to partiality and wrong. For this result the circumstances of the times rather than the financiers of the Assembly were to blame. But the Assembly cannot avoid censure for the weakness and unwisdom which it displayed, for its refusal to recognise clearly the liabilities which it had incurred, for its determination to make a show of economy, however delusive that economy might prove, and for the moral cowardice which made it shut its eyes to facts involving unpopularity for those who faced them. Its attempts to redeem or diminish the national debt by loans, by confiscation, and by issuing paper money, failed completely. Its attempt to balance its receipts and expenses for the future ensured failure as complete, from the manner in which it was undertaken. Even if the new taxes had been regularly paid--and they never were--the Assembly's policy could only have resulted in still further increasing the debt, in forcing the Government into fresh issues of Assignats or into other equally desperate expedients, and in destroying the national credit. No doubt allowances, many and ample, should be made for the difficulties of the National Assembly, for its inevitable inexperience, and for its generally excellent intentions. But still it is as practical reformers that the members of that Assembly must be judged; and the record of their labours, though in many respects deserving of sympathy and praise, still goes far to vindicate the maxim, that high-pitched theories and philanthropic aims are after all only as dust in the balance, compared with the many sober qualities of wisdom required for the effective administration of a State.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: Different authorities give different figures. But these seem to be the most correct.]