III.

Direction of the current.--The people led by lawyers.-- Theories and piques the sole surviving forces.--Suicide of the Ancient regime.

We are all well aware from which side the gale comes, and, to assure ourselves, we have merely to see how the reports of the Third-Estate are made up. The peasant is led by the man of the law, the petty attorney of the rural districts, the envious advocate and theorist. This one insists, in the report, on a statement being made in writing and at length of his local and personal grievances, his protest against taxes and deductions, his request to have his dog free of the clog, and his desire to own a gun to use against the wolves[5419]. Another one, who suggests and directs, envelopes all this in the language of the Rights of Man and that of the circular of Sieyès.

"For two months," writes a commandant in the South,[5420] "inferior judges and lawyers, with which both town and country swarm, with a view to their election to the States-General, have been racing after the members of the Third-Estate, under the pretext of standing by them and of giving them information. . . They have striven to make them believe that, in the States-General, they alone would be masters and regulate all the affairs of the kingdom; that the Third-Estate, in selecting its deputies among men of the robe, would secure the might and the right to take the lead, to abolish nobility and to cancel all its rights and privileges; that nobility would no longer be hereditary; that all citizens, in deserving it, would be entitled to claim it; that, if the people elected them, they would have accorded to the Third-Estate whatever it desired, because the curates, belonging to the Third-Estate, having agreed to separate from the higher clergy and unite with them, the nobles and the clergy, united together, would have but one vote against two of the Third-Estate. . . . If the third--Estate had chosen sensible townspeople or merchants they would have combined without difficulty with the other two orders. But the assemblies of the bailiwicks and other districts were stuffed with men of the robe who had absorbed all opinions and striven to take precedence of the others, each, in his own behalf, intriguing and conspiring to be appointed a deputy."

"In Touraine," writes the intendant,[5421] "most of the votes have been bespoken or begged for. Trusty agents, at the moment of voting, placed filled-in ballots in the hands of the voters, and put in their way, on reaching the taverns, every document and suggestion calculated to excite their imaginations and determine their choice for the gentry of the bar."

"In the sénéchausée of Lectoure, a number of parishes have not been designated or notified to send their reports or deputies to the district assembly. In those which were notified the lawyers, attorneys and notaries of the small neighboring towns have made up the list of grievances themselves without summoning the community. . . Exact copies of this single rough draft were made and sold at a high price to the councils of each country parish".--

This is an alarming symptom, one marking out in advance the road the Revolution is to take: The man of the people is indoctrinated by the advocate, the pikeman allowing himself to be led by the spokesman.[5422]

The effect of their combination is apparent the first year. In Franche-Comté[5423] after consultation with a person named Rouget, the peasants of the Marquis de Chaila "determine to make no further payments to him, and to divide amongst themselves the product of the wood-cuttings." In his paper "the lawyer states that all the communities of the province have decided to do the same thing. . . His consultation is diffused to such an extent around the country that many of the communities are satisfied that they owe nothing more to the king nor to the seigniors. M. de Marnésia, deputy to the (National) Assembly, has arrived (here) to pass a few days at home on account of his health. He has been treated in the rudest and most scandalous manner; it was even proposed to conduct him back to Paris under guard. After his departure his chateau was attacked, the doors burst open and the walls of his garden pulled down. (And yet) no gentleman has done more for the people on his domain the M. le Marquis de Marnésia. . . Excesses of every kind are on the increase; I have constant complaints of the abuse which the national militia make of their arms, and which I cannot remedy." According to an utterance in the National Assembly the police imagines that it is to be disbanded and has therefore no desire to make enemies for itself. "The baillages are as timid as the police-forces; I send them business constantly, but no culprit is punished."--"No nation enjoys liberty so indefinite and so disastrous to honest people; it is absolutely against the rights of man to see oneself constantly liable to have his throat cut by the scoundrels who daily confound liberty with license."--In other words, the passions utilize the theory to justify themselves, and the theory appeal to passion to be carried out. For example, near Liancourt, the Duc de Larochefoucauld possessed an uncultivated area of ground; "at the commencement of the revolution,[5424] the poor of the town declare that, as they form a part of the nation, untilled lands being national property, this belongs to them," and "with no other formality" they take possession of it, divide it up, plant hedges and clear it off. "This, says Arthur Young, shows the general disposition. . . . Pushed a little farther the consequences would not be slight for properties in this kingdom." Already, in the preceding year, near Rouen, the marauders, who cut down and sell the forests, declare, that "the people have the right to take whatever they require for their necessities." They have had the doctrine preached to them that they are sovereign, and they act as sovereigns. The condition of their intellects being given, nothing is more natural than their conduct. Several millions of savages are thus let loose by a few thousand windbags, the politics of the café finding an interpreter and ministrants in the mob of the streets. On the one hand brute force is at the service of the radical dogma. On the other hand radical dogma is at the service of brute force. And here, in disintegrated France, these are the only two valid powers remaining erect on the debris of the others.

