Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 8
FRANCE BEFORE THE REVOLUTION.
As the life of Madame Roland will now become part of the History of the French Revolution, let us pause a moment, and briefly review the political and social condition of a people within whose capital stood the Bastile, its fortifications, bristling with cannon, being a visible embodiment of an invisible idea and a system of government. Glancing backwards, we find that the feudal order of the Middle Ages, with its graduated authority—vested in the hands of successive orders of agricultural and military chiefs, subordinated in their turn to one supreme chief, the Sovereign of the realm—had gradually become absorbed in an absolute monarchy. Louis XIV. had put the situation in a nutshell in his famous phrase, "I am the State." The "right divine" of kings had reached its utmost limit under the Grand Monarque, whose prestige was such that his frown snuffed out the great poet Racine, and the mere apprehension of whose frown drove Vâtel, the paragon of cooks, to suicide, because the fish had not arrived in time for the King's dinner.
This is the serio-comic aspect of a state of things of unimaginable wretchedness. The burden of taxation laid on the people ruined agriculture and commerce, and, when whole provinces had been driven into rebellion by intolerable exactions, they were reduced to obedience by means of wholesale slaughter. Madame de Sévigné, in the charming epistles addressed to her daughter, did not dream of attacking the Government; but what a picture of corruption does not that correspondence reveal! Lower Brittany, from sheer inability to pay more taxes, had taken up arms, but was soon reduced to obedience by the King's troops, and no punishment was severe enough for its inhabitants. The brilliant Marquise, in travelling from Paris to her estates there in 1675, saw "peasants hanging on the trees by the roadside," and in her budget of news speaks of "rebels broken on the wheel by hundreds:" so many hundreds being despatched, indeed, that she says in one letter, "They have done hanging for want of people to hang." These "poor Lower Bretons" took it so meekly, too; asked "but for something to drink, a pinch of snuff, and to be despatched quickly; for, indeed," she remarks, "hanging seems a kind of deliverance here from greater evils."
But let the amiable, witty French Marquise beware of too much sympathy for "the despair and desolation" of her "poor province of Brittany"; for even such letters as hers, from mother to daughter, did not escape the watchful eyes of postal spies, and an ill-considered word of compassion, nay, a witticism, might send her to the Bastile, despite her marquisate. Merely for some such trifle, some satirical lines on Madame de Pompadour, had not a certain Chevalier de Rességuier been shut up for years in an iron cage, to endure the torture of neither being able to stand upright nor of lying down? Who, remembering, these punishments, those infamous Lettres de Cachet, given in blank by Louis XV. to his minions and mistresses, to be filled in by them with the name of whomsoever they chose—who, I say, remembering this, can help giving the people absolution if in return its retribution was terrible?
The unlimited power of the Sovereign, having sapped the pride of the French nobles, had gradually converted them from a body of responsible landholders into cringing courtiers, who, absenting themselves from their estates—left in the hands of rapacious stewards and land-agents,—came to spend their revenues in Versailles, and to intrigue for place and power by paying court to the King's reigning mistress. It was while performing her toilet that Madame de Pompadour received the lords, generals, prelates, and princes of the blood; nor were any of them suffered to sit down in her presence. But, while behaving like curs at court, these same nobles turned into wolves in their dealings with the peasantry, whom they fleeced as if they were so many flocks of sheep.
In describing the relations of the nobles to the French peasantry, it is difficult to speak with more than approximate correctness; for, as each province had its separate laws and customs and fiscal regulations, their conditions were often widely dissimilar, and the discrepancy between Provence and Brittany, for example, was so great, that they were more like two separate countries than provinces of the same empire. Thus, although the peasants were everywhere wretchedly treated, they were worse off in some parts of France than in others; emancipated in this district, while in that they were in the truly purgatorial condition of what was called metayers, being neither bond nor free, so as to be equally deprived of the rights of liberty and the privileges of serfdom; in years of scarcity they were frequently turned adrift by the landowners, whose dues they were unable to pay, thus swelling the appalling host of beggars and vagrants which was one of the scourges of old France. In order to protect society from these famishing hordes infesting the highways and byeways, the most stringent edicts were continually published against them. They were branded like criminals and stuffed pell mell into prisons, dignified by the name of hospitals; where, in conformity to orders, they were forced to lie down on straw in order to take up less room. The indignant Saint Simon wrote as follows to Cardinal Fleury, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century:—"In Normandy they live on the grass of the fields. I speak in secret and in confidence to a Frenchman, a bishop, a minister, and to the only man who seems to enjoy the friendship and the confidence of the King, and is able to speak in private to him. The King, moreover, can be called such only while he possesses subject and a kingdom; he is of an age one day to feel the consequences of our state; and in spite of being the first King in Europe, he cannot be a great King if he only rules over wretches of all sorts and conditions, with his kingdom turned into one vast infirmary for the desperate and dying."
