The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789. Alexis de Tocqueville
the working of the administration under the old French Government in the secret documents which are still in existence, it is impossible to imagine the contempt into which the law eventually falls, even in the eyes of those charged with the application of it, when there are no longer either political assemblies or public journals to check the capricious activity, or to set bounds to the arbitrary and changeable humour of the Ministers and their offices.
We hardly find a single Order in Council that does not recite some anterior laws, often of very recent date, which had been enacted but never executed. There was not an edict, a royal declaration, or any solemnly registered letters-patent, that did not encounter a thousand impediments in its application. The letters of the Comptrollers-General and the Intendants show that the Government constantly permitted things to be done, by exception, at variance with its own orders. It rarely broke the law, but the law was perpetually made to bend slightly in all directions to meet particular cases, and to facilitate the conduct of affairs.
An Intendant writes to the minister with reference to a duty of octroi from which a contractor of public works wanted to be exempted: ‘It is certain that according to the strict letter of the edicts and decrees which I have just quoted, no person throughout the kingdom is exempted from these duties; but those who are versed in the knowledge of affairs are well aware that these imperative enactments stand on the same footing as to the penalties which they impose, and that although they are to be found in almost every edict, declaration, and decree for the imposition of taxes, they have never prevented exceptions from being made.’
The whole essence of the then state of France is contained in this passage: rigid rules and lax practice were its characteristics.
Any one who should attempt to judge the Government of that period by the collection of its laws would fall into the most absurd mistakes. Under the date 1757 I have found a royal declaration condemning to death any one who shall compose or print writings contrary to religion or established order. The bookseller who sells and the pedlar who hawks them are to suffer the same punishment. Was this in the age of St. Dominic? It was under the supremacy of Voltaire.
It is a common subject of complaint against the French that they despise law; but when, alas! could they have learned to respect it? It may be truly said that amongst the men of the period I am describing, the place which should be filled in the human mind by the notion of law was empty. Every petitioner entreated that the established order of things should be set aside in his favour with as much vehemence and authority as if he were demanding that it should be properly enforced; and indeed its authority was never alleged against him but as a means of getting rid of his importunity. The submission of the people to the existing powers was still complete, but their obedience was the effect of custom rather than of will, and when by chance they were stirred up, the slightest excitement led at once to violence, which again was almost always repressed by counter-violence and arbitrary power, not by the law.
In the eighteenth century the central authority in France had not yet acquired that sound and vigorous constitution which it has since exhibited; nevertheless, as it had already succeeded in destroying all intermediate authorities, and had left only a vast blank between itself and the individuals constituting the nation, it already appeared to each of them from a distance as the only spring of the social machine, the sole and indispensable agent of public life.
Nothing shows this more fully than the writings even of its detractors. When the long period of uneasiness which preceded the Revolution began to be felt, all sorts of new systems of society and government were concocted. The ends which these various reformers had in view were various, but the means they proposed were always the same. They wanted to employ the power of the central authority in order to destroy all existing institutions, and to reconstruct them according to some new plan of their own device; no other power appeared to them capable of accomplishing such a task. The power of the State ought, they said, to be as unlimited as its rights; all that was required was to force it to make a proper use of both. The elder Mirabeau, a nobleman so imbued with the notion of the rights of his order that he openly called the Intendants ‘intruders,’ and declared that if the appointment of the magistrates was left altogether in the hands of the Government, the courts of justice would soon be mere ‘bands of commissioners,’—Mirabeau himself looked only to the action of the central authority to realise his visionary schemes.
These ideas were not confined to books; they found entrance into men’s minds, modified their customs, affected their habits, and penetrated throughout society, even into every-day life.
No one imagined that any important affair could be properly carried out without the intervention of the State. Even the agriculturists—a class usually refractory to precept—were disposed to think that if agriculture did not improve, it was the fault of the Government, which did not give them sufficient advice and assistance. One of them writes to an Intendant in a tone of irritation which foreshadows the coming Revolution. ‘Why does not the Government appoint inspectors to go once a year into the provinces to examine the state of cultivation, to instruct the cultivators how to improve it—to tell them what to do with their cattle, how to fatten, rear, and sell them, and where to take them to market? These inspectors should be well paid; and the farmers who exhibited proofs of the best system of husbandry should receive some mark of honour.’
Agricultural inspectors and crosses of honour! Such means of encouraging agriculture never would have entered into the head of a Suffolk farmer.
In the eyes of the majority of the French the Government was alone able to ensure public order; the people were afraid of nothing but the patrols, and men of property had no confidence in anything else. Both classes regarded the gendarme on his rounds not merely as the chief defender of order, but as order itself. ‘No one,’ says the provincial assembly of Guyenne, ‘can fail to observe that the sight of a patrol is well calculated to restrain those most hostile to all subordination.’ Accordingly every one wanted to have a squadron of them at his own door. The archives of an intendancy are full of requests of this nature; no one seemed to suspect that under the guise of a protector a master might be concealed.[32]
Nothing struck the émigrés so much on their arrival in England as the absence of this military force. It filled them with surprise, and often even with contempt, for the English. One of them, a man of ability, but whose education had not prepared him for what he was to see, wrote as follows:—‘It is perfectly true that an Englishman congratulates himself on having been robbed, on the score that at any rate there is no patrol in his country. A man may lament anything that disturbs public tranquillity, but he will nevertheless comfort himself, when he sees the turbulent restored to society, with the reflection that the letter of the law is stronger than all other considerations. Such false notions, however,’ he adds, ‘are not absolutely universal; there are some wise people who think otherwise, and wisdom must prevail in the end.’
But that these eccentricities of the English could have any connection with their liberties never entered into the mind of this observer. He chose rather to explain the phenomenon by more scientific reasons. ‘In a country,’ said he, ‘where the moisture of the climate, and the want of elasticity in the air, give a sombre tinge to the temperament, the people are disposed to give themselves up to serious objects. The English people are naturally inclined to occupy themselves with the affairs of government, to which the French are averse.’
The French Government having thus assumed the place of Providence, it was natural that every one should invoke its aid in his individual necessities. Accordingly we find an immense number of petitions which, while affecting to relate to the public interest, really concern only small individual interests.[33] The boxes containing them are perhaps the only place in which all the classes composing that society of France, which has long ceased to exist, are still mingled. It is a melancholy task to read them: we find peasants praying to be indemnified for the loss of their cattle or their horses; wealthy landowners asking for assistance in rendering their estates more productive; manufacturers soliciting from the Intendant privileges by which they may be protected from a troublesome competition, and very frequently confiding the embarrassed state of their affairs to him, and begging him to obtain for them relief or a loan from the Comptroller-General. It appears that some fund was set apart for this purpose.
Even the nobles