*****

NOTES:

[Footnote 5401: Necker, "De l'Administration des Finances," II. 422, 435.]

[Footnote 5402: The wages have in 1789 been estimated to be 7 sous 4 deniers of which 2 sous and 6 deniers would have to be paid for the bread. (Mercure de France, May 7, 1791.)]

[Footnote 5403: Aubertin, 345. Letter to the Comte de St. Germain (during the Seven Years War). "The soldier's hardships make one's heart bleed; he passes his days in a state of abject misery, despised and living like a chained dog to be used for combat."]

[Footnote 5404: De Tocqueville, 190, 191.]

[Footnote 5405: Archives nationales, H, 1591.]

[Footnote 5406: De Rochambeau, "Mémoires," I. 427.--D'Argenson, December 24, 1752. "30,000 men have been punished for desertion since the peace of 1748; this extensive desertion is attributed to the new drill which fatigues and disheartens the soldier, and especially the veterans."--Voltaire, "Dict. Phil.," article "Punishments." "I was amazed one day on seeing the list of deserters, for eight years amounting to 60,000."]

[Footnote 5407: Archives nationales, H, 554. (Letter of M. de Bertrand, intendant of Rennes, August 17, 1785).]

[Footnote 5408: Mercier, XI, 121.]

[Footnote 5409: Now we know better. The most healthy bread is the one in which some bran is left, such bran is not only good for the digestion but contains vitamins and minerals as well. (SR).]

[Footnote 5410: De Vaublanc, 149.]

[Footnote 5411: De Ségur, I, 20 (1767).]

[Footnote 5412: Augeard, "Mémoires," 165.]

[Footnote 5413: Horace Walpole, September 5, 1789.]

[Footnote 5414: Laboulaye, "De l'Administration française sous Louis XVI." (Revue des Cours littéraires, IV, 743).--Albert Babeau, I, 111. (Doléances et veux des corporations de Troyes).]

[Footnote 5415: De Tocqueville, 158.]

[Footnote 5416: Ibid. 304. (The words of Burke.)]

[Footnote 5417: Travels in France, I. 240, 263.]

[Footnote 5418: What an impression this view must have made on Lenin who sought, between 1906 and 1909 in Paris, the means and ways with which to re-create the French revolution in Russia. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5419: Beugnot, I. 115, 116.]

[Footnote 5420: Archives nationales, procès-verbaux and cahiers of the States-General, vol. XIII, p. 405. (Letter of the Marquis de Fodoas, commandant of Armagnac, to M. Necker, may 29, 1789.)]

[Footnote 5421: Ibid. Vol. CL, p. 174. ( Letter from the intendant of Tours of March 25, 1789.)]

[Footnote 5422: "Lenin deviated from Marx not in preaching the necessity for violent proletarian revolution, but by advocating the creation of an elite party of professional revolutionaries to hasten this end, and by arguing for the dictatorship of this party rather than the working class as a whole." The Guinness Encyclopedia page 269. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5423: Archives nationales, H, 784. (Letters of M. de Langeron, military commandant at Besançon, October 16 and 18, 1789). The consultation is annexed.]