What a picture is this of the state to which the country had been reduced! And it puzzles one not a little to understand why so rich and fertile a country as France—a country which, after its disasters in 1670, recovered with astonishing rapidity from the ravages of an invading army—should only a century before have been such a scene of desolation and sterility. But the cause lay chiefly in the rapacity with which the privileged classes had cast the whole burden of taxation on the shoulders of the people. The theory with which they justified this equitable arrangement was that "the nobility paid in blood, the clergy in prayer, and the people in money!" Poor people, whose toil and whose tithes had, in the course of time, helped the Gallican Church to accumulate in lands and money what amounted to more than half the revenue of the kingdom, and which, in spite of its tithes and taxes, was not by any means exempt from shedding its blood on the battle-fields, of which others reaped the glory and the greatness. In the feudal ages, when fighting was the badge of knighthood, there might have been some faint shadow of meaning in this invidious distinction, which became a mere farce after the invention of gunpowder; and the exemption of the aristocracy and clergy from taxation showed, in regard to this society, that it was simply relapsing into a state of natural anarchy—that of the strong preying on the weak without let or hindrance from justice.
Under the closely-woven network of this system of taxation, agriculture and commerce—the two lungs of national prosperity—were stifling for want of room. The ruling powers seemed to resemble nothing so much as those monstrous harpies of fable who, however greedily they fed, were yet gnawed by insatiable hunger. To spring ever fresh subsidies from the body of the people seemed to be the sole business of government. Among the most oppressive of these fiscal grievances (for the system was so obscure and complicated that the high financiers themselves only understood it in portion) may be enumerated the Gabelle, the Taille, the Corvée, and the Aides.
As is well known, the Gabelle, a tax on salt, was so oppressively administered, that in some provinces, when this article was scarce, the people, down to every child, were forced to buy a regulation quantity, whether they wanted it or not; whereas, in other provinces, such as Provence, where salt was naturally formed on the coast, soldiers were stationed at certain times of the year to prevent even the cattle from imbibing the saline properties of the soil. The Taille, a tax raised on property and income, was equally oppressive, because, as must be remembered, it was a tax raised only on the property and income of the unprivileged classes. Thirdly, there was the detested Corvée—the unremunerated service, originally due from serf or tenant to his Seigneur—copied by the Government in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the public Corvées were instituted. Then might be seen groups of peasants—hungry, sullen, wrathful—pressed like malefactors into the unpaid labour of constructing and repairing the public roads. And while they were making the highways for the easier locomotion of the Grand Seigneur and the wealthy financier, their own field of grass or patch of wheat was in the meanwhile ruined for want of the requisite labour. Next came the Aides, or subsidies on all fermented liquors, which bore so heavily on the wine trade as to check this, the most productive source of wealth in the country. The vintage was no sooner over than gaugers appeared ransacking the cellars, and confiscating what had not been duly registered and declared. The very owners were taxed for everything but a very small quantity. On entering and leaving towns, on entering or leaving provinces, along the highroad and rivers, under and over bridges, on entering and leaving wine-shops, the barrel of wine encountered a fresh obstacle. For a system of internal custom-houses formed artificial frontiers, impeding all free circulation of provisions; so that a measure of wine which in Orléanais was worth one half-penny, by the time it arrived in Normandy cost a shilling!
These taxes were not levied by salaried Government officials, but were let out to fermiers-généraux (tax-farmers), who again underlet them to subordinates. Their method of procedure was perfectly arbitrary, and the mere fact that they were not paid, but expected to indemnify themselves when once they had apportioned its share to the Government, gave the rein to such a system of wholesale spoliation, only to be matched in Turkey at the present day, or by the extortions of the prefects in the conquered provinces of the Roman Empire. Adam Smith, who had visited France in 1765, and studied French finances, wrote in his Wealth of Nations: "The most sanguinary laws exist in those countries where the revenue is farmed out by the Government."
It is no wonder that under such a system the country was wretchedly cultivated; that whole regions, in spite of a capital soil, were, according to Arthur Young, mere barren tracts, desolate stretches of dreary bogs and arid wildernesses; that the villages and towns were often but a filthy heap of mud-houses and windowless hovels; that the children in their repulsive rags were, "if possible, worse clad than if with no clothes at all"; that the countrywomen—in the enforced absence of husbands and brothers, of carts and horses—were condemned to the heaviest field-work, till, disfigured and blasted with drudgery, they appeared not so much women as creatures of amorphous shape, and that this extreme poverty of the husbandman, following his plough "without wooden shoes or feet to his stockings," in turn became the insidious worm, gnawing at the root of the tree of national prosperity.
In the Confessions, Rousseau incidentally refers to the French peasant's dread of the tax-gatherer's spies, and the premium that was put upon poverty. He narrates how, journeying on foot from Paris to Lyons, he lost his way on one occasion, and, footsore and famishing, besought hospitality of a peasant for payment. The rustic brought him some skimmed milk and rye-bread, saying it was all he possessed. Jean Jacques' hunger being in no wise appeased, and the peasant, drawing his own conclusions from this very genuine appetite, cautiously lifted a trap-door near the kitchen, descended, and reappeared with a ham, a bottle of wine, add a loaf of wheaten bread—a meal to make the traveller's mouth water. But the peasant's anxiety returned on Rousseau's offering to pay him, and it was only after much pressing that he, with a shudder, brought out the terrible words of tax-gatherer and cellar-rat. He explained how be hid his wine, because of the aides, how he hid his bread, because of the taille, and that he would be lost if it were known that he was not dying of hunger. The impression produced by the lot of this peasant who dared not so much as eat the bread he had earned in the sweat of his brow, became the germ of that life-long inextinguishable hatred which Rousseau felt for the oppression of the poor—became the germ of his Contrat Social, the little book which kindled so mighty a conflagration.
There was a limit, however, beyond even the extortions of the tax-collector, the custom-house officer, the gauger, could not proceed; they could not seize where nothing remained to be taken. Yet the public exchequer was empty, the public revenues were exhausted, and still the cry for gold, more gold, was as importunate at Versailles as that for bread, more bread, among the populace. Paris-Duvernoy, one of the ministers of Louis XV., seeing no other way out of the pressing difficulty, at last bethought him of putting a tax, the Cinquantième, on all classes without distinction. This tax raised a perfect storm of indignation among the nobility and clergy. Who so daring as to lay a sacrilegious hand on the riches of the Church! The Duke was forced to resign, and a proclamation issued to the effect that all ecclesiastical possessions should now and in perpetuity remain exempt from taxes and imposts! The author of this proclamation was that identical Cardinal Fleury, the confidant of the King, to whom Henri Saint Simon had described the appalling poverty of the realm.
Such was the conduct of the Church at the approach of an imminent national crisis, such the rapacity of a priesthood instituted in the name of Christ, the very core of whose teaching had been not to lay up riches for yourself, but charity, but the sharing in common of the common fruits of the earth. If ever the absolute divorce between theory and practice had the effect of producing in a nation an army of cynics, sceptics, and scoffers, then this effect must have been produced in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century. But while the extravagances and licentiousness of the higher clergy had realised a fabulous extent, the curés and village priests were left so badly that they often depended for a livelihood on the charity of their poor parishioners. Many of them, in consequence, were among the first who made common cause with the people in 1789—such as that apostolic figure of Claude Fauchet, who preached the revolution with the gospel in his hand.
With an irresponsible government, an effeminate aristocracy, a dissolute clergy, a poverty-stricken people, it seemed that the ruin of the old Régime must bring about that of the realm itself. But to save it from destruction there was yet left one sound and robust limb in the French body politic: the bourgeoisie or middle class; although there, did not then exist the infinite gradations by which social inequalities are to some degree hidden, or at least made less glaring, in the present day. For, as Arthur Young wrote, "there were no gentle transitions from ease to comfort, from comfort to wealth; you passed at once from beggary to profusion, from misery in mud cabins to Mademoiselle Hubert (a popular actress) in splendid spectacles." Still, from the ranks of the middle class there rose up a small phalanx of men—philosophers, historians, littérateurs, journalists: impassioned innovators, doughty pioneers, the light brigade of the Thought Militant of human progress. The very sound of the names of them—Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, d'Holbach, Condillac, Helvétius—still rings upon our ears like so many battle-cries. These were no word-mongers calmly writing by their snug firesides, these were soldiers in the heat of the fight, eager, alert, fevered with action, whose words wave their swords, and who too often paid for their audacity with poverty, exile, and imprisonment. They have been much vilified, these brave philosophers, their system has been much misunderstood, because, forsooth, it was less a system than a challenge. It may be objected that a Reformation such as Luther had wrought for Germany in the sixteenth century, or a transformation such as Cromwell momentarily effected for this country in the seventeenth, would have been more permanently beneficial than their annihilation of all previous religious and social moulds; but the Night of St. Bartholomew had forced back the advancing tide of thought so long, that nothing could now stem its accumulated waters in their destructive overflow. It is by the sanguinary light of these massacres that we should read the writings of Voltaire and his associates; for thus only their vehement onslaughts, their motto of Écrasez l'Infâme, receive their fitting commentary.
Leader of the minds who inaugurated the revolution of thought, by importing the sensational philosophy of Hobbes and Locke into France, is the ubiquitous Voltaire—the intellectual Briareus of the eighteenth century—the man who did the thinking of fifty heads at least, and who, while assisting the Encyclopædists in their warfare against the priests, yet contrived to seat himself by the thrones of kings. Voltaire's primary service to his time consisted in his sowing division between Church and State, and in his power of making such potentates as Frederick the Great and Catharine of Russia actual accomplices of his assaults on the despotism of the Hierarchy. Thus shielded by Voltaire's supreme dexterity, his comrades could proceed in their perilous undertaking, the publication of the Encyclopédie, which, by revolutionising the thought of its generation, fitted the following one to carry thought into action.
Diderot—the son of a blacksmith, himself a smith in the workshop of thought, who, amid much din and confusion, forged, with his comrades, those destructive weapons afterwards wielded by the Constituent Assembly—was, along with D'Alembert, the directing spirit of the Encyclopédie. The former bold and impetuous as the latter was discreet, they succeeded, between the years 1751 and 1760, in spite of Papal denunciations, legal decrees, and State prisons, in completing this engine for the destruction of feudal institutions and theological tenets, and for the propounding of their own systems of nature and society. To free men from the bondage of authority in religion and philosophy, to substitute for superstitious terror a faith in human reason and virtue, to transform regret for a lost Paradise to quenchless belief in the perfectibility of the race, was the prominent teaching of their school. Some of these men called themselves Deists, some Pyrrhonists, some Atheists; but, in spite of clashing divergencies of opinion, they all worshipped at one common shrine, that of Progress. The fact is, that a social rather than a philosophical idea lay at the root of their work, and that, in their efforts to rid their country of the incubus of superstition, they also tore away some of that transmitted inheritance of religious thought around which cluster the most sensitive fibres of the mind. Helvétius and D'Holbach, in the crude and dogmatic exposition of Materialism elaborated in De l'Esprit and the Système de la Nature, became the exponents of the Necessitarian doctrine, reducing the universe to a fortuitous concourse of atoms and man to an animated machine.
Apart and companionless, a "love in desolation masked—a power girt round with weakness," there came he who appeared in the eighteenth century like one crying in the wilderness. The most paradoxical and enigmatic figure in literary history, he preached the purification of morals while tainted with the corruption of his age, and composed a lofty theory of education after depositing his children in the Foundlings' Hospital. Jean Jacques Rousseau, possessed, perhaps, above all writers, the magnetism of genius, and Madame Roland is an instance of the paramount influence he exercised on the generation which succeeded his. A child of the people, a vagabond of the highways, a citizen of Geneva, he naturally approached the problems of his time by a road different from that of his compeers. As we have seen, it was his inextinguishable hatred of the oppression of the poor that turned his thoughts to politics, and, if in the Contrat Social he seems to reason too much from general à priori principles, it must be remembered that, as a native of Switzerland, he had had experience of a form of government which gave to part of his theories a solid basis of fact. His definition of the State as the social compact of all its members, who, constituting what he calls the sovereign, annually elect in their entirety the prince or executive power, has become proverbial. This single axiom, from which the correlative notions of the Rights of Man—Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality—are natural outcomes, became the lever which helped to set the vast forces of the Revolution in motion, as well as the lode-star of its reconstructive tendencies. Rousseau's leading conception is, that Might is not Right, and that, although the power of the strong may enable him to frame laws which force the weak to obey him, the moment the weak becomes strong enough to refuse, he is justified in doing so. Justice, and not expediency, is the watchword of his political creed, a creed in striking contrast to Thomas Carlyle's equally strenuous teaching that Might is Right. Certainly we, bred up in the Darwinian era, we who have felt the full significance of that modern Shibboleth, the struggle for existence, we who have ached in dull despair at this grim law of life with which Nature, "red in tooth and claw," proclaims that Might is Right—we cannot help smiling at Rousseau's rose-coloured visions of a primitive state of nature, wherein the leopard was supposed to have lain down with the kid, and to which society was exhorted to return. Yet, though we must admit many of his premises to be false and many of his arguments shallow, his conclusion is neverthless in harmony with the highest conception of justice—justice which, like music, has its origin in the soul of man only, the most purely human of the virtues, and which is the goal towards which society is slowly and painfully working its way.
Another of Rousseau's axioms in the Contrat Social, and one which must be noticed in passing as connected with the land question, now of such paramount interest, is the assertion that, "the State, as regards its members, is the master of all possessions by reason of the social contract, which is the basis also of all their rights. As a rule," he says, "to legalise the rights of the first occupier of any lands, the following conditions are necessary: first, that this land should never before have been occupied; secondly, that he should only occupy the amount requisite for subsistence; thirdly, that he should take possession, not by a vain ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, sole indication of ownership which, in default of legal titles, deserves the recognition of others."
Unconnected with the Encyclopædists and unnoticed by Rousseau, there were two men who, without exciting much attention, were then elaborating a system of pure Socialism. Morellet, in his Code de la Nature, preached community in property, capital, dwelling-houses, and all requisite tools for labour, State education, and the distribution of work among members of a community according to their strength, and of the means of subsistence according to their wants. The Government of the State was to be modelled in all respects on that of the family, whose members, though unequally endowed with physical and mental strength, share the income in common. Mably, a financier and man of the world, deeply versed in affairs, adopted these views with enthusiasm, in spite of their apparent unpractical Utopianism.
The school of economists and Physiocrats, as they were called, had in some respects a more immediate influence on the politics of the Revolution. The main point of Quesnay, the head of the school, seems to have been identical with Mr. George's proposition, "that all taxation should be abolished, save a tax upon the value of land." Turgot, in some respects a disciple of Quesnay, succeeded in introducing during his ministry (he became Controller General in 1774, after the accession of Louis XVI. to the throne) some economic reforms into the French Administration, as well as in abolishing some of the most scandalous abuses. He removed, amongst other oppressive forms of taxation, that most infamous of all, the Corvée; he suppressed exclusive industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose restrictions and monopolies had been one of the many fatal obstacles to the trade of the country. This last reform was hailed in Paris with transports of delight. The working-men left their old masters in crowds, and celebrated their emancipation from the bondage of the trade-guilds. After repealing some of the most pernicious laws affecting the circulation of wine and corn in the country, Turgot shifted some part of the imposts on to the shoulders of the privileged classes. These changes, and the prospect of still more daring ones in contemplation, such as the introduction of a new territorial contribution, aroused the animosity of the rich and powerful. Unfortunately Turgot had failed to conciliate the partisanship of the popular party by his opposition to the convocation of the States-General, which was then its unanimous cry. His position having thus become precarious, Marie Antoinette procured his dismissal, and would, if possible, have had him locked up in the Bastile, for no better reason than that he had refused to bestow certain pensions on some of her worthless favourites. Had the nobles and clergy been gifted with some portion of second sight, they would have gone into mourning on that day in May of 1776, the date of Turgot's fall; as it was, they and their opponents were equally jubilant. A few thoughtful minds deplored the event, and among others Marie Phlipon, then a girl of two-and-twenty, wrote to her friend: "I have heard this evening of the resignation of M. Turgot; it vexed and stunned me. One of his financial measures has acted hurtfully on my father's affairs, and therefore on mine also; but it is not by private interest, that I judge him. He was so well thought of, so much was expected of his extensive views!" From his retirement at Ferney came Voltaire's cry, "I am as one dashed to the ground; never can we console ourselves for having seen the golden age dawn and vanish. My eyes see only death in front of me now that Turgot is gone. The rest of my days must be all bitterness."
Two years later, in 1778, both Voltaire and Rousseau died within a few months of each other, and the revolution which they had inaugurated in the spirit took bodily form, and entered on the stormy scene of action in the volcanic Mirabeau, the noble Madame Roland, the inexorable Robespierre.