The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4). William Milligan Sloane
to the first, and consequently, being integral members of neither, formed a strong independent class by themselves. The petty nobles were in much the same condition with regard to the wealthy, powerful families in their own estate and to the rich burghers; they married the fortunes of the latter and accepted their hospitality, but otherwise treated them with the same exclusive condescension as that displayed to themselves by the great.
But if the estate of the clergy and the estate of the nobility were alike divided in character and interests, this was still more true of the burghers. In 1614, at the close of the middle ages, the third estate had been little concerned with the agricultural laborer. For various reasons this class had been gradually emancipated until now there was less serfage in France than elsewhere; more than a quarter, perhaps a third, of the land was in the hands of peasants and other small proprietors. This, to be sure, was economically disastrous, for over-division of land makes tillage unprofitable, and these very men were the taxpayers. The change had been still more marked in the denizens of towns. During the last two centuries the wealthy burgesses had grown still more wealthy in the expansion of trade, commerce, and manufactures; many had struggled and bought their way into the ranks of the nobility. The small tradesmen had remained smug, hard to move, and resentful of change. But there was a large body of men unknown to previous constitutions, and growing ever larger with the increase in population—intelligent and unintelligent artisans, half-educated employees in workshops, mills, and trading-houses, ever recruited from the country population, seeking such intermittent occupation as the towns afforded. The very lowest stratum of this society was then, as now, most dangerous; idle, dissipated, and unscrupulous, they were yet sufficiently educated to discuss and disseminate perilous doctrines, and were often most ready in speech and fertile in resource.
This comparative well-being of a nation, devoted like the ancient Greeks to novelty, avid of great ideas and great deeds, holding opinions not merely for the pleasure of intellectual gymnastics but logically and with a view to their realization, sensitive to influences like the deep impressions made on their thinkers by the English and American revolutions—such relative comfort with its attendant opportunities for discussion was not the least of many causes which made France the vanguard in the great revolution which had already triumphed in theory throughout the continent and was eventually to transform the social order of all Europe.
Discussion is not only a safety-valve, it is absolutely essential in governments where the religion, morals, opinions, and occupations of the people give form and character to institutions and legislation. The centralized and despotic Bourbon monarchy of France was an anachronism among an intelligent people. So was every institution emanating from and dependent upon it. It was impossible for the structure to stand indefinitely, however tenderly it was treated, however cleverly it was propped and repaired. As in the case of England in 1688 and of her colonies in 1772, the immediate and direct agency in the crash was a matter of money. But the analogy holds good no further, for in France the questions of property and taxation were vastly more complex than in England, where the march of events had so largely destroyed feudalism, or in America, where feudalism had never existed. On the great French estates the laborers had first to support the proprietor and his representatives, then the Church and the King; the minute remainder of their gains was scarcely sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. The small proprietors were so hampered in their operations by the tiny size of their holdings that they were still restricted to ancient and wretched methods of cultivation; but they too were so burdened with contributions direct and indirect that famine was always imminent with them as well. Under whatever name the tax was known, license (octroi), bridge and ferry toll, road-work, salt-tax, or whatever it may have been, it was chiefly distasteful not because of its form but because it was oppressive. Some of it was paid to the proprietors, some to the state. The former was more hateful because the gainer was near and more tangible; the hatred of the country people for the feudal privileges and those who held them was therefore concrete and quite as intense as the more doctrinaire dislike of the poor in the towns to the rich. Such was the alienation of classes from each other throughout the beginning and middle of the century that the disasters which French arms suffered at the hands of Marlborough and Frederick, so far from humiliating the nation, gave pleasure and not pain to the masses because they were, as they thought, defeats not of France, but of the nobility and of the crown.
Feudal dues had arisen when those imposing them had the physical force to compel their payment and were also the proprietors of the land on which they were exacted. Now the nobility were entirely stripped of power and in many instances of land as well. How empty and bottomless the oppressive institutions and how burdensome the taxes which rested on nothing but a paper grant, musty with age and backed only by royal complaisance! Want too was always looking in at the doors of the many, while the few were enjoying the national substance. This year there was a crisis, for before the previous harvest time devastating hail-storms had swept the fields, in 1788; during the winter there had been pinching want and many had perished from destitution and cold; the advancing seasons had brought warmth, but sufficient time had not even yet elapsed for fields and herds to bring forth their increase, and by the myriad firesides of the people hunger was still an unwelcome guest.
With wholesome economy such crises may be surmounted in a rich and fertile country. But economy had not been practised for fifty years by the governing classes. As early as 1739 there had been a deficiency in the French finances. From small beginnings the annual loans had grown until, in 1787, the sum to be raised over and above the regular income was no less than thirty-two millions of dollars. This was all due to the extravagance of the court and the aristocracy, who spent, for the most part, far more than the amount they actually collected and which they honestly believed to be their income. Such a course was vastly more disastrous than it appeared, being ruinous not only to personal but to national well-being, inasmuch as what the nobles, even the earnest and honest ones, believed to be their legitimate income was not really such. Two thirds of the land was in their hands; the other third paid the entire land-tax. They were therefore regarding as their own two thirds of what was in reality taken altogether from the pockets of the small proprietors. Small sacrifices the ruling class professed itself ready to make, but such a one as to pay their share of the land-tax—never. It had been proposed also to destroy the monopoly of the grain trade, and to abolish the road-work, a task more hateful to the people than any tax, because it brought them into direct contact with the exasperating superciliousness of petty officials. But in all these proposed reforms, Necker, Calonne, and Loménie de Brienne, each approaching the nobles from a separate standpoint, had alike failed. The nobility could see in such retrenchment and change nothing but ruin for themselves. An assembly of notables, called in 1781, would not listen to propositions which seemed suicidal. The King began to alienate the affection of his natural allies, the people, by yielding to the clamor of the court party. From the nobility he could wring nothing. The royal treasury was therefore actually bankrupt, the nobles believed that they were threatened with bankruptcy, and the people knew that they themselves were not only bankrupt, but also hungry and oppressed.
At last the King, aware of the nation's extremity, began to undertake reforms without reference to class prejudice, and on his own authority. He decreed a stamp-tax, and the equal distribution of the land-tax. He strove to compel the unwilling parliament of Paris, a court of justice which, though ancient, he himself had but recently reconstituted, to register his decrees, and then banished it from the capital because it would not. That court had been the last remaining check on absolutism in the country, and, as such, an ally of the people; so that although the motives and the measures of Louis were just, the high-handed means to which he resorted in order to carry them alienated him still further from the affections of the nation. The parliament, in justifying its opposition, had declared that taxes in France could be laid only by the Estates-General. The people had almost forgotten the very name, and were entirely ignorant of what that body was, vaguely supposing that, like the English Parliament or the American Congress, it was in some sense a legislative assembly. They therefore made their voice heard in no uncertain sound, demanding that the Estates should meet. Louis abandoned his attitude of independence, and recalled the Paris parliament from Troyes, but only to exasperate its members still further by insisting on a huge loan, on the restoration of civil rights to the Protestants, and on restricting, not only its powers, but those of all similar courts throughout the realm. The parliament then declared that France was a limited monarchy with constitutional