[Footnote 5424: Arthur Young, I, 344.]

## CHAPTER V. SUMMARY.

I. Suicide of the Ancient Regime.

These two forces, radical dogma and brute force, are the successors and executors of the Ancient regime, and, on contemplating the way in which this regime engendered, brought forth, nourished, installed and stimulated them we cannot avoid considering its history as one long suicide, like that of a man who, having mounted to the top of an immense ladder, cuts away from under his feet the support which has kept him up.--In a case of this kind good intentions are not sufficient; to be liberal and even generous, to enter upon a few semi-reforms, is of no avail. On the contrary, through both their qualities and defects, through both their virtues and their vices, the privileged wrought their own destruction, their merits contributing to their ruin as well as their faults.--Founders of society, formerly entitled to their advantages through their services, they have preserved their rank without fulfilling their duties; their position in the local as in the central government is a sinecure, and their privileges have become abuses. At their head, a king, creating France by devoting himself to her as if his own property, ended by sacrificing her as if his own property; the public purse is his private purse, while passions, vanities, personal weaknesses, luxurious habits, family solicitudes, the intrigues of a mistress and the caprices of a wife, govern a state of twenty-six millions of men with an arbitrariness, a heedlessness, a prodigality, a lack of skill, an absence of consistency that would scarcely be overlooked in the management of a private domain.--The king and the privileged excel in one direction, in manners, in good taste, in fashion, in the talent for representation and in entertaining and receiving, in the gift of graceful conversation, in finesse and in gaiety, in the art of converting life into a brilliant and ingenious festivity, regarding the world as a drawing room of refined idlers in which it suffices to be amiable and witty, whilst, actually, it is an arena where one must be strong for combats, and a laboratory in which one must work in order to be useful.--Through the habit, perfection and sway of polished intercourse they stamped on the French intellect a classic form, which, combined with recent scientific acquisitions, produced the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the disrepute of tradition, the ambition of recasting all human institutions according to the sole dictates of Reason, the appliance of mathematical methods to politics and morals, the catechism of the Rights of Man, and other dogmas of anarchical and despotic character in the CONTRAT SOCIAL.--Once this chimera is born they welcome it as a drawing room fancy; they use the little monster as a plaything, as yet innocent and decked with ribbons like a pastoral lambkin; they never dream of its becoming a raging, formidable brute; they nourish it, and caress it, and then, opening their doors, they let it descend into the streets.--Here among the middle class which the government has rendered ill-disposed by compromising its fortunes, which the privileged have offended by restricting its ambition, which is wounded by inequality through injured self-esteem, the revolutionary theory gains rapid accessions, a sudden asperity, and, in a few years, it finds itself undisputed master of public opinion.--At this moment and at its summons, another colossal monster rises up, a monster with millions of heads, a blind, startled animal, an entire people pressed down, exasperated and suddenly loosened against the government whose exactions have despoiled it, against the privileged whose rights have reduced it to starvation, without, in these rural districts abandoned by their natural protectors, encountering any surviving authority; without, in these provinces subject to the yoke of universal centralization, encountering a single independent group and without the possibility of forming, in this society broken up by despotism, any centers of enterprise and resistance; without finding, in this upper class disarmed by its very humanity, a policy devoid of illusion and capable of action. Without which all these good intentions and fine intellects shall be unable to protect themselves against the two enemies of all liberty and of all order, against the contagion of the democratic nightmare which disturbs the ablest heads and against the irruptions of the popular brutality which perverts the best of laws. At the moment of opening the States-General the course of ideas and events is not only fixed but, again, apparent. Beforehand and unconsciously, each generation bears (Page 400/296)within itself its past and its future; and to this one, long before the end, one might have been able to foretell its fate, and, if both details as well as the entire action could have been foreseen, one would readily have accepted the following fiction made up by a converted Laharpe[5501] when, at the end of the Directory, he arranged his souvenirs: