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The Eve of the French Revolution

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Title: The Eve of the French Revolution

Author: Edward J. Lowell


        
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Language: English

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THE EVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

BY

EDWARD J. LOWELL



TO MY WIFE





PREFACE


There are two ways in which the French Revolution may be considered. We
may look at the great events which astonished and horrified Europe and
America: the storming of the Bastille, the march on Versailles, the
massacres of September, the Terror, and the restoration of order by
Napoleon. The study of these events must always be both interesting and
profitable, and we cannot wonder that historians, scenting the
approaching battle, have sometimes hurried over the comparatively
peaceful country that separated them from it. They have accepted easy
and ready-made solutions for the cause of the trouble. Old France has
been lurid in their eyes, in the light of her burning country-houses.
The Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, they think, must have been
wretches, or they could not so have suffered. The social fabric, they
are sure, was rotten indeed, or it would never have gone to pieces so
suddenly.

There is, however, another way of looking at that great revolution of
which we habitually set the beginning in 1789. That date is, indeed,
momentous; more so than any other in modern history. It marks the
outbreak in legislation and politics of ideas which had already been
working for a century, and which have changed the face of the civilized
world. These ideas are not all true nor all noble. They have in them a
large admixture of speculative error and of spiritual baseness. They
require to-day to be modified and readjusted. But they represent sides
of truth which in 1789, and still more in 1689, were too much overlooked
and neglected. They suited the stage of civilization which the world had
reached, and men needed to emphasize them. Their very exaggeration was
perhaps necessary to enable them to fight, and in a measure to supplant,
the older doctrines which were in possession of the human mind.
Induction, as the sole method of reasoning, sensation as the sole origin
of ideas, may not be the final and only truth; but they were very much
needed in the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and
they found philosophers to elaborate them, and enthusiasts to preach
them. They made their way chiefly on French soil in the decades
preceding 1789.

The history of French society at that time has of late years attracted
much attention in France. Diligent scholars have studied it from many
sides. I have used their work freely, and acknowledgment will be found
in the foot-notes; but I cannot resist the pleasure of mentioning in
this preface a few of those to whom I am most indebted; and first M.
Albert Babeau, without whose careful researches several chapters of this
book could hardly have been written. His studies in archives, as well as
in printed memoirs and travels, have brought much of the daily life of
old France into the clearest light. He has in an eminent degree the
great and thoroughly French quality of telling us what we want to know.
His impartiality rivals his lucidity, while his thoroughness is such
that it is hard gleaning the old fields after him.

Hardly less is my indebtedness to the late M. Aimé Chérest, whose
unfinished work, "La Chute de l'ancien régime," gives the most
interesting and philosophical narrative of the later political events
preceding the meeting of the Estates General. To the great names of de
Tocqueville and of Taine I can but render a passing homage. The former
may be said to have opened the modern mind to the proper method of
studying the eighteenth century in France, the latter is, perhaps, the
most brilliant of writers on the subject; and no one has recently
written, or will soon write, about the time when the Revolution was
approaching without using the books of both of them. And I must not
forget the works of the Vicomte de Broc, of M. Boiteau, and of M.
Rambaud, to which I have sometimes turned for suggestion or
confirmation.

Passing to another branch of the subject, I gladly acknowledge my debt
to the Right Honorable John Morley. Differing from him in opinion almost
wherever it is possible to have an opinion, I have yet found him
thoroughly fair and accurate in matters of fact. His books on Voltaire,
Rousseau, and the Encyclopaedists, taken together, form the most
satisfactory history of French philosophy in the eighteenth century with
which I am acquainted.

Of the writers of monographs, and of the biographers, I will not speak
here in detail, although some of their books have been of very great
service to me. Such are those of M. Bailly, M. de Lavergne, M. Horn, M.
Stourm, and M. Charles Gomel, on the financial history of France; M. de
Poncins and M. Desjardins, on the cahiers; M. Rocquain on the
revolutionary spirit before the revolution, the Comte de Luçay and M. de
Lavergne, on the ministerial power and on the provincial assemblies and
estates; M. Desnoiresterres, on Voltaire; M. Scherer, on Diderot; M. de
Loménie, on Beaumarchais; and many others; and if, after all, it is the
old writers, the contemporaries, on whom I have most relied, without the
assistance of these modern writers I certainly could not have found them
all.

In treating of the Philosophers and other writers of the eighteenth
century I have not endeavored to give an abridgment of their books, but
to explain such of their doctrines as seemed to me most important and
influential. This I have done, where it was possible, in their own
language. I have quoted where I could; and in many cases where quotation
marks will not be found, the only changes from the actual expression of
the author, beyond those inevitable in translation, have been the
transference from direct to oblique speech, or some other trifling
alterations rendered necessary in my judgment by the exigencies of
grammar. On the other hand, I have tried to translate ideas and phrases
rather than words.

EDWARD J. LOWELL.

June 24, 1892.




CONTENTS.


INTRODUCTION

I. THE KING AND THE ADMINISTRATION

II. LOUIS XVI. AND HIS COURT

III. THE CLERGY

IV. THE CHURCH AND HER ADVERSARIES

V. THE CHURCH AND VOLTAIRE

VI. THE NOBILITY

VII. THE ARMY

VIII. THE COURTS OF LAW

IX. EQUALITY AND LIBERTY

X. MONTESQUIEU

XI. PARIS

XII. THE PROVINCIAL TOWNS

XIII. THE COUNTRY

XIV. TAXATION

XV. FINANCE

XVI. "THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA"

XVII. HELVETIUS, HOLBACH, AND CHASTELLUX

XVIII. ROUSSEAU'S POLITICAL WRITINGS

XIX. "LA NOUVELLE HÉLOÏSE" AND "ÉMILE"

XX. THE PAMPHLETS

XXI. THE CAHIERS

XXII. SOCIAL AND ECONOMICAL MATTERS IN THE CAHIERS

XXIII CONCLUSION

INDEX OF EDITIONS CITED





THE EVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.




INTRODUCTION.


It is characteristic of the European family of nations, as distinguished
from the other great divisions of mankind, that among them different
ideals of government and of life arise from time to time, and that
before the whole of a community has entirely adopted one set of
principles, the more advanced thinkers are already passing on to
another. Throughout the western part of continental Europe, from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century, absolute monarchy was superseding
feudalism; and in France the victory of the newer over the older system
was especially thorough. Then, suddenly, although not quite without
warning, a third system was brought face to face with the two others.
Democracy was born full-grown and defiant. It appealed at once to two
sides of men's minds, to pure reason and to humanity. Why should a few
men be allowed to rule a great multitude as deserving as themselves? Why
should the mass of mankind lead lives full of labor and sorrow? These
questions are difficult to answer. The Philosophers of the eighteenth
century pronounced them unanswerable. They did not in all cases advise
the establishment of democratic government as a cure for the wrongs
which they saw in the world. But they attacked the things that were,
proposing other things, more or less practicable, in their places. It
seemed to these men no very difficult task to reconstitute society and
civilization, if only the faulty arrangements of the past could be done
away. They believed that men and things might be governed by a few
simple laws, obvious and uniform. These natural laws they did not make
any great effort to discover; they rather took them for granted; and
while they disagreed in their statement of principles, they still
believed their principles to be axiomatic. They therefore undertook to
demolish simultaneously all established things which to their minds did
not rest on absolute logical right. They bent themselves to their task
with ardent faith and hope.

The larger number of people, who had been living quietly in the existing
order, were amused and interested. The attacks of the Philosophers
seemed to them just in many cases, the reasoning conclusive. But in
their hearts they could not believe in the reality and importance of the
assault. Some of those most interested in keeping the world as it was,
honestly or frivolously joined in the cry for reform and for
destruction.

At last an attempt was made to put the new theories into practice. The
social edifice, slowly constructed through centuries, to meet the
various needs of different generations, began to tumble about the
astonished ears of its occupants. Then all who recognized that they had
something at stake in civilization as it existed were startled and
alarmed. Believers in the old religion, in old forms of government, in
old manners and morals, men in fear for their heads and men in fear for
their estates, were driven together. Absolutism and aristocracy,
although entirely opposed to each other in principle, were forced into
an unnatural alliance. From that day to this, the history of the world
has been largely made up of the contests of the supporters of the new
ideas, resting on natural law and on logic, with those of the older
forms of thought and customs of life, having their sanctions in
experience. It was in France that the long struggle began and took its
form. It is therefore interesting to consider the government of that
country, and its material and moral condition, at the time when the new
ideas first became prominent and forced their way toward fulfillment.

It is seldom in the time of the generation in which they are propounded
that new theories of life and its relations bear their full fruit. Only
those doctrines which a man learns in his early youth seem to him so
completely certain as to deserve to be pushed nearly to their last
conclusions. The Frenchman of the reign of Louis XV. listened eagerly to
Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Their descendants, in the time of
his grandson, first attempted to apply the ideas of those teachers.
While I shall endeavor in this book to deal with social and political
conditions existing in the reign of Louis XVI., I shall be obliged to
turn to that of his predecessor for the origin of French thoughts which
acted only in the last quarter of the century.



CHAPTER I.

THE KING AND THE ADMINISTRATION.


When Louis XVI. came to the throne in the year 1774, he inherited a
power nearly absolute in theory over all the temporal affairs of his
kingdom. In certain parts of the country the old assemblies or
Provincial Estates still met at fixed times, but their functions were
very closely limited. The _Parliaments_, or high courts of justice,
which had claimed the right to impose some check on legislation, had
been browbeaten by Louis XIV., and the principal one, that of Paris, had
been dissolved by his successor. The young king appeared, therefore, to
be left face to face with a nation over which he was to exercise direct
and despotic power. It was a recognized maxim that the royal was law.
[Footnote: Si veut le roi, si veut la loi.] Moreover, for more than two
centuries, the tendency of continental governments had been toward
absolutism. Among the great desires of men in those ages had been
organization and strong government. A despotism was considered more
favorable to these things than an aristocracy. Democracy existed as yet
only in the dreams of philosophers, the history of antiquity, and the
example of a few inconsiderable countries, like the Swiss cantons. It
was soon to be brought into greater prominence by the American
Revolution. As yet, however, the French nation looked hopefully to the
king for government, and for such measures of reform as were deemed
necessary. A king of France who had reigned justly and strongly would
have received the moral support of the most respectable part of his
subjects. These longed for a fair distribution of public burdens and for
freedom from unnecessary restraint, rather than for a share in the
government. The admiration for the English constitution, which was
commonly expressed, was as yet rather theoretic than practical, and was
not of a nature to detract from the loyalty undoubtedly felt for the
French crown.

Every monarch, however despotic in theory, is in fact surrounded by many
barriers which it takes a strong man to overleap. And so it was with the
king of France. Although he was the fountain of justice, his judicial
powers were exercised through magistrates many of whom had bought their
places, and could therefore not be dispossessed without measures that
were felt to be unjust and almost revolutionary. The breaking up of the
Parliament of Paris, in the latter years of the preceding reign, had
thrown the whole body of judges and lawyers into a state of discontent
bordering on revolt. The new court of justice which had superseded the
old one, the Parlement Maupeou as it was called, after the name of the
chancellor who had advised its formation, was neither liked nor
respected. It was one of the first acts of the government of Louis XVI.
to restore the ancient Parliament of Paris, whose rights over
legislation will be considered later, but which exercised at least a
certain moral restraint on the royal authority.

But it was in the administrative part of the government, where the king
seemed most free, that he was in fact most hampered. A vast system of
public offices had been gradually formed, with regulations, traditions,
and a professional spirit. This it was which had displaced the old
feudal order, substituting centralization for vigorous local life.

The king's councils, which had become the central governing power of the
state, were five in number. They were, however, closely connected
together. The king himself was supposed to sit in all of them, and
appears to have attended three with tolerable regularity. When there was
a prime minister, he also sat in the three that were most important. The
controller of the finances was a member of four of the councils, and the
chancellor of three at least. As these were the most important men in
the government, their presence in the several councils secured unity of
action. The boards, moreover, were small, not exceeding nine members in
the case of the first four in dignity and power: the Councils of State,
of Despatches, of Finance, and of Commerce. The fifth, the Privy
Council, or Council of Parties, was larger, and served in a measure as a
training-school for the others. It comprised, beside all the members of
the superior councils, thirty councilors of state, several intendants of
finance, and eighty lawyers known as _maîtres des requêtes_.
[Footnote: De Lucay, _Les Secrétaires d'État, 418, 419, 424, 442, 448,
449.]

The functions of the various councils were not clearly defined and
distinguished. Many questions would be submitted to one or another of
them as chance or influence might direct. Under each there were a number
of public offices, called bureaux, where business was prepared, and
where the smaller matters were practically settled. By the royal
councils and their subordinate public offices, France was governed to an
extent and with a minuteness hardly comprehensible to any one not
accustomed to centralized government.

The councils did nothing in their own name. The king it was who
nominally settled everything with their advice. The final decision of
every question was supposed to rest with the monarch himself. Every
important matter was in fact submitted to him. Thus in the government of
the country, the king could at any moment take as much of the burden
upon his own shoulders as they were strong enough to bear.

The legislative power was exercised by the councils. It was a question
not entirely settled whether their edicts possessed full force of law
without the assent of the high courts or parliaments. But with the
councils rested, at least, all the initiative of legislation. The
process of lawmaking began with them, and by them the laws were shaped
and drafted.

They also possessed no small part of the judiciary power. The custom of
removing private causes from the regular courts, and trying them before
one or another of the royal councils, was a great and, I think, a
growing one. This appellate jurisdiction was due in theory partly to the
doctrine that the king was the origin of justice; and partly to the idea
that political matters could not safely be left to ordinary tribunals.
The notion that the king owes justice to all his subjects and that it is
an act of grace, perhaps even a duty on his part, to administer it in
person when it is possible to do so, is as old as monarchy itself.

Solomon in his palace, Saint Louis under his oak, when they decided
between suitors before them, were exercising the inherent rights of
sovereignty, as understood in their day. The late descendants of the
royal saint did not decide causes themselves except on rare occasions,
but in questions between parties followed the decision of the majority
of the council that heard the case. Thus the ancient custom of seeking
justice from a royal judge merely served to transfer jurisdiction to an
irregular tribunal.[Footnote: De Lucay, _Les Secrétaires d'État_,
465.]

The executive power was both nominally and actually in the hands of the
councils. Great questions of foreign and domestic policy could be
settled only in the Council of State.[Footnote: Sometimes called
Conseil d'en haut, or Upper Council.] But the whole administration
tended more and more in the same direction. Questions of detail were
submitted from all parts of France. Hardly a bridge was built or a
steeple repaired in Burgundy or Provence without a permission signed by
the king in council and countersigned by a secretary of state. The
Council of Despatches exercised disciplinary jurisdiction over authors,
printers, and booksellers. It governed schools, and revised their rules
and regulations. It laid out roads, dredged rivers, and built canals. It
dealt with the clergy, decided differences between bishops and their
chapters, authorized dioceses and parishes to borrow money. It took
general charge of towns and municipal organization. The Council of
Finance and the Council of Commerce had equally minute questions to
decide in their own departments.[Footnote: De Lucay, _Les Secrétaires
d'État_, 418. For this excessive centralization, see, also, De
Tocqueville, _L'ancien Régime et la Révolution_, passim.]

Evidently the king and his ministers could not give their personal
attention to all these matters. Minor questions were in fact settled by
the bureaux and the secretaries of state, and the king did little more
than sign the necessary license. Thus matters of local interest were
practically decided by subordinate officers in Paris or Versailles,
instead of being arranged in the places where they were really
understood. If a village in Languedoc wanted a new parsonage, neither
the inhabitants of the place, nor any one who had ever been within a
hundred miles of it, was allowed to decide on the plan and to regulate
the expense, but the whole matter was reported to an office in the
capital and there settled by a clerk. This barbarous system, which is by
no means obsolete in Europe, is known in modern times by the barbarous
name of bureaucracy.

The royal councils and their subordinate bureaux had their agents in the
country. These were the intendants, men who deserve attention, for by
them a very large part of the actual government was carried on. They
were thirty-two in number, and governed each a territory, called a
généralité. The Intendants were not great lords, nor the owners of
offices that had become assimilated to property; they were hard-working
men, delegated by the council, under the great seal, and liable to be
promoted or recalled at the royal pleasure. They were chosen from the
class of _maîtres des requêtes_, and were therefore all lawyers and
members of the Privy Council. Thus the unity of the administration in
Versailles and the provinces was constantly maintained.

It had originally been the function of the intendants to act as legal
inspectors, making the circuit of the provincial towns for the purpose
of securing uniformity and the proper administration of justice in the
various local courts.[Footnote: Du Boys, i. 517.] They retained to the
end of the monarchy the privilege of sitting in all the courts of law
within their districts.[Footnote: De Lucay, _Les Assemblées
provinciales_, 31.] But their duties and powers had grown to be far
greater than those of any officer merely judicial. The intendant had
charge of the interests of the Catholic religion and worship, and the
care of buildings devoted to religious purposes. He also controlled the
Protestants, and all their affairs. He encouraged and regulated
agriculture and commerce. He settled many questions concerning military
matters and garrisons. The militia was entirely managed by him. He
cooperated with the courts of justice in the control of the police. He
had charge of post-roads and post-offices, stage coaches, books and
printing, royal or privileged lotteries, and the suppression of illegal
gambling. He was, in fact, the direct representative of the royal power,
and was in constant correspondence with the king's minister of state.
And as the power of the crown had constantly grown for two centuries, so
the power of the intendant had constantly grown with it, tending to the
centralization and unity of France and to the destruction of local
liberties.

As the intendants were educated as lawyers rather than as
administrators, and as they were often transferred from one province
to another after a short term of service, they did not acquire full
knowledge of their business. Moreover, they did not reside regularly
in the part of the country which they governed, but made only flying
visits to it, and spent most of their time near the centre of
influence, in Paris or Versailles. Yet their opportunities for doing
good or harm were almost unlimited. Their executive command was nearly
uncontrolled; for where there were no provincial estates, the
inhabitants could not send a petition to the king except through the
hands of the intendant, and any complaint against that officer was
referred to himself for an answer.[Footnote: For the intendants, see
Necker, _De l'administration_, ii. 469, iii. 379. Ibid., _Mémoire au
roi sur l'établissement des administrations provinciales_, passim. De
Lucay, _Les Assemblées provinciales_, 29. Mercier, _Tableau de Paris_,
ix. 85. The official title of the intendant was _commissaire
départi_.]

The intendants were represented in their provinces by subordinate
officers called sub-delegates, each one of whom ruled his petty district
or _élection_. These men were generally local lawyers or
magistrates. Their pay was small, they had no hope of advancement, and
they were under great temptation to use their extensive powers in a
corrupt and oppressive manner.[Footnote: De Lucay, _Les Assemblées
provinciales_, 42, etc.]

Beside the intendant, we find in every province a royal governor. The
powers of this official had gradually waned before those of his rival.
He was always a great lord, drawing a great salary and maintaining great
state, but doing little service, and really of far less importance to
the province than the new man. He was a survival of the old feudal
government, superseded by the centralized monarchy of which the
intendant was the representative.[Footnote: The _generalité_
governed by the intendant, and the _province_ to which the royal
governor was appointed, were not always coterminous.]



CHAPTER II.

LOUIS XVI. AND HIS COURT.


A centralized government, when it is well managed and carefully watched
from above, may reach a degree of efficiency and quickness of action
which a government of distributed local powers cannot hope to equal. But
if a strong central government become disorganized, if inefficiency, or
idleness, or, above all, dishonesty, once obtain a ruling place in it,
the whole governing body is diseased. The honest men who may find
themselves involved in any inferior part of the administration will
either fall into discouraged acquiescence, or break their hearts and
ruin their fortunes in hopeless revolt. Nothing but long years of
untiring effort and inflexible will on the part of the ruler, with power
to change his agents at his discretion, can restore order and honesty.

There is no doubt that the French administrative body at the time when
Louis XVI. began to reign, was corrupt and self-seeking. In the
management of the finances and of the army, illegitimate profits were
made. But this was not the worst evil from which the public service was
suffering. France was in fact governed by what in modern times is called
"a ring." The members of such an organization pretend to serve the
sovereign, or the public, and in some measure actually do so; but their
rewards are determined by intrigue and favor, and are entirely
disproportionate to their services. They generally prefer jobbery to
direct stealing, and will spend a million of the state's money in a
needless undertaking, in order to divert a few thousands into their own
pockets.

They hold together against all the world, while trying to circumvent
each other. Such a ring in old France was the court. By such a ring will
every country be governed, where the sovereign who possesses the
political power is weak in moral character or careless of the public
interest; whether that sovereign be a monarch, a chamber, or the mass of
the people.[Footnote: "Quand, dans un royaume, il y a plus d'avantage à
faire sa cour qu'à faire son devoir, tout est perdu." Montesquieu, vii.
176, (_Pensées diverses_.)]

Louis XVI., king of France and of Navarre, was more dull than stupid,
and weaker in will than in intellect. In him the hobbledehoy period had
been unusually prolonged, and strangers at court were astonished to see
a prince of nineteen years of age running after a footman to tickle him
while his hands were full of dirty clothes.[Footnote: Swinburne, i.
11.] The clumsy youth grew up into a shy and awkward man, unable to find
at will those accents of gracious politeness which are most useful to
the great. Yet people who had been struck at first only with his
awkwardness were sometimes astonished to find in him a certain amount of
education, a memory for facts, and a reasonable judgment.[Footnote:
Campan, ii. 231. Bertrand de Moleville, _Histoire_, i. Introd.;
_Mémoires_, i. 221.] Among his predecessors he had set himself
Henry IV. as a model, probably without any very accurate idea of the
character of that monarch; and he had fully determined he would do what
in him lay to make his people happy. He was, moreover, thoroughly
conscientious, and had a high sense of the responsibility of his great
calling. He was not indolent, although heavy, and his courage, which was
sorely tested, was never broken. With these virtues he might have made a
good king, had he possessed firmness of will enough to support a good
minister, or to adhere to a good policy. But such strength had not been
given him. Totally incapable of standing by himself, he leant
successively, or simultaneously, on his aunt, his wife, his ministers,
his courtiers, as ready to change his policy as his adviser. Yet it was
part of his weakness to be unwilling to believe himself under the
guidance of any particular person; he set a high value on his own
authority, and was inordinately jealous of it. No one, therefore, could
acquire a permanent influence. Thus a well-meaning man became the worst
of sovereigns; for the first virtue of a master is consistency, and no
subordinate can follow out with intelligent zeal today a policy which he
knows may be subverted tomorrow.

The apologists of Louis XVI. are fond of speaking of him as
"virtuous." The adjective is singularly ill-chosen. His faults were
of the will more than of the understanding. To have a vague notion of
what is right, to desire it in a general way, and to lack the moral
force to do it,--surely this is the very opposite of virtue.

The French court, which was destined to have a very great influence on
the course of events in this reign and in the beginning of the French
Revolution, was composed of the people about the king's person. The
royal family and the members of the higher nobility were admitted into
the circle by right of birth, but a large place could be obtained only
by favor. It was the court that controlled most appointments, for no
king could know all applicants personally and intimately. The stream of
honor and emolument from the royal fountain-head was diverted, by the
ministers and courtiers, into their own channels. Louis XV had been led
by his mistresses; Louis XVI was turned about by the last person who
happened to speak to him. The courtiers, in their turn, were swayed by
their feelings, or their interests. They formed parties and
combinations, and intrigued for or against each other. They made
bargains, they gave and took bribes. In all these intrigues, bribes, and
bargains, the court ladies had a great share. They were as corrupt as
the men, and as frivolous. It is probable that in no government did
women ever exercise so great an influence.

The factions into which the court was divided tended to group themselves
round certain rich and influential families. Such were the Noailles, an
ambitious and powerful house, with which Lafayette was connected by
marriage; the Broglies, one of whom had held the thread of the secret
diplomacy which Louis XV. had carried on behind the backs of his
acknowledged ministers; the Polignacs, new people, creatures of Queen
Marie Antoinette; the Rohans, through the influence of whose great name
an unworthy member of the family was to rise to high dignity in the
church and the state, and then to cast a deep shadow on the darkening
popularity of that ill-starred princess. Such families as these formed
an upper class among nobles, and the members firmly believed in their
own prescriptive right to the best places. The poorer nobility, on the
other hand, saw with great jealousy the supremacy of the court families.
They insisted that there was and should be but one order of nobility,
all whose members were equal among themselves.[Footnote: See among
other places the Instructions of the Nobility of Blois to the deputies,
_Archives parlementaires_, ii. 385.]

The courtiers, on their side, thought themselves a different order of
beings from the rest of the nation. The ceremony of presentation was the
passport into their society, but by no means all who possessed this
formal title were held to belong to the inner circle. Women who came to
court but once a week, although of great family, were known as "Sunday
ladies." The true courtier lived always in the refulgent presence of his
sovereign.[Footnote: Campan, iii. 89.]

The court was considered a perfectly legitimate power, although much
hated at times, and bearing, very properly, a large share of the odium
of misgovernment. The idea of its legitimacy is impressed on the
language of diplomacy, and we still speak of the Court of St. James, the
Court of Vienna, as powers to be dealt with. Under a monarchy, people do
not always distinguish in their own minds between the good of the state
and the personal enjoyment of the monarch, nor is the doctrine that the
king exists for his people by any means fully recognized. When the Count
of Artois told the Parliament of Paris in 1787 that they knew that the
expenses of the king could not be regulated by his receipts, but that
his receipts must be governed by his expenses, he spoke a half-truth;
yet it had probably not occurred to him that there was any difference
between the necessity of keeping up an efficient army, and the
desirability of having hounds, coaches, and palaces. He had not
reflected that it might be essential to the honor of France to feed the
old soldiers in the Hotel des Invalides, and quite superfluous to pay
large sums to generals who had never taken the field and to colonels who
seldom visited their regiments. The courtiers fully believed that to
interfere with their salaries was to disturb the most sacred rights of
property. In 1787, when the strictest economy was necessary, the king
united his "Great Stables" and "Small Stables," throwing the Duke of
Coigny, who had charge of the latter, out of place. Although great pains
were taken to spare the duke's feelings and his pocket, he was very
angry at the change, and there was a violent scene between him and the
king. "We were really provoked, the Duke of Coigny and I," said Louis
good-naturedly afterwards, "but I think if he had thrashed me, I should
have forgiven him." The duke, however, was not so placable as the king.
Holding another appointment, he resigned it in a huff. The queen was
displeased at this mark of temper, and remarked to a courtier that the
Duke of Coigny did not appreciate the consideration that had been shown
him.

"Madam," was the reply, "he is losing too much to be content with
compliments. It is too bad to live in a country where you are not sure
of possessing today what you had yesterday. Such things used to take
place only in Turkey."[Footnote: Besenval, ii. 255.]

It is not easy, in looking at the French government in the eighteenth
century, to decide where the working administration ended, and where the
useless court that answered no real purpose began. The ministers of
state were reckoned a part of the court. So were many of the upper
civil-servants, the king's military staff, and in a sense, the guards
and household troops. So were the "great services," partaking of the
nature of public offices, ceremonial honors, and domestic labors. Of
this kind were the Household, the Chamber, the Antechamber and Closet,
the Great and the Little Stables, with their Grand Squire, First Squire
and pages, who had to prove nobility to the satisfaction of the royal
herald. There was the department of hunting and that of buildings, a
separate one for royal journeys, one for the guard, another for police,
yet another for ceremonies. There were five hundred officers "of the
mouth," table-bearers distinct from chair-bearers. There were tradesmen,
from apothecaries and armorers at one end of the list to saddle-makers,
tailors and violinists at the other.

When a baby is at last born to Marie Antoinette (only a girl, to every
one's disappointment), a rumor gets about that the child will be
tended with great simplicity. The queen's mother, the Empress Maria
Theresa, in distant Vienna, takes alarm. She does not approve of "the
present fashion according to Rousseau" by which young princes are
brought up like peasants. Her ambassador in Paris hastens to reassure
her. The infant will not lack reasonable ceremony. The service of her
royal person alone will employ nearly eighty attendants.[Footnote:
Mercy-Argenteau, iii. 283, 292.] The military and civil households of
the king and of the royal family are said to have consisted of about
fifteen thousand souls, and to have cost forty-five million francs per
annum. The holders of many of the places served but three months
apiece out of every year, so that four officers and four salaries were
required, instead of one.

With such a system as this we cannot wonder that the men who
administered the French government were generally incapable and
self-seeking. Most of them were politicians rather than
administrators, and cared more for their places than for their
country. Of the few conscientious and patriotic men who obtained
power, the greater number lost it very speedily. Turgot and
Malesherbes did not long remain in the Council. Necker, more cautious
and conservative, could keep his place no better. The jealousy of
Louis was excited, and he feared the domination of a man of whom the
general opinion of posterity has been that he was wanting in
decision. Calonne was sent away as soon as he tried to turn from
extravagance to economy. Vergennes alone, of the good servants,
retained his office; perhaps because he had little to do with
financial matters; perhaps, also, because he knew how to keep himself
decidedly subordinate to whatever power was in the ascendant. The
lasting influences were that of Maurepas, an old man who cared for
nothing but himself, whose great object in government was to be
without a rival, and whose art was made up of tact and gayety; and
that of the rival factions of Lamballe and Polignac, guiding the
queen, which were simply rapacious.

The courtiers and the numerous people who were drawn to Versailles by
business or curiosity were governed by a system of rules of gradual
growth, constituting what was known as "Étiquette." The word has passed
into common speech. In this country it is an unpopular word, and there
is an impression in many people's minds that the thing which it
represents is unnecessary. This, however, is a great delusion. Étiquette
is that code of rules, not necessarily connected with morals, by which
mutual intercourse is regulated. Every society, whether civilized or
barbarous, has such a code of its own. Without it social life would be
impossible, for no man would know what to expect of his neighbors, nor
be able promptly to interpret the words and actions of his fellow-men.
It is in obedience to an unwritten law of this kind that an American
takes off his hat when he goes into a church, and an Asiatic, when he
enters a mosque, takes off his shoes; that Englishmen shake hands, and
Africans rub noses. Where étiquette is well understood and well adapted
to the persons whom it governs, men are at ease, for they know what they
may do without offense. Where it is too complicated it hampers them,
making spontaneous action difficult, and there is no doubt that the
étiquette that governed the French court was antiquated, unadvisable and
cumbrous. Its rules had been devised to prevent confusion and to
regulate the approach of the courtiers to the king. As all honors and
emoluments came from the royal pleasure, people were sure to crowd about
the monarch, and to jostle each other with unmannerly and dangerous
haste, unless they were strictly held in check. Every one, therefore,
must have his place definitely assigned to him. To be near the king at
all times, to have the opportunity of slipping a timely word into his
ear, was an invaluable privilege. To be employed in menial offices about
his person was a mark of confidence. Rules could not easily be revised,
for each of them concerned a vested right. Those in force in the reign
of Louis XVI. had been established by his predecessors when manners were
different.

At the close of the Middle Ages privacy may be said to have been a
luxury almost unknown to any man. There was not room for it in the
largest castle. Solitude was seldom either possible or safe. People
were crowded together without means of escape from each other. The
greatest received their dependents, and often ate their meals, in
their bedrooms. A confidential interview would be held in the
embrasure of a window. Such customs disappeared but gradually from
the sixteenth century to our own. But by the latter part of the
eighteenth, modern ways and ideas were coming in. Yet the étiquette of
the French court was still old-fashioned. It infringed too much on the
king's privacy; it interfered seriously with his freedom. It exposed
him too familiarly to the eyes of a nation overprone to ridicule. A
man who is to inspire awe should not dress and undress in public. A
woman who is to be regarded with veneration should be allowed to take
her bath and give birth to her children in private.[Footnote: See the
account of the birth of Marie Antoinette's first child, when she was
in danger from the mixed crowd that filled her room, stood on chairs,
etc., 19th Dec. 1778. Campan, i. 201. At her later confinements only
princes of the blood, the chancellor and the ministers, and a few
other persons were admitted. Ibid., 203.]

Madame Campan, long a waiting-woman of Marie Antoinette, has left an
account of the toilet of the queen and of the little occurrences that
might interrupt it. The whole performance, she says, was a masterpiece
of étiquette; everything about it was governed by rules. The Lady of
Honor and the Lady of the Bedchamber, both if they were there together,
assisted by the First Woman and the two other women, did the principal
service; but there were distinctions among them. The Lady of the
Bedchamber put on the skirt and presented the gown. The Lady of Honor
poured out the water to wash the queen's hands and put on the chemise.
When a Princess of the Royal Family or a Princess of the Blood was
present at the toilet, the Lady of Honor gave up the latter function to
her. To a Princess of the Royal Family, that is to say to the sister,
sister-in-law, or aunt of the king, she handed the garment directly; but
to a Princess of the Blood (the king's cousin by blood or marriage) she
did not yield this service. In the latter case, the Lady of Honor handed
the chemise to the First Woman, who presented it to the Princess of the
Blood. Every one of these ladies observed these customs scrupulously, as
appertaining to her rank.

One winter's day it happened that the Queen, entirely undressed, was
about to put on her chemise. Madame Campan was holding it unfolded. The
Lady of Honor came in, made haste to take off her gloves and took the
chemise. While she still had it in her hands there came a knock at the
door, which was immediately opened. The new-comer was the Duchess of
Orleans, a Princess of the Blood. Her Highness's gloves were taken off,
she advanced to take the shift, but the Lady of Honor must not give it
directly to her, and therefore passed it back to Madame Campan, who gave
it to the princess. Just then there came another knock at the door, and
the Countess of Provence, known as Madame, and sister-in-law to the
king, was ushered in. The Duchess of Orleans presented the chemise to
her. Meanwhile the Queen kept her arms crossed on her breast, and looked
cold. Madame saw her disagreeable position, and without waiting to take
off her gloves, merely threw away her handkerchief and put the chemise
on the Queen. In her haste she knocked down the Queen's hair. The latter
burst out laughing, to hide her annoyance; and only murmured several
times between her teeth: "This is odious! What a nuisance!"

This anecdote gives but an instance of the well-known and not unfounded
aversion of Marie Antoinette to the étiquette of the French court. But
the young queen made no attempt to reform that étiquette; she tried only
to evade it. Much has been written about Marie Antoinette as a woman,
her terrible misfortunes and the fortitude with which she bore them
having evoked the sympathy of mankind. Her conduct as a queen-consort
has been less considered. The woman was lively and amiable, possessing a
great personal charm, which impressed those who approached her; but that
mattered little to the nation, whose dealings were with the queen. What
were the duties of her office and how did she fulfill them?

The first thing demanded of her was parade. She had to keep up the
splendor and attractiveness of the French monarchy. This, in spite of
her impatience of étiquette, was of all her public duties the one which
she best performed. Her manners were dignified, gracious, and
appropriately discriminating. It is said that she could bow to ten
persons with one movement, giving, with her head and eyes, the
recognition due to each separately.

She had also the art of talking to several people at once, so that each
one felt as if her remarks had been addressed to himself, and the
equally important art (sometimes called royal) of remembering faces and
names. As she passed from one part of her palace to another, surrounded
by the ladies of her court, she seemed to the spectator to surpass them
all in the nobility of her countenance and the dignified grace of her
carriage. She had the crowning beauty of woman, a well-poised and
proudly carried head. Her gait was a gliding motion, in which the steps
were not clearly distinguishable. Foreigners generally were enchanted
with her, and to them she owes no small part of her posthumous
popularity. The French nobility, on the other hand, complained, not
unreasonably, that the queen was too exclusively devoted to the society
of a few intimate companions, for whose sake she neglected other people.
Her court, on this account, was sometimes comparatively deserted. But a
young queen can hardly be very severely blamed if she often prefers her
pleasures and her friends to the tedious duties of her position. Marie
Antoinette had had little education or guidance. Her likes and dislikes
were strong, nor was she entirely above petty spite. "You tell me,"
wrote Maria Theresa to her daughter on one occasion, "that for love of
me you treat the Broglies well, although they have been disrespectful to
you personally. That is another odd idea. Can a little Broglie be
disrespectful to you? I do not understand that. No one was ever
disrespectful to me, nor to any of your ten brothers and sisters." It
was no fair-weather queen that wrote this most royal reproof. Marie
Antoinette never rose to this height of dignity, where the great lady
sits above the clouds. In her days of prosperity she certainly never
approached it. Perhaps no mortal woman ever reached it in early life.
[Footnote: Mercy-Argenteau, _passim_, and especially i. 218, 265,
279; ii. 218, 232, 312, 525; iii. 56, 113, 132 and _n_., 157, 265,
490. Tilly, _Mémoires,_ 230. Cognel, 59, 84; Wraxall, i. 85;
Walpole's _Letters,_ vi. 245 (23d Aug. 1776), etc.]

It is one of the most important duties of a queen-consort to set a good
example in morals. Here Marie Antoinette was deficient. Her private
conduct has probably been slandered, but she brought the slanders on
herself. Beside the code of morals, there is in every country a code of
proprieties, and people who habitually do that which is considered
improper have only themselves to thank if a harsh construction is put on
their doubtful actions. The scandals concerning Marie Antoinette were
numberless and public. The young queen of France chose for her intimate
companions men and women of bad reputation. Her brother, Joseph II., was
shocked when he visited her, at the familiar manners which she
permitted. He wrote to her that English travelers compared her court to
Spa, then a famous gambling-place, and he called the house of the
Princess of Guéménée, which she was in the habit of frequenting, "a real
gambling-hell." Accusations of cheating at cards flew about the palace,
and one courtier had his pocket picked in the royal drawing-room. The
queen was constantly surrounded by dissipated young noblemen, who on
race days were allowed to come into her presence in costumes which
shocked conservative people. She herself was recognized at public masked
balls, where the worst women of the capital jostled the great nobles of
the court. When she had the measles, four gentlemen of her especial
friends were appointed nurses, and hardly left her chamber during the
day and evening. People asked ironically what four ladies would be
appointed to nurse the king if he were ill. In her amusements she was
seldom accompanied by her husband. It hardly told in her favor that the
latter was a man for whom a young and high-spirited woman could not be
expected to entertain any very passionate affection.

The country was deeply in debt, and during a part of the reign an
expensive war was going on. It was obviously the queen's duty to
retrench her own expenses, and to set an example of economy. Yet her
demands on the treasury were very great. Her personal allowance was
much larger than that of the previous queen, and she was frequently in
debt. Her losses at play were considerable, in spite of her husband's
well-known aversion to gambling. She increased the number of expensive
and useless offices about her court. She was constantly accessible to
rapacious favorites. The feeble king could at least recognize that he
owed something to his subjects; the queen appears to have thought that
the revenues of France were intended principally to provide means for
the royal bounty to people who had done nothing to deserve it. On the
other hand, she acknowledged the duty of private charity, and believed
that thereby she was earning the gratitude of her subjects. That the
taxpayer was entitled to any consideration is an idea that does not
seem to have entered her mind.

Had Marie Antoinette been the wife of a strong and able king, she would
probably have been quite right in avoiding interference in the
government of the state. Being married to Louis XVI., it was inevitable
that she should try to direct his vacillating will in public matters. It
therefore becomes pertinent to ask whether her influence was generally
exerted on the right side.

It is evident that in the earlier part of her reign the affairs of the
state did not interest her, though her feelings were often strongly
moved for or against persons. Her preference for Choiseul and his
adherents, over Aiguillon and his party, was natural and well founded.
The Duke of Choiseul was not only the author of the Austrian alliance
and of the queen's marriage, but was also the ablest minister who had
recently held favor in France. Had Marie Antoinette possessed as much
influence over her husband in 1774 as she obtained later, she might
perhaps have overcome what seems to have been one of his strongest
prejudices, and have brought Choiseul back to power, to the benefit of
the country. But her efforts in that direction were unavailing. In her
relations with the other ministers, Turgot, Malesherbes, and Necker, her
voice was generally on the side of extravagance and the court, and
against economy and the nation. This, far more than the intrigues of
faction, was the cause of the unpopularity that pursued her to her
grave. If the court of France was a corrupt ring living on the country,
Marie Antoinette was not far from being its centre.



CHAPTER III.

THE CLERGY.


The inhabitants of France were divided into three orders, differing in
legal rights. These were the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commons, or
Third Estate. The first two, which are commonly spoken of as the
privileged orders, contained but a small fraction of the population
numerically, but their wealth and position gave them a great importance.

The clergy formed, as the philosophers were never tired of complaining,
a state within a state. No accurate statistics concerning it can be
obtained. The whole number of persons vowed to religion in the country,
both regular and secular, would seem to have been between one hundred
and one hundred and thirty thousand. They owned probably from one fifth
to one quarter of the soil. The proportion was excessive, but it does
not appear that the lay inhabitants of the country were thereby crowded.
Like other landowners, the clergy had tenants, and they were far from
being the worst of landlords. For one thing, they were seldom absentees.
The abbot of a monastery might spend his time at Versailles, but the
prior and the monks remained, to do their duty by their farmers. It is
said that the church lands were the best cultivated in the kingdom, and
that the peasants that tilled them were the best, treated.[Footnote:
Barthelémy, _Erreurs et mensonges historiques, xv. 40._ Article
entitled _La question des congregations il y a cent ans_, quoting
largely from Féroux, _Vues d'un Solitaire Patriote_, 1784. See also
Genlis, _Dictionnaire des Étiquettes,_ ii. 79. Mathieu, 324.
Babeau, _La vie rurale_, 133.] In any case the church was rich. Its
income from invested property, principally land, has been reckoned at
one hundred and twenty-four million livres a year. It received about as
much more from tithes, beside the amount, very variously reckoned, which
came in as fees, on such occasions as weddings, christenings, and
funerals.

Tithes were imposed throughout France for the support of the clergy.
They were not, however, taken upon all Articles of produce, nor did they
usually amount to one tenth of the increase. Sometimes the tithe was
compounded for a fixed rent in money; sometimes for a given number of
sheaves, or measures of wine per acre. Oftener it was a fixed proportion
of the crop, varying from one quarter to one fortieth. In some places
wood, fruit, and other commodities were exempt; in other places they
were charged. Tithe was in some cases taken of calves, lambs, chickens,
sucking pigs, fleeces, or fish; and the clergy or the tithe owners were
bound to provide the necessary bulls, rams, and boars. A distinction was
usually made between the Great tithes, levied on such common articles as
corn and wine, and the Small tithes, taken from less important crops. Of
these the former were often paid to the bishops, the latter to the
parish priest. The tithes had in some cases been alienated by the church
and were owned by lay proprietors. In general, it is believed that this
tax on the agricultural class in France amounted to about one eighteenth
of the gross product of the soil.[Footnote: Chassin, _Les cahiers
due clergé_, 36. Bailly, ii. 414, 419. Boiteau, 41. Rambaud, ii. 58
_n._ Taine, _L'ancien Régime_ (book i. chap ii.). The livre
of the time of Louis XVI. is commonly reckoned to have had at least
twice the purchasing power of the franc of to-day.]

The whole body of the clergy, as it existed within the boundaries of the
kingdom, was not subject to the same rules and laws. The larger part of
it formed what was known as the "Clergy of France," and possessed
peculiar rights and privileges presently to be described. Those
ecclesiastics, however, who lived in certain provinces, situated
principally in the northern and eastern part of the country, and annexed
to the kingdom since the beginning of the sixteenth century, were called
the "Foreign Clergy." These did not share the rights of the larger body,
but depended more directly on the papacy. They paid certain taxes from
which the Clergy of France were exempt. The mode of appointment to
bishoprics and abbacies was different among them from what it was in the
rest of the country. Throughout France, and in all affairs,
ecclesiastical and secular, were anomalies such as these.

The Church of France enjoyed great and peculiar privileges, both among
the churches of Christendom, and among the Estates of the French realm.
By the Concordat, or treaty of 1516, made between Pope Leo X. and King
Francis I., the nomination to bishroprics and to considerable
ecclesiastical benefices had been given to the king, while the Holy
Father kept only a right of veto on appointments. The _annates_, or
first-fruits of the bishoprics, taxes equal in theory to one year's
revenue on every change of incumbent, but in fact of less amount than
that, were paid to the Pope, and these, with other dues, made up a sum
of three or four million livres sent annually from France to Rome. On
the other hand, the Clergy of France was the only body in the state
which had undisputed constitutional rights independent of the throne.
Its ordinary assemblies were held once in ten years. The country was
divided into sixteen ecclesiastical provinces, each under the
superintendence of an archbishop. In each of these provinces a meeting
was held, composed of delegates of the various dioceses. Each of these
provincial meetings elected two bishops and two other ecclesiastics,
either regular or secular. These deputies received, from their
constituents, instructions called _cahiers_ to be taken by them to
the Ordinary Assembly of the clergy, which was held in Paris. This body
granted subsidies to the king, managed the debt and other secular
affairs of the clergy, and pronounced unofficially even in matters of
doctrine. Smaller Assemblies, nearly equal in power, came together at
least once during the interval which elapsed between the meetings of the
Ordinary Assemblies; so that as often as once in five years the Church
of France exercised a true political activity. The sum voted to the king
was called a Free Gift[Footnote: Don Gratuit], and the name was not
altogether inappropriate, for, although required was stated by the
king's ministers, conditions were not infrequently exacted of the crown.
Thus in 1785, on the occasion of a gift of eighteen million livres, the
suppression of the works of Voltaire was demanded. And once at least, as
late as 1750, on the occasion of a squabble between the church and the
court, the clergy had refused to make any grant whatsoever. The total
amount of the Free Gift voted during the reign of Louis XVI. was
65,800,000 livres, or less than four and a half millions a year on an
average. The grant was not annual, but was made in lump sums from time
to time; a vote of two thirds of the assembly being necessary for making
it. The assembly itself assessed the tax on the dioceses. A commission
managed the affairs of the clergy when no assembly was sitting. The
order had its treasury, and its credit was good. The king was its debtor
to the extent of about a hundred million livres.

The clergy itself was in debt. Instead of raising directly, by
taxation of its members, the money which it paid to the state, it had
acquired the habit of borrowing the necessary sum. The debt thus
incurred appears to have been about one hundred and thirty-four
million livres. In addition to the amount necessary for interest on
this debt, and for a provision for its gradual repayment, the order
had various expenses to meet. For these purposes it taxed itself to an
amount of more than ten million livres a year. On the other hand it
received back from the king a subsidy of two and a half million
livres. From most of the regular, direct taxes paid by Frenchmen the
Clergy of France was freed. [Footnote: _Revue des questions
historiques_, 1st July, 1890 (L'abbé L. Bourgain, _Contribution du
clergé à l'impôt_). Sciout, i. 35. Boiteau, 195. Rambaud,
ii. 44. Necker, _De l'Administration_, ii. 308. The financial
statement given above refers to the Clergy of France only. Its
pecuniary affairs are as difficult and doubtful as those of every part
of the nation at this period, and have repeatedly been made the
subject of confused statement and religious and political
controversy. The Foreign Clergy paid some of the regular taxes, giving
the state about one million livres a year on an income of twenty
million livres. Boiteau, 196.]

The bishops were not subject to the secular tribunals, but other clerks
came under the royal jurisdiction in temporal matters. In spiritual
affairs they were judged by the ecclesiastical courts.

The income of the clergy, had it been fairly distributed, was amply
sufficient for the support of every one connected with the order. It
was, however, divided with great partiality. There were set over the
clergy, both French and foreign, eighteen archbishops and a hundred and
twenty-one bishops, beside eleven of those bishops _in partibus
infidelium_, who, having no sees of their own in France, might be
expected to make themselves generally useful. These hundred and fifty
bishops were very highly, though unequally paid. The bishoprics, with a
very few exceptions, were reserved for members of the nobility, and this
rule was quite as strictly enforced under Louis XVI. as under any of his
predecessors. Nothing prevented the cumulation of ecclesiastical
benefices, and that prelate was but a poor courtier who did not enjoy
the revenue of several rich abbeys. Nor was it in money and in
ecclesiastical preferment alone that the bishops were paid for the
services which they too often neglected to perform.

Not a few of them were barons, counts, dukes, princes of the Holy Roman
Empire, or peers of France by virtue of their sees. Several rose to be
ministers of state. Even in that age they were accused of worldliness.
It was a proverb that with Spanish bishops and French priests an
excellent clergy could be made. But not all the French bishops were
worldly, nor neglectful of their spiritual duties. Among them might be
found conscientious and serious prelates, abounding both in faith and
good works, living simply and bestowing their wealth in charity.
[Footnote: Rambaud, ii. 37. Mathieu, 151.]

After the bishops came the abbots. As their offices were in the gift of
the king, and as no discipline was enforced upon them, they were chiefly
to be found in the antechambers of Versailles and in the drawing-rooms
of Paris. They were not even obliged to be members of the religious
orders they were supposed to govern.[Footnote: The abbots of abbeys
_en commende_ were appointed by the king. These appear to have been
most of the rich abbeys. There were also _abbayes régulières_,
where the abbot was elected by the brethren. Rambaud, ii. 53. The
revenues of the monasteries were divided into two parts, the _mense
abbatiale_, for the abbot, the _mense conventuelle_, for the
brethren. Mathieu, 73.] Leaving the charge of their monasteries to the
priors, they spent the incomes where new preferment was to be looked
for, and devoted their time to intrigues rather than to prayers. No
small part of the revenues of the clergy was wasted in the dissipations
of these ecclesiastic courtiers. They were imitated in their vices by a
rabble of priests out of place, to whom the title of abbot was given in
politeness, the little _abbés_ of French biography and fiction.
These men lived in garrets, haunted cheap eating-houses, and appeared on
certain days of the week at rich men's tables, picking up a living as
best they could. They were to be seen among the tradesmen and suitors
who crowded the levees of the great, distinguishable in the throng by
their black clothes, and a very small tonsure. They attended the toilets
of fashionable ladies, ever ready with the last bit of literary gossip,
or of social scandal. They sought employment as secretaries, or as
writers for the press. The church, or indeed, the opposite party, could
find literary champions among them at a moment's notice. Nor was hope of
professional preferment always lacking. It is said that one of the
number kept an ecclesiastical intelligence office. This man was
acquainted with the incumbents of valuable livings; he watched the state
of their health, and calculated the chances of death among them. He knew
what patrons were likely to have preferment to give away, and how those
patrons were to be reached. His couriers were ever on the road to Rome,
for the Pope still had the gift of many rich places in France, in spite
of the Concordat.[Footnote: Mercier, ix. 350.]

Another large part of the revenues of the church was devoted to the
support of the convents. These contained from sixty to seventy thousand
persons, more of them women than men. Owing to various causes, and
especially to the action of a commission appointed to examine all
convents, and to reform, close, or consolidate such as might need to be
so treated, the number of regular religious persons fell off more than
one half during the last twenty-five years of the monarchy. Yet many of
the functions which in modern countries are left to private charity, or
to the direct action of the state, were performed in old France by
persons of this kind. The care of the poor and sick and the education of
the young were largely, although not entirely, in the hands of religious
orders. Some monks, like the Benedictines of St. Maur, devoted their
lives to the advancement of learning. But there were also monks and nuns
who rendered no services to the public, and were entirely occupied with
their own spiritual and temporal interests, giving alms, perhaps, but
only incidentally, like other citizens. Against these the indignation of
the French Philosophers was much excited. Their celibacy was attacked,
as contrary to the interests of the state; they were accused of laziness
and greed. How far were the Philosophers right in their opposition? It
is impossible to discuss in detail here the policy of allowing or
discouraging religious corporations in a state. Should men and women be
permitted to retire from the struggles and duties of active life in the
world? Is the monastery, with its steady and depressing routine, its
religious observances, often mechanical, and its quiet life, more or
less degrading than the wearing toil of the world without, and the
coarse pleasures of the club or the tavern? Is it better that a woman,
whom choice or necessity has deprived of every probability of governing
a home of her own, should struggle against the chances and temptations
of city life, or the constant drudgery of spinsterhood in the country;
or that she should find the stupefying protection of a convent? These
questions have seldom been answered entirely on their own merits. They
have presented themselves in company with others even more important;
with questions of freedom of conscience and of national existence. The
time seems not far distant when they must be reconsidered for their own
sake. Already in France the persons leading a monastic life are believed
to be twice as numerous as they were at the outbreak of the Revolution.
It is difficult to ascertain the number in our own country, but it is
not inconsiderable.[Footnote: Rambaud (ii. 52 and _n._) reckons
100,000 in the 18th century and 158,500 to-day in France, but the
figures for the last century are probably too high, at least if 1788 be
taken as the point of comparison. Sadlier's _Catholic Directory_,
1885, p. 116, gives the number of Catholic religions in the Archdiocese
of New York at 117 regular priests, 271 brothers, 2136 religious women,
in addition to 279 secular priests.]

A pleasant life the inmates of some convents must have had of it. The
incomes were large, the duties easy.

Certain houses had been secularized and turned into noble chapters. The
ladies who inhabited them were freed from the vow of poverty. They wore
no religious vestment, but appeared in the fashionable dress of the day.
They received their friends in the convent, and could leave it
themselves to reenter the secular life, and to marry if they pleased.
Such a chapter was that of Remiremont in Lorraine, whose abbess was a
princess of the Holy Roman Empire, by virtue of her office. Her crook
was of gold. Six horses were harnessed to her carriage. Her dominion
extended over two hundred villages, whose inhabitants paid her both
feudal dues and ecclesiastical tithes. Nor were her duties onerous. She
spent a large part of her time in Strasburg, and went to the theatre
without scruple. She traveled a good deal in the neighborhood, and was a
familiar figure at some of the petty courts on the Rhine. The canonesses
followed her good example. Some of them were continually on the road.
Others stayed at home in the convent, and entertained much good company.
They dressed like other people, in the fashion, with nothing to mark
their religious calling but a broad ribbon over the right shoulder, blue
bordered with red, supporting a cross, with a figure of Saint Romaric.
No lady was received into this chapter who could not show nine
generations or two hundred and twenty-five years of chivalric, noble
descent, both on the father's and on the mother's side.

Such requirements as this were extreme, but similar conditions were not
unusual. The Benedictines of Saint Claude, transformed into a chapter of
canonesses, required sixteen quarterings for admission; that is to say,
that every canoness must show by proper heraldic proof, that her sixteen
great--grandfathers and great--grandmothers were of noble blood. The
Knights of Malta required but four quarterings. They had two hundred and
twenty commanderies in France, with eight hundred Knights. The Grand
Priory gave an income of sixty thousand livres to the Prior, who was
always a prince. The revenues of the order were 1,750,000 livres.

But very rich monasteries were exceptional after all. Those where life
was hard and labor continuous were far more common. In some of them,
forty men would be found living on a joint income of six thousand livres
a year. They cultivated the soil, they built, they dug. They were not
afraid of great undertakings in architecture or engineering, to be
accomplished only after long years and generations of labor, for was not
their corporation immortal? Then we have the begging orders, infesting
the roads and villages, and drawing several million livres a year from
the poorer classes, which supported and grumbled at them. And against
the luxury of the noble chapters must be set the silence, the vigils,
the fasts of La Trappe. This monastery stood in a gloomy valley, sunk
among wooded hills. The church and the surrounding buildings were mostly
old, and all sombre and uninviting. Each narrow cell was furnished with
but a mattress, a blanket and a table, without chair or fire. The monks
were clad in a robe and a hood, and wore shoes and stockings, but had
neither shirt nor breeches. They shaved three times a year. Their food
consisted of boiled vegetables, with salad once a week; never any butter
nor eggs. Twice in the night they rose, and hastened shivering to the
chapel. Never did they speak, but to their confessor; until, in his last
hour, each was privileged to give to the prior his dying messages.
Hither, from the active and gay world of philosophy and frivolity would
suddenly retire from time to time some young officer, scholar, or
courtier. Here, bound by irrevocable vows, he could weep over his sins,
or gnash his teeth at the folly that had brought him, until he found
peace at last in life or in the grave.

To enjoy the temporal privileges of the religious life neither any great
age nor any extensive learning was required. To hold a cure of souls or
the abbacy of a "regular" convent (whose inmates chose their abbot), a
man must be twenty-five years old. But an abbot appointed by the king
need only be twenty-two, a canon of a cathedral fourteen, and a chaplain
seven. It cannot be doubted that persons of either sex were obliged to
make irrevocable vows, without any proof of free vocation, or any reason
to expect a fixed resolution. Daughters and younger sons could thus be
conveniently disposed of. A larger share was left for the family, for
the religious were civilly dead, and did not take part in the
inheritance. On the other hand, misfortune and want need not be feared
for the inmate of the convent. If a nun were lost to the joys of the
world, she was lost to its cares. To make such a choice, to commit
temporal suicide, the very young should surely not be admitted. Yet it
was not until 1768 that the time for taking final vows was advanced to
the very moderate age of twenty-one for young men and eighteen for
girls.[Footnote: Rambaud, ii. 45. Mathieu, 43. Chassin, 25. Boiteau,
176. Bailly, 421. Mme. d'Oberkirch, 127. Mme. de Genlis, _Dict. des
Étiquettes_, i. Ill _n._, _Le Comte de Fersen et la Cour de
France_, I. xxix. Mercier, xi. 358.]

The secular clergy was about as numerous as the regular. It was
principally composed of the _curés_ and _vicaires_ who had charge of
parishes.[Footnote: The bishops, of course, belonged to the secular
clergy. So, in fact, did the canons; who, on account of the similarity
of their mode of life, have been treated with the regulars. In the
French hierarchy the _curé_ comes above the _vicaire_. The relation
is somewhat that of _parson_ and _curate_ in the church of England.]
These men were mostly drawn from the lower classes of society, or at
any rate not from the nobility. They had therefore very little chance
of promotion. Some of them in the country districts were very poor;
for the great tithes, levied on the principal crops, generally
belonged to the bishops, to the convents of regulars, or to laymen;
and only the lesser tithes, the occasional fees,[Footnote: _Casuel._]
and the product of a small glebe were reserved for the parish priest,
and the latter was liable to continual squabbles with the peasants
concerning his dues. But the parish priest, with all other churchmen,
was exempt from the state taxes, although obliged to pay a proportion
of the _décimes_,[Footnote: _Décime_, in the singular, was an
extraordinary tax levied on ecclesiastical revenue for some object
deemed important. _Décimes_, in the plural, was the tax paid annually
by bénéfices. _Dîme_, tithe (see Littré, _Décime_). It seems a
question whether the proportion of the _décimes_ paid by the parish
priests was too large. See _Revue des questions historiques_, 1st July
1890, 102. Necker, _De l'Administration_, ii. 313.] or special tax
laid by the clergy on their own order. Moreover, the government set a
minimum;[Footnote: _Portion congrue._] and if the income of the parish
priest fell below it, the owner of the great tithes was bound to make
up the difference. This minimum was set at five hundred livres a year
for a _curé_ in 1768, and raised to seven hundred in 1785. A _vicaire_
received two hundred and three hundred and fifty. These amounts do not
seem large, but they must have secured to the country priest a
tolerable condition, for we do not find that the clerical profession
was neglected.

Apart from considerations of material well being, the condition of the
parish priest was not undesirable. He was fairly independent, and could
not be deprived of his living without due process of law. His house was
larger or smaller according to his means, but his authority and
influence might in any case be considerable. He had more education and
more dealings with the outer world than most of his parishioners. To him
the intendant of the province might apply for information concerning the
state of his village, and the losses of the peasants by fire, or by
epidemics among their cattle. His sympathy with his fellow-villagers was
the warmer, that like them he had a piece of ground to till, were it
only a garden, an orchard, or a bit of vineyard. Round his door, as
round theirs, a few hens were scratching; perhaps a cow lowed from her
shed, or followed the village herd to the common. The priest's servant,
a stout lass, did the milking and the weeding. In 1788, a provincial
synod was much disturbed by a motion, made by some fanatic in the
interest of morals, that no priest should keep a serving-maid less than
forty-five years of age. The rule was rejected on the ground that it
would make it impossible to cultivate the glebes. Undoubtedly, the
priests themselves often tucked up the skirts of their cassocks, and
lent a hand in the work. They were treated by their flocks with a
certain amount of respectful familiarity. They were addressed as
_messire_. With the joys and sorrows of their parishioners, their
connection was at once intimate and professional. Their ministrations
were sought by the sick and the sad, their congratulations by the happy.
No wedding party nor funeral feast was complete without them.[Footnote:
Turgot, v. 364. This letter is very interesting, as showing the
importance of the _curés_ and their possible dealings with the
intendant. Mathieu, 152. Babeau, _La vie rurale_, 157. A good study
of the clergy before the Revolution is found in an article by Marius
Sepet (_La société française à la veille de la révolution_), in the
_Revue des questions historiques_, 1st April and 1st July, 1889.]

The privileges and immunities which the Church of France enjoyed had
given to her clergy a tone of independence both to the Pope and to the
king. We have seen them accompanying their "free gifts" to the latter by
requests and conditions. Toward the Holy See their attitude had once
been quite as bold. In 1682 an assembly of the Church of France had
promulgated four propositions which were considered the bulwarks of the
Gallican liberties.

(1.) God has given to Saint Peter and his successors no power, direct or
indirect, over temporal affairs.

(2.) Ecumenical councils are superior to the Pope in spiritual matters.

(3.) The rules, usages and statutes admitted by the kingdom and the
Church of France must remain inviolate.

(4.) In matters of faith, decisions of the Sovereign Pontiff are
irrevocable only after having received the consent of the church.

These propositions were undoubtedly a part of the law of France, and
were fully accepted by a portion of the French clergy. But the spirit
that dictated them had in a measure died out during the corrupt reign of
Louis XV. The long quarrel between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, which
agitated the Galilean church during the latter part of the seventeenth
and the earlier half of the eighteenth century, had tended neither to
strengthen nor to purify that body. A large number of the most serious,
intelligent and devout Catholics in France had been put into opposition
to the most powerful section of the clergy and to the Pope himself. Thus
the Church of France was in a bad position to repel the violent attacks
made upon her from without.[Footnote: Rambaud, ii. 40. For a Catholic
account of the Jansenist quarrel, see Carné, _La monarchie française
au 18me siècle_, 407.]

For a time of trial had come to the Catholic Church, and the Church of
France, although hardly aware of its danger, was placed in the forefront
of battle. It was against her that the most persistent and violent
assault of the Philosophers was directed. Before considering the
doctrines of those men, who differed among themselves very widely on
many points, it is well to ask what was the cause of the great
excitement which their doctrines created. Men as great have existed in
other centuries, and have exercised an enormous influence on the human
mind.

But that influence has generally been gradual; percolating slowly,
through the minds of scholars and thinkers, to men of action and the
people. The intellectual movement of the eighteenth century in France
was rapid. It was the nature of the opposition which they encountered
which drew popular attention to the attacks of the Philosophers.



CHAPTER IV.

THE CHURCH AND HER ADVERSARIES.


The new birth of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had
been followed by the strengthening and centralization of government,
both in church and state. France had its full share of this change. Its
civil government became the strongest in Europe, putting down every
breath of opposition. Against the political conduct of Louis XIV neither
magistrate nor citizen dared to raise his voice. The Church of France,
on the other hand, in close alliance with the civil power, became almost
irresistible in her own sphere. The Catholic Church throughout Europe
had been the great schoolmaster of civilization. It had fallen into the
common fault of schoolmasters, the assumption of infallibility. It was,
moreover, a state within all states. Its sovereign, the Pope, the most
powerful monarch in Christendom, is chosen in accordance with a curious
and elaborate set of regulations, by electors appointed by his
predecessors. His rule, nominally despotic, is limited by powers and
influences understood by few persons outside of his palace. His
government, although highly centralized, is yet able to work efficiently
in all the countries of the earth. It is served by a great body of
officials, probably less corrupt on the whole than those of any other
state. They are kept in order, not only by moral and spiritual
sanctions, but by a system of worldly promotion. They wield over their
subjects a tremendous weapon, sometimes borrowed, but seldom long or
very skillfully used by laymen, and called, in clerical language,
excommunication. This, when it is confined to the denial of religious
privileges, may be considered a spiritual weapon. But in the eighteenth
century the temporal power of Catholic Europe was still in great measure
at the service of the ecclesiastical authorities. Obedience to the
church was a law of the state. Although Frenchmen were no longer
executed for heresy in the reign of Louis XVI., they still were
persecuted. The property of Protestants was unsafe, their marriages
invalid. Their children might be taken from them. Such toleration as
existed was precarious, and the Church of France was constantly urging
the temporal government to take stronger measures for the extirpation of
heresy.

The church had succeeded in implanting in the minds of its votaries one
opinion of enormous value in its struggle for power. Originally and
properly an association for the practice and spreading of religion, the
corporation had succeeded in making itself an object of worship. One
great reason why atheism took root in France was the impossibility,
induced by long habit, of distinguishing between religion and
Catholicism, and of conceiving that the one may exist without the other.
The by-laws of the church had become as sacred as the primary duties of
piety; and the injunction to refrain from meat on Fridays was
indistinguishable by most Catholics, in point of obligation, from the
injunction to love the Lord their God.

The Protestant churches which separated themselves from the Church of
Rome in the sixteenth century carried with them much of the intolerant
spirit of the original body. It is one of the commonplace sneers of the
unreflecting to say that religious toleration has always been the dogma
of the weaker party. The saying, if it were true, which it is not, yet
would not be especially sagacious. Toleration, like other things, has
been most sought by those whose need of it was greatest. But they have
not always recognized its value. It was no small step in the progress of
the human mind that was taken when men came to look on religious
toleration as desirable or possible. That the state might treat with
equal favor all forms of worship was an opinion hardly accepted by wise
and liberal-minded men in the eighteenth century. It may be that the
fiery contests of the Reformation were still too near in those days to
let perfect peace be safe or profitable.

Yet religious toleration was making its way in men's minds. Cautiously,
and with limitations, the doctrine is stated, first by Locke, Bayle, and
Fénelon in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, then by almost
all the great writers of the eighteenth. The Protestants, with their
experience of persecution, assert that those persons should not be
tolerated who teach that faith should not be kept with heretics, or that
kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms; or who attribute
to themselves any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals in
civil affairs; in short, they exclude the Catholics. Atheists also may
be excluded, as being under no possible conscientious obligation to
dogmatize concerning their negative creed. The Catholics maintain the
right of the sovereign to forbid the use of ceremonies, or the
profession of opinions, which would disturb the public peace.
Montesquieu, a nominal Catholic only, declares that it is the
fundamental principle of political laws concerning religion, not to
allow the establishment of a new form if it can be prevented; but when
one is once established, to tolerate it. He refuses to say that heresy
should not be punished, but he says that it should be punished only with
great circumspection. This left the case of the French Protestants to
all appearances as bad as before; for the laws denied that they had been
established in the kingdom, and the church always asserted that it was
mild and circumspect in its dealings with heretics. Voltaire will not
say that those who are not of the same religion as the prince should
share in the honors of the state, or hold public office. Such
limitations as these would seem to have deprived toleration of the
greater part of its value, by excluding from its benefits those persons
who were most likely to be persecuted. But the statement of a great
principle is far more effectual than the enumeration of its limitations.
Toleration, eloquently announced as an ideal, made its way in men's
minds. "Absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial
liberty, is the thing we stand in need of," cries Locke, and the saying
is retained when his exceptions concerning the Catholics are forgotten.
"When kings meddle with religion," says Fénelon, "instead of protecting,
they enslave her."[Footnote: Locke, vi. 46, 46 (Letter on Toleration).
Bayle, Commentary on the Text "Compelle intrare" (for atheists), ii.
431, a., Fénelon, Oeuvres, vii. 123 (Essai philosophique sur le
gouvernement civil). Montesquieu, Oeuvres, iv. 68; v. 175 (Esprit des
Lois, liv. xii. ch. v. and liv. xxxv. ch. x.). Felice, Voltaire, xli.
247 (Essai sur la tolérance).]

The Church of France had long been cruel to her opponents. The
persecution of the French Protestants, which preceded and followed the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, is known to most readers. It
was long and bloody. But about the middle of the eighteenth century it
began to abate. The last execution for heresy in France appears to have
taken place in 1762. A Protestant meeting was surprised and attacked by
soldiers in 1767. Some eight or ten years later than this, the last
prisoner for conscience' sake was released from the galleys at Toulon.
But no religion except the Roman Catholic was recognized by the state;
and to its clergy alone were entrusted certain functions essential to
the conduct of civilized life. No marriage could be legally solemnized
but by a Catholic priest. No public record of births was kept but in the
parish registers. As a consequence of this, no faithful Protestant could
be legally married at all, and all children of Protestant parents were
bastards, whose property could be taken from them by the nearest
Catholic relative. It is true that the courts did much to soften the
execution of these laws; but the judges, with the best intentions, were
sometimes powerless; and all judges did not mean to act fairly by
heretics.

Slowly, during the lifetime of a generation, the Protestants gained
ground. The coronation-oath contained a clause by which the king
promised to exterminate heretics. When Louis XVI. was to be crowned at
Rheims, Turgot desired to modify this part of the oath. He drew up a new
form. The clergy, however, resisted the innovation, and Maurepas, the
prime minister, agreed with them. The young king, with characteristic
weakness, is said to have muttered some meaningless sounds, in place of
the disputed portion of the oath.

In 1778, an attempt was made to induce the Parliament of Paris to
interfere in behalf of the oppressed sectaries, It was stated that since
1740, more than four hundred thousand marriages had been contracted
outside of the church, and that these marriages were void in law and the
constant cause of scandalous suits. But the Parliament, by a great
majority, rejected the proposal to apply to the king for relief. In
1775, and again in 1780, the assembly of the clergy protested against
the toleration accorded to heretics. It is not a little curious that at
a time when a measure of simple humanity was thus opposed by the highest
court of justice in the realm, and by the Church of France in its
corporate capacity, a foreign Protestant, Necker, was the most important
of the royal servants.

The spirit of the church, or at least of her leading men, is expressed
in the Pastoral Instruction of Lefranc de Pompignan, Archbishop of
Vienne, perhaps the most prominent French ecclesiastic of the century.
The church, he says, has never persecuted, although misguided men have
done so in her name. The sovereign should maintain the true religion,
and is himself the judge of the best means of doing it. But religion
sets bounds to what a monarch should do in her defense. She does not ask
for violent or sanguinary measures against simple heretics. Such
measures would do more harm than good. But when men have the audacity to
exercise a pretended and forbidden ministry, injurious to the public
peace, it would be absurd to think that rigorous penalties applied to
their misdeeds are contrary to Christian charity. And in connection with
toleration, the prelate brings together the two texts, "Judge not, that
ye be not judged;"--"but he that believeth not is condemned already."
This plan of dealing gently with Protestants, while so maltreating their
pastors as to make public worship or the administration of sacraments
very difficult, was a favourite one with French churchmen.

The great devolution was close at hand. On the last day of the first
session of the Assembly of Notables, in the spring of 1787, Lafayette
proposed to petition the king in favor of the Protestants. His motion
was received with almost unanimous approval by the committee to which it
was made, and the Count of Artois, president of that committee, carried
a petition to Louis XVI. accordingly. His Majesty deigned to favor the
proposal, and an edict for giving a civil status to Protestants was
included in the batch of bills submitted to the Parliament of Paris for
registration. The measure of relief was of the most moderate character.
It did not enable the sectaries of the despised religion to hold any
office in the state, nor even to meet publicly for worship. Yet the
opposition to the proposed law was warm, and was fomented by part of the
nobility and of the clergy. One of the great ladies of the court called
on each counselor of the Parliament, and left a note to remind him of
his duty to the Catholic religion and the laws. The Bishop of Dol told
the king of France that he would be answerable to God and man for the
misfortunes which the reestablishment of Protestantism would bring on
the kingdom. His Majesty's sainted aunt, according to the bishop, was
looking down on him from that heaven where her virtues had placed her,
and blaming his conduct. Louis XVI. resented this language and found
manliness enough to send the Bishop of Dol back to his see. On the 19th
of January, 1788, the matter was warmly debated in the Parliament
itself. D'Espréménil, one of the counselors, was filled with excitement
and wrath at the proposed toleration. Pointing to the image of Christ,
which hung on the wall of the chamber, "would you," he indignantly
exclaimed, "would you crucify him again?" But the appeal of bigotry was
unavailing. The measure passed by a large majority.[Footnote: For the
last persecution of the Protestants, see Felice, 422. Howard,
Lazzarettos, 55. Coquerel, 93. Geffroy, i. 406. Chérest, i. 45, 382. For
the oath, Turgot, i. 217; vii. 314, 317. See also Dareste, vii. 20,
Lefranc de Pompignan, i. 132. Geffroy, i. 410; ii. 85. Droz, ii. 38.
Sallier, Annales françaises, 136 n. The majority was 94 to 17. Seven
counselors and three bishops retired without voting.]

It was not against Protestants alone that the clergy showed their
activity. The church, in its capacity of guardian of the public morals
and religion, passed condemnation on books supposed to be hostile to its
claims. In this matter it exercised concurrent jurisdiction with the
administrative branch of the government and with the courts of law. A
new book was liable to undergo a triple ordeal. A license was required
before publication, and the manuscript was therefore submitted to an
official censor, often an ecclesiastic. Thence it became the custom to
print in foreign countries, books which contained anything to which
anybody in authority might object, and to bring them secretly into
France. The presses of Holland and of Geneva were thus used. Sometimes,
instead of this, a book would be published in Paris with a foreign
imprint. Thus "Boston" and "Philadelphia" are not infrequently found on
the title-pages of books printed in France in the reign of Louis XVI.
Such books were sold secretly, with greater or less precautions against
discovery, for the laws were severe; an ordinance passed as late as 1757
forbade, under penalty of death, all publications which might tend to
excite the public mind. So loose an expression gave discretionary power
to the authorities. The extreme penalty was not enforced, but
imprisonment and exile were somewhat capriciously inflicted on authors
and printers.

But a book that had received the _imprimatur_ of the censor was not
yet safe. The clergy might denounce, or the Parliament condemn it. The
church was quick to scent danger. An honest scholar, an upright and
original thinker, could hardly escape the reproach of irreligion or of
heresy. Nor were the laws fairly administered. It might be more
dangerous to be supposed to allude disagreeably to the mistress of a
prince, than to attack the government of the kingdom. Had a severe law
been severely and consistently enforced, slander, heresy, and political
thought might have been stamped out together. Such was in some measure
the case in the reign of Louis XIV. But under the misrule of the
courtiers of his feeble successors, no strict law was adhered to. There
was a common tendency to wink at illegal writings of which half the
public approved. Malesherbes, for instance, was at one time at the head
of the official censors. He is said to have had a way of warning authors
and publishers the day before a descent was to be made upon their
houses. Under laws thus enforced, authors who held new doctrines learned
to adapt their methods to those of the government. Almost all the great
French writers of the eighteenth century framed some passages in their
books for the purpose of satisfying the censor or of avoiding
punishment. They were profuse in expressions of loyally to church and
state, in passages sometimes sounding ludicrously hollow, sometimes
conveying the most biting mockery and satire, and again in words hardly
to be distinguished from the heartfelt language of devotion. They became
skillful at hinting, and masters of the art of innuendo. They attacked
Christianity under the name of Mahometanism, and if they had occasion to
blame French ministers of state, would seem to be satirizing the viziers
of Turkey. Politics and theology are subjects of unceasing and vivid
interest, and their discussion cannot be suppressed, unless minds are to
be smothered altogether. If any measure of free thought and speech is to
be admitted, the engrossing topics will find expression. If people are
not allowed pamphlets and editorials, they will bring out their ideas in
poems and fables. Under Louis XV and Louis XVI, politics took possession
of popular songs, and theology of every conceivable kind of writing.
There was hardly an advertisement of the virtues of a quack medicine, or
a copy of verses to a man's mistress, that did not contain a fling at
the church or the government. There can be no doubt that the moral
nature of authors and of the public suffered in such a course. Books
lost some of their real value. But for a time an element of excitement
was added to the pleasure both of writers and readers. The author had
all the advantage of being persecuted, with the pleasing assurance that
the persecution would not go very far. The reader, while perusing what
seemed to him true and right, enjoyed the satisfaction of holding a
forbidden book. He had the amusement of eating stolen fruit, and the
inward conviction that it agreed with him.[Footnote: Lomenie, Vie de
Beaumarchais, i. 324. Montesquieu, i. 464 (Lettres persanes, cxlv.).
Mirabeau, L'ami des hommes, 238 (pt. ii. oh, iv.). Anciennes Lois, xxii.
272. Lanfrey, 193.]

The writers who adopted this course are mostly known as the
"Philosophers." It is hard to be consistent in the use of this word as
applied to Frenchmen of the eighteenth century. The name was sometimes
given to all those who advocated reform or alteration in church or
state. In its stricter application, it belongs to a party among them; to
Voltaire and his immediate followers, and especially to the
Encyclopaedists.

"Never," says Voltaire, in his "English Letters," "will our
philosophers make a religious sect, for they are without enthusiasm."
This was a favorite idea with the disciples of the great cynic, but the
event has disproved its truth. The Philosophers in Voltaire's lifetime
formed a sect, although it could hardly be called a religious one. The
Patriarch of Ferney himself was something not unlike its pontiff.
Diderot and d'Alembert were its bishops, with their attendant clergy of
Encyclopaedists. Helvetius and Holbach were its doctors of atheology.
Most reading and thinking Frenchmen were for a time its members.
Rousseau was its arch-heretic. The doctrines were materialism, fatalism,
and hedonism. The sect still exists. It has adhered, from the time of
its formation, to a curious notion, its favorite superstition, which may
be expressed somewhat as follows: "Human reason and good sense were
first invented from thirty to fifty years ago." "When we consider," says
Voltaire, "that Newton, Locke, Clarke and Leibnitz, would have been
persecuted in France, imprisoned at Rome, burnt at Lisbon, what must we
think of human reason? It was born in England within this century."
[Footnote: Voltaire (Geneva ed. 1771) xv. 99 (Newton). Also (Beuchot's
ed.) xv. 351 (Essai sur les Moeurs) and passim. The date usually set by
Voltaire's modern followers is that of the publication of the Origin of
Species; although no error is more opposed than this one to the great
theory of evolution.] And similar expressions are frequent in his
writings. The sectaries, from that day to this, have never been wanting
in the most glowing enthusiasm. In this respect they generally surpass
the Catholics; in fanaticism (or the quality of being cocksure) the
Protestants. They hold toleration as one of their chief tenets, but
never undertake to conceal their contempt for any one who disagrees with
them. The sect has always contained many useful and excellent persons,
and some of the most dogmatic of mankind.



CHAPTER V.

THE CHURCH AND VOLTAIRE.


The enemies of the Church of France were many and bitter, but one man
stands out prominent among them. Voltaire was a poet, much admired in
his day, an industrious and talented historian, a writer on all sorts of
subjects, a wit of dazzling brilliancy; but he was first, last, and
always an enemy of the Catholic Church, and although not quite an
atheist, an opponent of all forms of religion. For more than forty years
he was the head of the party of the Philosophers. During all that time
he was the most conspicuous of literary Frenchmen. Two others, Rousseau
and Montesquieu, may rival him in influence on the modern world, but his
followers in the regions of thought are numerous and aggressive to-day.

Voltaire was born in 1694 the son of a lawyer named Arouet. There are
doubts as to the origin of the name he has made so famous; whether it
was derived from a fief possessed by his mother, or from an anagram of
AROUET LE JEUNE. At any rate, the name was adopted by the young poet, at
his own fancy, a case not without parallel in the eighteenth century.
[Footnote: As in the case of D'Alembert. For Voltaire's name, see
Desnoiresterres, _Jeunesse de Voltaire_, 161.]

Voltaire began early to attract public attention. Before he was
twenty-five years old he had established his reputation as a wit, had
spent nearly a year in the Bastille on a charge of writing satirical
verses, and had produced a successful tragedy. In this play a couplet
sneering at priests might possibly have become a familiar quotation
even had it been written by another pen.[Footnote: _Oedipe_, written
in 1718. "Nos prêtres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense; Notre
credulité fait toute leur science." Act IV., Scene I.] For several
years Voltaire went on writing, with increasing reputation. In 1723,
his great epic poem, "La Henriade," was secretly circulated in
Paris.[Footnote: Desnoiresterres, _Jeunesse_, 297.] The author was
one of the marked men of the town. At the same time his reputation
must have been to some extent that of a troublesome fellow. And in
December of that year an event occurred which was destined to drive
the rising author from France for several years, and add bitterness to
a mind naturally acid.

The details of the story are variously told. It appears that Voltaire
was one evening at the theatre behind the scenes, and had a dispute with
the Chevalier de Chabot, of the family of Rohan. "Monsieur de Voltaire,
Monsieur Arouet, what's your name!" the chevalier is said to have called
out. "My name is not a great one, but I am no discredit to it," answered
the author. Chabot lifted his cane, Voltaire laid his hand on his sword.
Mademoiselle Lecouvreur, the actress, for whose benefit, perhaps, the
little dispute was enacted, took occasion to faint. Chabot went off,
muttering something about a stick.

A few days later, Voltaire was dining at the house of the Duke of Sulli.
A servant informed him that some one wanted to see him at the door. So
Voltaire went out, and stepped quietly up to a coach that was standing
in front of the house. As he put his head in at the coach door, he was
seized by the collar of his coat and held fast, while two men came up
behind and belabored him with sticks. The Chevalier de Chabot, his noble
adversary, was looking on from another carriage.

When the tormentors let him go, Voltaire rushed back into the house and
appealed to the Duke of Sulli for vengeance, but in vain. It was no
small matter to quarrel with the family of Rohan. Then the poet applied
to the court for redress, but got none. It is said that Voltaire's
enemies had persuaded the prime minister that his petitioner was the
author of a certain epigram, addressed to His Excellency's mistress, in
which she was reminded that it is easy to deceive a one-eyed Argus. (The
minister had but one eye.) Finally Voltaire, seeing that no one else
would take up his quarrel, began to take fencing lessons and to keep
boisterous company. It is probable that he would have made little use of
any skill he might have acquired as a swordsman. Voltaire was not
physically rash. The Chevalier de Chabot, although he held the
commission of a staff-officer, was certainly no braver than his
adversary, and was in a position to take no risks. Voltaire was at first
watched by the police; then, perhaps after sending a challenge, locked
up in the Bastille. He remained in that state prison for about a
fortnight, receiving his friends and dining at the governor's table. On
the 5th of May, 1726, he was at Calais on his way to exile in England.
[Footnote: Desnoiresterres, _Jeunesse_, 345.]

Voltaire spent three years in England, years which exercised a deep
influence on his life. He learned the English language exceptionally
well, and practiced writing it in prose and verse. He associated on
terms of intimacy with Lord Bolingbroke, whom he had already known in
France, with Swift, Pope, and Gay. He drew an epigram from Young. He
brought out a new and amended edition of the "Henriade," with a
dedication in English to Queen Caroline. He studied the writings of
Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Thus to the Chevalier de Chabot, and his
shameful assault, did French thinkers owe, in no small measure, the
influence which English writers exercised upon them.

While in England, Voltaire was taking notes and writing letters. These
he probably worked over during the years immediately following his
return to France. The "Lettres Philosophiques," or "Letters concerning
the English Nation," were first published in England in 1733. They were
allowed to slip into circulation in France in the following year.
Promptly condemned by the Parliament of Paris as "scandalous and
contrary to religion and morals, and to the respect due to the powers
that be," they were "torn and burned at the foot of the great
staircase," and read all the more for it.

It is no wonder that the church, and that conservative if sometimes
heterodox body, the Parliament of Paris, should have condemned the
"English Letters." A bitter satire is leveled at France, with her
religion and her government, under cover of candid praise of English
ways and English laws. What could the Catholic clergy say to words like
these, put into the mouth of a Quaker? "God forbid that we should dare
to command any one to receive the Holy Ghost on Sunday to the exclusion
of the rest of the faithful! Thank Heaven we are the only people on
earth who have no priests! Would you rob us of so happy a distinction?
Why should we abandon our child to mercenary nurses when we have milk to
give him? These hirelings would soon govern the house and oppress mother
and child. God has said: `Freely ye have received; freely give.' After
that saying, shall we go chaffer with the Gospel, sell the Holy Ghost,
and turn a meeting of Christians into a tradesman's shop? We do not give
money to men dressed in black, to assist our poor, to bury our dead, to
preach to the faithful. Those holy occupations are too dear to us to be
cast off upon others."[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 124.]

Having thus attacked the institution of priesthood in general, Voltaire
turns his attention in particular to the priests of France and England.
In morals, he says, the Anglican clergy are more regular than the
French. This is because all ecclesiastics in England are educated at the
universities, far from the temptations of the capital, and are called to
the dignities of the church at an advanced age, when men have no
passions left but avarice and ambition. Advancement here is the
recompense of long service, in the church as well as in the army. You do
not see boys becoming bishops or colonels on leaving school. Moreover,
most English priests are married men. The awkward manners contracted at
the university, and the slight intercourse with women usual in that
country, generally compel a bishop to be content with his own wife.
Priests sometimes go to the tavern in England, because custom allows it;
but if they get drunk, they do so seriously, and without making scandal.

"That indefinable being, who is neither a layman nor an ecclesiastic, in
a word, that which we call an _abbé_, is an unknown species in
England. Here all priests are reserved, and nearly all are pedants. When
they are told that in France young men known for their debauched lives
and raised to the prelacy by the intrigues of women make love publicly,
amuse themselves by composing amorous songs, give long and dainty
suppers every night, and go thence to ask the enlightenment of the Holy
Spirit, and boldly call themselves successors of the apostles, they
thank God that they are Protestants;--but they are vile heretics, to be
burned by all the devils, as says Master Francois Rabelais. Which is why
I have nothing to do with them."[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 140.]

While the evil lives of an important part of the French clergy are
thus assailed, the doctrines of the Church are not spared. The
following is from the letter on the Socinians. "Do you remember a
certain orthodox bishop, who in order to convince the Emperor of the
consubstantiality [of the three Persons of the Godhead] ventured to
chuck the Emperor's son under the chin, and to pull his nose in his
sacred majesty's presence? The Emperor was going to have the bishop
thrown out of the window, when the good man addressed him in the
following fine and convincing words: `Sir, if your Majesty is so angry
that your son should be treated with disrespect, how do you think that
God the Father will punish those who refuse to give to Jesus Christ
the titles that are due to Him?' The people of whom I speak say that
the holy bishop was ill-advised, that his argument was far from
conclusive, and that the Emperor should have answered: `Know that
there are two ways of showing want of respect for me; the first is not
to render sufficient honor to my son, the other is to honor him as
much as myself.'"[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 144.] Such words as
these were hardly to be borne. But the French authorities recognized
that there was a greater and more insidious danger to the church in
certain other passages by which Frenchmen were made to learn some of
the results of English abstract thought.

Among the French writers of the eighteenth century are several men of
eminent talent; one only whose sinister but original genius has given a
new direction to the human mind. I shall treat farther on of the ideas
of Rousseau. The others, and Voltaire among them, belong to that class
of great men who assimilate, express, and popularize thought, rather
than to the very small body of original thinkers. Let us then pause for
a moment, while studying the French Philosophers and their action on
the church, and ask who were their masters.

Montaigne, Bayle, and Grotius may be considered the predecessors on the
Continent of the French Philosophic movement, but its great impulse came
from England. Bacon had much to do with it; Hooker and Hobbes were not
without influence; Newton's discoveries directed men's minds towards
physical science; but of the metaphysical and political ideas of the
century, John Locke was the fountain-head. Some Frenchmen have in modern
times disputed his claims. To refute these disputants it is only
necessary to turn from their books to those of Voltaire and his
contemporaries. The services rendered by France to the human race are so
great that her sons need never claim any glory which does not clearly
belong to them. All through modern history, Frenchmen have stood in the
front rank of civilization. They have stood there side by side with
Englishmen, Italians, and Germans. International jealousy should spare
the leaders of human thought. They belong to the whole European family
of nations. The attempt to set aside Locke, Newton, and Bacon, as guides
of the eighteenth century belongs not to that age but to our own.

The works of Locke are on the shelves of most considerable libraries;
but many men, now that the study of metaphysics is out of fashion, are
appalled at the suggestion that they should read an essay in three
volumes on the human understanding, evidently considering their own
minds less worthy of study than their bodies or their estates. It may be
worth while, therefore, to give a short summary of those theories, or
discoveries of Locke which most modified French thought in the
eighteenth century. The great thinker was born in 1632 and died in 1704.
His principal works were published shortly after the English Revolution
of 1688, but had been long in preparation; and the "Essay on the Human
Understanding" is said to have occupied him not less than twenty years.

It is the principal doctrine of Locke that all ideas are derived from
sensation and reflection. He acknowledges that "it is a received
doctrine that men have native ideas and original characters stamped upon
their minds in their very first being;" but he utterly rejects every
such theory. It is his principal business to protest and argue against
the existence of such "innate ideas." Virtue he believes to be generally
approved because it is profitable, not on account of any natural leaning
of the mind in its direction. Conscience "is nothing else but our own
opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our own
actions." Memory is the power in the mind to revive perceptions which it
once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has
had them before. Wit lies in the assemblage of ideas, judgment in the
careful discrimination among them. "Things are good or evil only in
reference to pleasure or pain;" ... "our love and hatred of inanimate,
insensible beings is commonly founded on that pleasure or pain which we
receive from their use and application any way to our senses, though
with their destruction; but hatred or love of beings incapable of
happiness or misery is often the uneasiness or delight which we find in
ourselves, arising from a consideration of their very being or
happiness. Thus the being and welfare of a man's children or friends,
producing constant delight in him, he is said constantly to love them.
But it suffices to note that our ideas of love and hatred are but
dispositions of the mind in respect of pleasure or pain in general,
however caused in us."

We have no clear idea of substance nor of spirit. Substance is that
wherein we conceive qualities of matter to exist; spirit, that in which
we conceive qualities of mind, as thinking, knowing, and doubting. The
primary ideas of body are the cohesion of solid, and therefore separate
parts, and a power of communicating motion by impulse. The ideas of
spirit are thinking and will, or a power of putting body into motion by
thought, and, which is consequent to it, liberty. The ideas of
existence, mobility, and duration are common to both.

Locke's intelligence was clear enough to perceive that these two ideas,
spirit and matter, stand on a similar footing. Less lucid thinkers have
boldly denied the existence of spirit while asserting that of matter.
Locke's system would not allow him to believe that either conception
depended on the nature of the mind itself. He therefore rejected the
claims of substance as unequivocally as those of spirit, declaring it to
be "only an uncertain supposition of we know not what, i. e., of
something whereof we have no particular, distinct, positive idea, which
we take to be the substratum or support of those ideas we know." Yet he
inclines on the whole toward materialism. "We have," he says, "the ideas
of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether
any mere material being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by
the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover
whether omnipotency has not given to some system of matter, fitly
disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to
matter so disposed a thinking immaterial substance, it being, in respect
of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive
that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking,
than that he should superadd to it another substance, with a faculty of
thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort
of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which
cannot be in any created being, but merely by the good pleasure and
power of the Creator."... "All the great ends of morality and religion,"
he adds, "are well secured without philosophical proof of the soul's
immateriality." As to our knowledge "of the actual existence of things,
we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence, and a demonstrative
knowledge of the existence of God; of the existence of anything else, we
have no other but a sensitive knowledge, which extends not beyond the
objects present to our senses."[Footnote: Is not an intuitive knowledge
suspiciously like an innate idea? Locke's _Works_, i. 38, 39, 72,
82, 137, 145, 231; ii. 10, 11, 21, 331, 360, 372 (Book i. ch. 3, 4, Book
ii. ch. 1, 10, 11, 20, 23, Book iv. ch. 3).]

The eulogy of Locke in Voltaire's "Lettres Philosophiques" gave
especial offense to the French churchmen. Voltaire writes to a friend
that the censor might have been brought to give his approbation to all
the letters but this one. "I confess," he adds, "that I do not
understand this exception, but the theologians know more about it than
I do, and I must take their word for it."[Footnote: Voltaire, li. 356
(_Letter to Thieriot,_ 24 Feb. 1733).] The letter to which the censor
objected was principally taken up with the doctrine of the materiality
of the soul. "Never," says Voltaire, "was there perhaps a wiser or a
more methodical spirit, a more exact logician, than Locke."
... "Before him great philosophers had positively decided what is the
soul of man; but as they knew nothing at all about it, it is very
natural that they should all have been of different minds." And he
adds in another part of the letter, "Men have long disputed on the
nature and immortality of the soul. As to its immortality, that cannot
be demonstrated, since people are still disputing about its nature;
and since, surely, we must thoroughly know a created being to decide
whether it is immortal or not. Human reason alone is so unable to
demonstrate the immortality of the soul, that religion has been
obliged to reveal it to us. The common good of all men demands that we
should believe the soul to be immortal; faith commands it; no more is
needed, and the matter is almost decided. It is not the same as to its
nature; it matters little to religion of what substance is the soul,
if only it be virtuous. It is a clock that has been given us to
regulate, but the maker has not told us of what springs this clock is
composed."[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 177, 182 (_Lettres
philosophiques._ In the various editions of Voltaire's collected works
published in the last century these letters do not appear as a series,
but their contents is distributed among the miscellaneous articles,
and those of the _Dictionnaire philosophique_. The reason for this
was that the letters, having been judicially condemned, might have
brought their publishers into trouble if they had appeared under their
own title. Bengesco, ii. 9. Desnoiresterres, _Voltaire à Cirey_, 28,
Voltaire, xxxvii. 113. In Beuchot's edition the letters appear in
their original form).]

The "Lettres philosophiques" may be considered the first of Voltaire's
polemic writings. They exhibit his mordant wit, his clear-sightedness
and his moral courage. There is in them, perhaps, more real gayety,
more spontaneous fun, than in his later books. Voltaire was between
thirty-five and forty years old when they were written, and although
he possessed to the end of his long life more vitality than most men,
yet he was physically something of an invalid, and his many exiles and
disappointments told upon his temper. From 1734, when these letters
first appeared in France, to 1778, when he died, worn out with years,
labors, quarrels, and honors, his activity was unceasing. He had many
followers and many enemies, but hardly a rival. Voltaire was and is
the great representative of a way of looking at life; a way which was
enthusiastically followed in his own time, which is followed with
equal enthusiasm to-day. This view he expressed and enforced in his
numberless poems, tragedies, histories, and tales. It formed the
burden of his voluminous correspondence. As we read any of them, his
creed becomes clear to us; it is written large in every one of his
more than ninety volumes. It may almost be said to be on every page of
them. That creed may be stated as follows: We know truth only by our
reason. That reason is enlightened only by our senses. What they do
not tell us we cannot know, and it is mere folly to waste time in
conjecturing. Imagination and feeling are blind leaders of the
blind. All men who pretend to supernatural revelation or inspiration
are swindlers, and those who believe them are dupes. It may be
desirable, for political or social purposes, to have a favored
religion in the state, but freedom of opinion and of expression should
be allowed to all men, at least to all educated men; for the populace,
with their crude ideas and superstitions, may be held in slight
regard.

Voltaire's hatred was especially warm against the regular clergy.
"Religion," he says, "can still sharpen daggers. There is within the
nation a people which has no dealings with honest folk, which does not
belong to the age, which is inaccessible to the progress of reason, and
over which the atrocity of fanaticism preserves its empire, like certain
diseases which attack only the vilest populace." The best monks are the
worst, and those who sing "Pervigilium Veneris" in place of matins are
less dangerous than such as reason, preach, and plot. And in another
place he says that "a religious order should not a part of history." But
it is well to notice that Voltaire's hatred of Catholicism and of
Catholic monks is not founded on a preference for any other church. He
thinks that theocracy must have been universal among early tribes, "for
as soon as a nation has chosen a tutelary god, that god has priests.
These priests govern the spirit of the nation; they can govern only in
the name of their god, so they make him speak continually; they set
forth his oracles, and all things are done by God's express commands."
From this cause come human sacrifices and the most atrocious tyranny;
and the more divine such a government calls itself, the more abominable
it is.

All prophets are imposters. Mahomet may have begun as an enthusiast,
enamored of his own ideas; but he was soon led away by his reveries; he
deceived himself in deceiving others; and finally supported a doctrine
which he believed to be good, by necessary imposture. Socrates, who
pretended to have a familiar spirit, must have been a little crazy, or a
little given to swindling. As for Moses, he is a myth, a form of the
Indian Bacchus. The Koran (and consequently the Bible) may be judged by
the ignorance of physics which it displays. "This is the touchstone of
the books which, according to false religions, were written by the
Deity, for God is neither absurd nor ignorant." Several volumes are
devoted by Voltaire to showing the inconsistencies, absurdities and
atrocities of the Old and New Testaments, and the abominations of the
Jews.

The positive religious opinions of Voltaire are less important than
his negations, for the work of this great writer was mainly to
destroy. He was a theist, of wavering and doubtful faith. He was well
aware that any profession of atheism might be dangerous, and likely to
injure him at court and with some of his friends. He thought that
belief in God and in a future life were important to the safety of
society, and is said to have sent the servant out of the room on one
occasion when one of the company was doubting the existence of the
Deity, giving as a reason that he did not want to have his throat
cut. Yet it is probable that his theism went a little deeper than
this. He says that matter is probably eternal and self-existing, and
that God is everlasting, and self-existing likewise. Are there other
Gods for other worlds? It may be so; some nations and some scholars
have believed in the existence of two gods, one good and one
evil. Surely, nature can more easily suffer, in the immensity of
space, several independent beings, each absolute master of its own
portion, than two limited gods in this world, one confined to doing
good, the other to doing evil. If God and matter both exist from
eternity, "here are two necessary entities; and if there be two there
may be thirty. We must confess our ignorance of the nature of
divinity."

It is noticeable that, like most men on whom the idea of God does not
take a very strong hold, Voltaire imagined powers in some respects
superior to Deity. Thus he says above that nature can more easily
suffer several independent gods than two opposed ones. Having supposed
one or several gods to put the universe in order, he supposes an order
anterior to the gods. This idea of a superior order, Fate, Necessity,
or Nature, is a very old one. It is probably the protest of the human
mind against those anthropomorphic conceptions of God, from which it
is almost incapable of escaping. Voltaire and the Philosophers almost
without exception believed that there was a system of natural law and
justice connected with this superior order, taught to man by instinct.
Sometimes in their system God was placed above this law, as its
origin; sometimes, as we have seen, He was conceived as subjected to
Nature. "God has given us a principle or universal reason," says
Voltaire, "as He has given feathers to birds and fur to bears; and
this principle is so lasting that it exists in spite of all the
passions which combat it, in spite of the tyrants who would drown it
in blood, in spite of the impostors who would annihilate it in
superstition. Therefore the rudest nation always judges very well in
the long run concerning the laws that govern it; because it feels that
these laws either agree or disagree with the principles of pity and
justice which are in its heart." Here we have something which seems
like an innate idea of virtue. But we must not expect complete
consistency of Voltaire. In another place he says, "Virtue and vice,
moral good and evil, are in all countries that which is useful or
injurious to society; and in all times and in all places he who
sacrifices the most to the public is the man who will be called the
most virtuous. Whence it appears that good actions are nothing else
than actions from which we derive an advantage, and crimes are but
actions that are against us. Virtue is the habit of doing the things
which please mankind, and vice the habit of doing things which
displease it. Liberty, he says elsewhere, is nothing but the power to
do that which our wills necessarily require of us."[Footnote: Voltaire,
xx. 439 (_Siècle de Louis XIV._, ch. xxxvii.), xxi. 369 (_Louis XV._),
xv. 34, 40, 123, 316 (_Essai sur les moeurs_), xliii. 74 (_Examen
important de Lord Bolingbroke_), xxxi. 13 (_Dict. philos. Liberté_)
xxxvii. 336 (Traité de métaphysique_). For general attacks on the
Bible and the Jews, see (_Oeuvres_, xv. 123-127, xliii. 39-205, xxxix.
454-464. Morley's _Diderot_, ii. 178). Notice how many of the
arguments that are still repeated nowadays concerning the Mosaic
account of the creation, etc. etc., come from Voltaire. Notice also
that Voltaire, while too incredulous of ancient writers, was too
credulous of modern travelers.]

The Church of France was both angered and alarmed by the writings of
Voltaire and his friends, and did her feeble best to reply to them. But
while strong in her organization and her legal powers, her internal
condition was far from vigorous. Incredulity had become fashionable even
before the attacks of Voltaire were dangerous. An earlier satirist has
put into the mouth of a priest an account of the difficulties which
beset the clergy in those days. "Men of the world," he says, "are
astonishing. They can bear neither our approval nor our censure. If we
wish to correct them, they think us ridiculous. If we approve of them,
they consider us below our calling. Nothing is so humiliating as to feel
that you have shocked the impious. We are therefore obliged to follow an
equivocal line of conduct, and to check libertines not by decision of
character but by keeping them in doubt as to how we receive what they
say. This requires much wit. The state of neutrality is difficult. Men
of the world, who venture to say anything they please, who give free
vent to their humor, who follow it up or let it go according to their
success, get on much better.

"Nor is this all. That happy and tranquil condition which is so much
praised we do not enjoy in society. As soon as we appear, we are obliged
to discuss. We are forced, for instance, to undertake to prove the
utility of prayer to a man who does not believe in God; the necessity of
fasting to another who all his life has denied the immortality of the
soul. The task is hard, and the laugh is not on our side."[Footnote:
Montesquieu, _Lettres persanes_, i. 210, 211, Lettre lxi.]

The prelates appointed to their high offices by Louis XV. and his
courtiers were not the men to make good their cause by spiritual
weapons. There was no Bossuet, no Fénelon in the Church of France of the
eighteenth century. Her defense was intrusted to far weaker men. First
we have the archbishops, Lefranc de Pompignan of Vienne and Elie de
Beaumont of Paris. Then come the Jesuit Nonnotte and the managers of the
Mémoires de Trévoux, the Benedictine Chaudon, the Abbé Trublet, the
journalist Fréron, and many others, lay and clerical. The answers of the
churchmen to their Philosophic opponents are generally inconclusive.
Lefranc de Pompignan declared that the love of dry and speculative truth
was a delusive fancy, good to adorn an oration, but never realized by
the human heart. He sneered at Locke and at the idea that the latter had
invented metaphysics. His objections and those of the Catholic church to
that philosopher's teachings were chiefly that the Englishman maintained
that thought might be an attribute of matter; that he encouraged
Pyrrhonism, or universal doubt; that his theory of identity was
doubtful, and that he denied the existence of innate ideas. All these
matters are well open to discussion, and the advantage might not always
be found on Locke's side. But in general the Catholic theologians and
their opponents were not sufficiently agreed to be able to argue
profitably. They had no premises in common. If one of two disputants
assumes that all ideas are derived from sensation and reflection, and
the other, that the most important of them are the result of the
inspiration of God, there is no use in their discussing minor points
until those great questions are settled. The attempt to reconcile views
so conflicting has frequently been made, and no writings are more dreary
than those which embody it. But men who are too far apart to cross
swords in argument may yet hurl at each other the missiles of
vituperation, and there were plenty of combatants to engage in that sort
of warfare with Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopaedists.

On the two sides, treatises, comedies, tales, and epigrams were written.
It was not difficult to point out that the sayings of the various
opponents of the church were inconsistent with each other; that Rousseau
contradicted Voltaire, that Voltaire contradicted himself. There were
many weak places in the armor of those warriors. Pompignan discourses at
great length, dwelling more especially on the worship which the
Philosophers paid to physical science, on their love of doubt, and on
their mistaken theory that a good Christian cannot be a patriot.
Chaudon, perhaps the cleverest of the clerical writers, sometimes throws
a well directed shaft. "That same Voltaire," he says, "who thinks that
satires against God are of no consequence, attaches great importance to
satires written against himself and his friends. He is unwilling to see
the pen snatched from the hands of the slanderers of the Deity; but he
has often tried to excite the powers that be against the least of his
critics." This was very true of Voltaire, who was as thin-skinned as he
was violent; and who is believed to have tried sometimes to silence his
opponents by the arbitrary method of procuring from some man in power a
royal order to have them locked up. Palissot, in a very readable comedy,
makes fun of Diderot and his friends. As for invective, the supply is
endless on both sides. The Archbishop of Paris condemns the "Émile" of
Rousseau as containing a great many propositions that are "false,
scandalous, full of hatred of the church and her ministers, erroneous,
impious, blasphemous, and heretical." The same prelate argues as
follows: "Who would not believe, my very dear brethren, from what this
impostor says, that the authority of the church is proved only by her
own decisions, and that she proceeds thus: `I decide that I am
infallible, therefore so I am.' A calumnious imputation, my very dear
brethren! The constitution of Christianity, the spirit of the
Scriptures, the very errors and the weakness of the human mind tend to
show that the church established by Jesus Christ is infallible. We
declare that, as the Divine Legislator always taught the truth, so his
church always teaches it. We therefore prove the authority of the
church, not by the church's authority, but by that of Jesus Christ, a
process as accurate as the other, with which we are reproached, is
absurd and senseless."

The arguments of the clerical writers were not all on this level.
Chaudon and Nonnotte prepared a series of articles, arranged in the
form of a dictionary, in which the Catholic doctrine is set forth,
sometimes clearly and forcibly. But it is evident that the champions
of Catholicism in that age were no match in controversy for her
adversaries.[Footnote: Lefranc de Pompignan, i. 27 (_Instruction
pastorale sur la prétendue philosophie des incredules). Dictionnaire
antiphilosophique,_ republished and enlarged by Grosse under the title
_Dictionnaire d'antiphilosophisme,_ Palissot, _Les philosophes._
Beaumont's "_mandement_" given in Rousseau, (_Oeuvres,_ vii. 22,
etc. See also Barthelémy, _Erreurs et mensonges,_ 5e, l3e, 14e Série,
articles on _Fréron, Nonnotte, Trublet,_ and _Patrouillet.
Confessions de Fréron._ Nisard, _Les ennemis de Voltaire_). The
superiority of the Philosophers over the churchmen in argument is too
evident to be denied. Carné, 408.]

The strength of a church does not lie in her doctors and her orators,
still less in her wits and debaters, though they all have their uses.
The strength of a church lies in her saints. While these have a large
part in her councils and a wide influence among her members, a church
is nearly irresistible. When they are few, timid and uninfluential,
knowledge and power, nay, simple piety itself, can hardly support her.
In the Church of France, through the ages, there have been many
saints; but in the reigns of Louis XVI. and his immediate predecessor
there were but few, and none of prominence. The persecution of the
Jansenists, petty as were the forms it took, had turned aside from
ardent fellowship in the church many of the most earnest, religious
souls in France. The atmosphere of the country was not then favorable
to any kind of heroism. Such self-devoted Christians as there were
went quietly on their ways; their existence to be proved only when, in
the worst days of the Revolution, a few of them should find the crown
of martyrdom.



CHAPTER VI.

THE NOBILITY.


The second order in the state was the Nobility. It is a mistake,
however, to suppose that this word bears on the Continent exactly the
same meaning as in England. Where all the children of a nobleman are
nobles, a strict class is created. An English peerage, descending only
to the eldest son, is more in the nature of an office. The French
_noblesse_ in the latter years of the old monarchy comprised nearly
all persons living otherwise than by their daily toil, together with the
higher part of the legal profession. While the clergy had political
rights and a corporate existence, and acted by means of an assembly, the
nobility had but privileges. This, however, was true only of the older
provinces, the "Lands of Elections," whose ancient rights had been
abolished. In some of the "Lands of Estates," which still kept a remnant
of self-government, the order was to some extent a political body with
constitutional rights.

The nobility have been reckoned at about one hundred thousand souls,
forming twenty-five or thirty thousand families, owning one fifth of the
soil of France. Only a part of this land, however, was occupied by the
nobles for their gardens, parks, and chases. The greater portion was let
to farmers, either at a fixed rent, or on the _métayer_ system, by
which the landlord was paid by a share of the crops. And beside his rent
or his portion, the noble received other things from his tenants:
payments and services according to ancient custom, days of labor, and
occasional dues. He could tramp over the ploughed lands with his
servants in search of game, although he might destroy the growing corn.
The game itself, which the peasant might not kill, was still more
destructive. Such rights as these, especially where they were harshly
enforced, caused both loss and irritation to the poor. Although there
were far too many absentees among the great families, yet the larger
number of the nobles spent most of their time at home on their estates,
looking after their farms and their tenants, attending to local
business, and saving up money to be spent in visits to the towns, or to
Paris. When they were absent, their bailiffs were harder masters than
themselves. Unfortunately the eyes of the noble class were turned rather
to the enjoyments of the city and the court than to the duties of
country life on their estates, an inevitable consequence of their loss
of local power.

If the nobles had few political rights, they had plenty of public
privileges. They were exempt from the most onerous taxes, and the best
places under the government were reserved for them. Therefore every man
who rose to eminence or to wealth in France strove to enter their ranks,
and since nobility was a purchasable commodity, through the
multiplication of venal offices which conferred it, none who had much
money to spend failed to secure the coveted rank. Thus the order had
come to comprise almost all persons of note, and a great part of the
educated class. To describe its ideas and aspirations is to describe
those of most of the leaders of France. Nobility was no longer a mark of
high birth, nor a brevet of distinction; it was merely a sign that a
man, or some of his ancestors, had had property. Of course all persons
in the order were not equal. The descendants of the old families, which
had been great in the land for hundreds of years, despised the mushroom
noblemen of yesterday, and talked contemptuously of "nobility of the
gown." Theirs was of the sword, and dated from the Crusades. And under
Louis XVI., after the first dismissal of Necker, there was a reaction,
and ground gained by the older nobility over the newer, and by both over
the inferior classes. As the Revolution draws near and financial
embarrassment grows more acute, the pickings of the favored class have
become scarcer, while the appetite for them has increased. Preferment in
church or state must no longer go to the vulgar.

There is a distinction among nobles quite apart from the length of their
pedigree. We find a higher and a lower nobility, with no clear line of
division between them. They are in fact the very rich, whose families
have some prominence, and the moderately well off. For it may be noticed
that among nobles of all times and countries, although wealth unaided
may not give titles and place, it is pretty much a condition precedent
for acquiring them. A man may be of excellent family, and poor; but to
be a great noble, a man must be rich. In old France the road to
preferment was through the court; but to shine at court a considerable
income was required; and so the _noblesse de cour_ was more or less
identical with the richer nobility.

In this small but influential part of the nation, both the good and the
bad qualities which are favored by court life had reached a high degree
of development. The old French nobility has sometimes been represented
as exhibiting the best of manners and the worst of morals. I believe
that both sides of the picture have been painted in too high colors. The
courtier was not always polite, nor were all great nobles libertines.
Faithful husbands and wives were by no means exceptional; although, as
in other places, well behaved people did not make a parade of their
morality. There is such a thing as a French prig; but prigs are neither
common nor popular in France. Before the Revolution the art of pleasing
was more studied than it is to-day,--that art by which men and women
make themselves agreeable to their acquaintance.

"In old times, under Louis XV. and Louis XVI.," says the Viscount of
Ségur, "a young man entering society made what was called a
_début_. He cultivated accomplishments. His father suggested and
directed this work, for work it was; but the mother, the mother only,
could bring her son to that last degree of politeness, of grace and
amiability, which completed his education. Beside her natural
tenderness, her pride was so much at stake that you may judge what care,
what studied pains, she used in giving her children, on their entrance
into society, all the charm that she could develop in them, or bestow
upon them. Thence came that rare politeness, that exquisite taste, that
moderation in speech and jest, that graceful carriage, in short that
combination which characterized what was called good company, and which
always distinguished French society even among foreigners. If a young
man, because of his youth, had failed in attention to a lady, in
consideration for a man older than himself, in deference for old age,
the mother of the thoughtless young fellow was informed of it by her
friends the same evening; and on the following day he was sure to
receive advice and reproof."[Footnote: The Viscount of Ségur was
brother to the Count of Ségur, from the preface to whose Memoirs this
extract is taken.]

The instruction thus early given was not confined to forms. Indeed,
French society in that day was probably less formal in some ways than
any other European society; and in Paris people were more free than in
the provinces. Although making a bow was a fine art, although a lady's
curtsey was expected to be at once "natural, soft, modest, gracious, and
dignified," ceremonious greetings were considered unnecessary, and few
compliments were paid. To praise a woman's beauty to her face would have
been to disparage her modesty. Good manners consisted in no small part
in distinguishing perfectly what was due to every one, and in expressing
that distinction with lightness and grace. Different modes of address
were appropriate toward parents, relations, friends, acquaintances,
strangers, your superiors in rank, your poor dependents, yet all must be
treated with courtesy and consideration. Such manners are possible only
where social distinctions are positively ascertained. In old France, at
least, every man had his place and knew where he was.

But it was in their dealings with ladies that the Frenchmen of that day
showed the perfection of their system. Vicious they might be, but
discourteous they were not. No well-bred man would then appear in a
lady's room carelessly dressed, or in boots. In speech between the
sexes, the third person was generally used, and a gentleman in speaking
to a lady dropped his voice to a lower tone than he employed to men.
Gentlemen were careful before ladies not to treat even each other with
familiarity. Still less would one of them, however intimate he might be
with a lady's husband or brother, speak to her of his friend by any name
less formal than his title. These habits have left their mark in France
and elsewhere to this day; but the mark is fast disappearing, not
altogether to the advantage of social life.[Footnote: Genlis,
Dictionnaire des Étiquettes, i. 94, 218; ii. 194, 347.]

Friendship between men was sometimes carried so far as to interfere with
the claims of domestic affection. At least it was faithful and sincere,
and the man on whom fortune had frowned, the fallen minister, or the
disgraced courtier, was followed in his adversity by the kindness of his
friends. Of all the virtues this is perhaps the one which in our hurried
age tends most to disappear. It is left for the occupation of idle
hours, and the smallest piece of triviality which can be tortured into
the name of business, is allowed to crowd away those constantly repeated
attentions which might add a true grace and refinement to the lives of
those who gave and of those who received them. It is often said that
friendships are formed only in youth. Is not this partly because youth
Revolution, men of all ages made friendships, and supported them by the
consideration for others which is at the bottom of all politeness. The
Frenchman is nervous and irritable. When he lets his temper get beyond
his control, he is fierce and violent. He has little of the easy-going
good-nature under inconveniences, which some branches of the Teutonic
race believe themselves to possess. He has less kindly merriment than
the Tuscan. But he has trained himself for social life; and has learned,
when on his good behavior, to make others happy about him. And it is
part of the well-bred Frenchman's pride and happiness to be almost
always on his good behavior.

In one respect Paris in the eighteenth century was more like a
provincial town than like a great modern capital. Acquaintanceship had
not swallowed up intimacy. A man or a woman did not undertake to keep on
terms of civility with so many people that he could not find time to see
his best friends oftener than once or twice a year. The much vaunted
_salons_ of the old monarchy were charming, in great measure
because they were reasonably organized. An agreeable woman would draw
her friends about her; they would meet in her parlor until they knew
each other, and would be together often enough to keep touch
intellectually. The talker knew his audience and felt at home with it.
The listener had learned to expect something worth hearing. The mistress
of the house kept language and men within bounds, and had her own way of
getting rid of bores. But even French wit and vivacity were not always
equal to the demands upon them. "I remember," says Montesquieu, "that I
once had the curiosity to count how many times I should hear a little
story, which certainly did not deserve to be told or remembered; during
three weeks that it occupied the polite world, I heard it repeated two
hundred and twenty-five times, which pleased me much."[Footnote:
_Oeuvres_, vii 179 _(Pensées diverses)._]

Beside the tie of friendship we may set that of the family. In old
France this bond was much closer than it is in modern America. If a man
rose in the world, the benefit to his relations was greater than now;
and there was no theory current that a ruler, or a man in a position of
trust, should exclude from the places under him those persons with whom
he is best acquainted, and of whose fidelity to himself and to his
employers he has most reason to be sure. On the other hand, a disgrace
to one member of a family spread its blight on all the others, and the
judicial condemnation of one man might exclude his near relations from
the public service--a state of things which was beginning to be
repugnant to the public conscience, but which had at least the merit of
forming a strong band to restrain the tempted from his contemplated
crime.

In fact, the old idea of the family as an organic whole, with common
joys, honors, and responsibilities, common sorrows and disgraces, was
giving way to the newer notion of individualism. In France, however, the
process never went so far as it has done in some other countries,
including our own.

Good manners were certainly the rule at the French court, but there
were exceptions, and not inconspicuous ones, for Louis XV. was an
unfeeling man, and Louis XVI. was an awkward one. When Mademoiselle
Genêt, fifteen years old, was first engaged as reader to the former
king's daughters, she was in a state of agitation easy to imagine. The
court was in mourning, and the great rooms hung with black, the state
armchairs on platforms, several steps above the floor, the feathers
and the shoulder-knots embroidered with tinsel made a deep impression
on her. When the king first approached, she thought him very
imposing. He was going a-hunting, and was followed by a numerous
train. He stopped short in front of the young girl and the following
dialogue took place:--

"Mademoiselle Genêt, I am told that you are very learned; that you know
four or five foreign languages."

"I know only two, sir," trembling.

"Which are they?"

"English and Italian."

"Do you speak them fluently?"

"Yes, sir, very fluently."

"That's quite enough to put a husband out of temper;" and the king went
on, followed by his laughing train, and left the poor little girl
standing abashed and disconsolate.[Footnote: Campan, i. pp. vi. viii.]

The memoirs of the time are full of stories proving that the rigorous
enforcement of étiquette and the general training in good manners had
not done away with eccentricity of behavior. The Count of Osmont, for
instance, was continually fidgeting with anything that might come under
his hand, and could not see a snuff-box without ladling out the snuff
with three fingers, and sprinkling it over his clothes like a Swiss
porter. He sometimes varied this pleasant performance by putting the box
itself under his nose, to the great disgust of whomever happened to be
its owner. He once spent a week at the house of Madame de Vassy, a lady
who was young and good-looking enough, but stiff and ceremonious. This
lady wore a skirt of crimson velvet over a big panier, and was covered
with pearls and diamonds. Madame de Vassy would not reprove Monsieur
d'Osmont in words for his method of treating her magnificent golden
snuff-box; but used to get up from her place at the card-table as soon
as he had so used it, empty all the snuff into the fireplace, and ring
for more. D'Osmont, meanwhile, would go on without noticing her, laugh
and swear over his cards, and get in a passion with himself if the luck
ran against him. Yet when he was not playing, the man was lively, modest
and amiable, and except for his fidgety habits, had the tone of the best
society.[Footnote: Dufort, ii. 46.]

That which above all things distinguished the French nobility, and
especially the highest ranks of it, from the rest of mankind was the
amount of leisure which it enjoyed. Most people in the world have to
work, most aristocracies to govern The English gentleman of the
eighteenth century farmed his estates, acted as a magistrate, took
part in politics. Living in the country, he was a mighty hunter. The
French nobleman, unless he were an officer in the army (and even the
officers had inordinately long leave of absence), had nothing to do
but to kill time. Only the poorer country gentlemen ever thought of
farming their own lands. For the unemployed nobles of Paris, there was
but occasional sport to be had. Indeed, the Frenchman, although he
likes the more violent and tumultuous kinds of hunting, is not easily
interested in the quieter and more lasting varieties of sport. He will
joyfully chase the wild boar, when horses, dogs, and horns, with the
admiration of his friends and servants, concur to keep his blood
boiling; but he will not care to plod alone through the woods for a
long afternoon on the chance of bringing home a brace of woodcock; nor
can he mention fishing without a sneer. Being thus deprived of the
chief resource by which Anglo-Saxons combine activity and indolence,
the French nobility cultivated to their highest pitch those human
pleasures which are at once the most vivid and the most delicate. They
devoted themselves to society and to love-making. Too quick-witted to
fall into sloth, too proud to become drunkards or gluttons, they
dissipated their lives in conversation and stained their souls with
intrigue. Never, probably, have the arts which make social intercourse
delightful been carried to so high a degree of excellence as among
them. Never perhaps, in a Christian country, have offenses against the
laws of marriage been so readily condoned, where outward decency was
not violated, as in the upper circles of France in the century
preceding the Revolution.

The vice of Parisian society under Louis XV. and his grandson presented
a curious character. Adultery had acquired a regular standing, and
connections dependent upon it were openly, if tacitly recognized. Such
illicit alliances were even governed by a morality of their own, and the
attempt to induce a woman to be unfaithful to her criminal lover might
be treated as an insult.[Footnote: Witness Rousseau and Mme. d'Houdetot
in the _Confessions_. Mlle. d'Aydie was accounted very virtuous for
dissuading her lover from marrying her, even after the birth of her
child, for fear of injuring his prospects. Yet the match would not seem,
to modern ideas, to have been a very unequal one.] But this pedantry of
vice was not always maintained. There were men and women in high life
who changed their connections very frequently, yielding to the caprice
of the moment, as the senses or the wit might lead them. Such people
were not passionate, but simply depraved; yet the mass of the community,
deterred partly by fear of ridicule, and partly by the Philosophic
spirit which had decided that chastity was not a part of natural morals,
did not visit them with very severe condemnation.

If eccentricity sometimes overrode étiquette and even politeness, good
morals and religion not infrequently made a stand against corruption.
There were loving wives and careful mothers among the highest nobility.
Of the Duchess of Ayen we get a description from her children. Her
mansion was in the Rue St. Honoré, and had a garden running back almost
to that of the Tuileries (for the Rue de Rivoli was not then in
existence). The house was known for the beauty of its apartments, and
for the superb collection of pictures which it contained. After dinner,
which was served at three o'clock, the duchess would retire to her
bedchamber, a large room hung with crimson damask, and take her place in
a great armchair by the fire. Her books, her work, her snuff-box, were
within reach. She would call her five girls about her. These, on chairs
and footstools, squabbling gently at times for the places next their
mother, would tell of their excursions, their lessons, the little events
of every day. There was nothing frivolous in their education. Their old
nurse had not filled their minds with fairy tales, but with stories from
the Old Testament and with anecdotes of heroic actions.

The pleasures of these girls were simple. Once or twice in a summer they
went on a visit to their grandfather, the Marshal de Noailles at Saint
Germain en Laye. In the autumn they spent a week with their other
grandfather, Monsieur d'Aguesseau at Fresnes. An excursion into the
suburbs, a ride on donkeys on the slopes of Mont Valérien, made up their
innocent dissipations. Their most frivolous excitement was to see their
governess fall off her donkey.

The piety of the duchess might in some respects appear extravagant. Her
fourth daughter had two beggars of the parish for god-parents, as a
constant reminder of humility. The same child was of a violent and
willful disposition, but was converted at the age of eleven and became
mild, patient, and studious. The conversion of so young a sinner, and
the seriousness with which the event was treated by the family, seem
rather to belong to the atmosphere of Puritanism than to that of the
Catholicism of the eighteenth century. But if the religion of the
Duchess of Ayen sometimes led her to fantastic extremes, these were not
its principal characteristics. Her piety was applied to the conduct of
her daily life and to the education of her daughters in honesty,
reasonableness, and self-devotion. Their faith and hers were to be
tested by the hardest trials, and to be victorious both in prison and on
the scaffold. We are fortunate in possessing their biographies. In how
many cases at the same time and in the same country did similar virtues
go unrecorded?[Footnote: Vie de Madame de Lafayette, Mme. de Montagu.]

As for the smaller nobility, the "sparrow hawks,"[Footnote: Hobéraux.]
living in the country, they dwelt among their less exalted neighbors,
doing good or evil as the character of each one of them directed.
Sometimes we find them on friendly terms with the villagers, acting as
godfathers and godmothers to the children, summoning the peasants to
take part in the chase, or to dance in the courtyard of the castle. We
find them endowing hospitals, giving alms, keeping an eye on the conduct
of the village priest. A continual interchange of presents goes on
between the cottage and the great house. A new lord is welcomed by
salvos of musketry, the ladies of his family are met by young girls
bearing flowers. Such relations as these are said to have grown less
common as the great Revolution drew near. It has often been remarked of
the Vendée and Brittany, where a larger proportion of lords resided on
their estates than was the case elsewhere, that a friendlier feeling was
there cultivated between the upper and the lower classes; and that it
was in those provinces that a stand was made by lords and peasants alike
for the maintenance of the old order of things. In some parts of the
country the peasants and their lords were continually quarreling and
going to law. The royal intendant was besieged with complaints. The poor
could not get their pay for their work. They received blows instead of
money. Arrogance and injustice on the one side were met by impudence and
fraud on the other. The old leadership had passed away. The upper class
had lost its power and its responsibility; it insisted the more
tenaciously on its privileges. Exemption from certain taxes was the
chief of these, but there were others as irritating if less important.
Quarrels arose with the priest about the lord's right to be first given
the holy water. One vicar in his wrath deluged his lordship's new wig.

In general, we may conceive of the lesser nobles, deprived of their
useful function of regulating and administering the country, leading
somewhat penurious and useless lives. They hunted a good deal, they
slept long. Generally they did not eat overmuch, for gluttony is not a
vice of their race. They grumbled at the ascendency of the court, and at
the new army-regulations. They preserved in their families the noble
virtues of dignity and obedience. Children asked their parents' blessing
on their knees before they went to bed. The elder Mirabeau, the grim
Friend of Men, still knelt nightly before his mother in his fiftieth
year. The children honored their parents in fact as well as in form, and
took no important step in life without paternal consent. The boys ran
rather wild in their youth, but settled down at the approach of middle
life; the oldest inheriting the few or barren paternal acres; the
younger sons equally noble, and thus debarred from lucrative
occupations, pushing their fortunes in the army. The girls were married
young or went into a convent. Marriages were arranged entirely by the
parents. "My father," said a young nobleman, "I am told that you have
agreed on a marriage for me. Would you be kind enough to tell me if the
report be true, and what is the name of the lady?" "My son," answered
his parent, "be so good as to mind your own business, and not to come to
me with questions."[Footnote: Babeau, _Le Village_, 158. Ch. de
Kibbe, 169. Mme. de Montagu, 57. Genlis, _Dictionnaire des
Étiquettes,_ i. 71. Lavergne, _Les Économistes,_ 127.]



CHAPTER VII.

THE ARMY.


The nobility of France was essentially a military class. Its privileges
were claimed on account of services rendered in the field. The priests
pray, the nobles fight, the commons pay for all; such was the theory of
the state. It is true that the nobility no longer furnished the larger
part of the armies; that the old feudal levies of ban and rear-ban, in
which the baron rode at the head of his vassals, were no longer called
out. But still the soldier's life was considered the proper career of
the nobleman. A large proportion of the members of the order were
commissioned officers, and most officers were members of the order.

The rule which required proofs of nobility as a prerequisite to
obtaining a commission was not severely enforced in the reign of Louis
XV., and in the earlier years of his successor. In many regiments it was
usual to promote one or two deserving sergeants every year. In others
the necessary certificate of birth could be signed by any nobleman and
was often obtained from greed or good-nature. Moreover, an order of 1750
had provided that officers of plebeian extraction should sometimes be
ennobled for distinguished services. But in 1781, a new rule was
established. No one could thenceforth receive a commission as second
lieutenant who could not show four generations of nobility on his
father's side, counting himself. Thus were all members of families
recently ennobled excluded from the service, and no door was left open
to the military ambition of people belonging to the middle class;
although that class was yearly increasing in importance. Moreover,
strict genealogical proofs were required, the candidate for a commission
having to submit his papers to the royal herald. Exceptions were made in
favor of the sons of members of the military order of Saint Louis.
[Footnote: Ségur, i. 82, 158. Chérest, i. 14. Anciennes lois françaises,
22d May, 1781. The regiments to which the regulation applies are those
of French infantry (not foreign regiments), cavalry, light horse,
dragoons, and chasseurs à cheval. This would seem to exclude the
artillery and engineers. The foreign regiments appear to have been
included in a later order. Chérest, i. 24.]

But all nobles were not on the same footing in the army. Among the
regimental officers two classes might be distinguished. There were, on
the one hand, the ensigns, lieutenants, captains, majors, and
lieutenant-colonels, who generally belonged to the poorer nobility. They
served long and for small pay, with little hope of the more brilliant
rewards of the profession. They did their work and stayed with their
regiments, although leave of absence was not difficult to obtain in time
of peace. Their lives were hard and frugal, a captain's pay not
exceeding twenty-five hundred livres, which was perhaps doubled by
allowances. On the other hand were the colonels and second colonels,
young men of influential families, who, at most, passed through the
lower ranks to learn something of the duties of an officer. Their
commissions were procured by favor. There was scarce a bishop about the
court who did not have a candidate for a colonelcy, scarcely a pretty
woman who did not aspire to make her friend a captain. The rich young
men, thus promoted, threw their money about freely in camp and garrison.
Thus if the nobility had exclusive privileges, the court had privileges
that excluded those of the rest of the nobility, and in the very last
days of the old monarchy, these also were enhanced. The Board of War in
1788, decided that no one should become a general officer who had not
previously been a colonel; and colonels' commissions, besides being very
expensive, were given, as above stated, by favor alone. Thus on the eve
of the Revolution were the bands of privilege drawn tighter in France.
[Footnote: Ségur, i. 154. Chérest, ii. 90.] The colonels thus appointed
were generally not wanting in courage. The French nobility of all
degrees was ready enough to give its blood on the battle-field. Thus the
son of the Duke of Boufflers, fourteen years old, had been made colonel
of the regiment which bore the name of his family. The duke served as a
lieutenant-général in the same army. Fearing that the boy might not know
how to behave in battle, the father, on the first occasion, obtained
permission from the Marshal, Maurice de Saxe, commander of the army, to
accompany his son as a volunteer. The boy's regiment was ordered to
attack the intrenched village of Raucoux. The young colonel and his
father, followed by two pages, led their men against the intrenchments.
When they reached the works, the duke took his son in his arms and threw
him over the parapet. He himself followed, and both came off unhurt, but
the two pages were shot dead.[Footnote: Montbarey, i. 38.]

In America, as in Europe, the young favorites of fortune were ready
enough to fight. Such men as Lauzun, Ségur, or the Viscount of Noailles
asked nothing better than adventures, whether of war or love; but in
peace they could not be looked on as satisfactory or hard-working
officers. Yet they and their like continued to get advancement.
Ordinances might be passed from time to time, requiring age or length of
service, but ordinances in old France did not apply to the great. The
poorer nobility might grumble, but the court families continued to get
the good places. The lieutenant-colonels and the other working officers
of the army had but little chance of rising to be general officers. Even
before the order of 1788, promotion fell to the courtier colonels. The
baton of the marshals of France was placed in the hands only of the very
highest nobility. All over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, armies were often commanded by men born to princely rank.
That this did not necessarily mean that they were ill commanded may be
shown by the names of Turenne and Condé, Maurice de Saxe and Eugène of
Savoy, Prince Henry of Prussia I and Frederick the Great.

While the higher commands were thus monopolized (or nearly so) by the
rich and powerful, the poorer nobility flocked into the army, to occupy
the subordinate ranks of commissioned officers. Sometimes they came
through the military schools. The most important of these had been
founded at Paris in 1750, by the financier Paris-Duverney. Here several
hundred young gentlemen, mostly born poor and preferably the sons of
officers, received a military education. The boys came to the school
from their homes in the country between the ages of nine and eleven,
rustic little figures sometimes, in wooden shoes and woolen caps, like
the peasant lads who had been their early playmates. They were taught
the duties of gentlemen and officers, cleanliness, an upright carriage,
the manual and tactics, and something of military science. Other
schools, kept by monks, existed in the provinces where the young
aspirants for commissions learned engineering and the theory of
artillery. But many young a noblemen entered their career by a process
more in accordance with youthful tastes. We find boys in camp in time of
war, evading the orders which forbade entering the service before the
age of sixteen. Children of twelve and thirteen are wounded in battle.
[Footnote: Babeau, _Vie militaire_, ii. 7, 45. Montbarey, i. 18.]

As the only form of active life in which most nobles could take part
was found in the army, there was always too large a number of
officers, and too great a proportion of the military expenses was
devoted to them. In 1787 hardly more than one in three of those
holding commissions was in active service. The number of soldiers
under Louis XVI. was less than a hundred and fifty thousand actually
with the colors. There were thirty-six thousand officers, on paper;
thirteen thousand actively employed. The soldiers cost the state
44,100,000 livres a year, the officers 46,400,000 livres.[Footnote:
Babeau, Vie militaire, i. 15; ii. 90, 145. Necker, De l'Administration,
ii. 415, 418.]

The relation between the officers and the soldiers of the old French
army was more intimate and kindly than that existing in any other
European army of the time. For both, their regiment was a home, and the
military service a lifelong profession. They had entered it young, and
they hoped to die in it. Their relation to each other had become a part
of the structure of their minds; a condition of coherent thought. A
soldier might rise from the ranks and become a lieutenant, or even a
captain, but such promotion was infrequent; few common soldiers had the
education or the means to aspire to it. On the other hand, the command
of a company was sometimes almost hereditary. The captain might be lord
of the village in which his soldiers were born. In that case he would
care for them in sickness, and perhaps even grant a furlough when the
private was much needed by his family at home. His own chance of
promotion was small. He expected to do the work of his life in that
company, among those soldiers, with perhaps his younger brother, or, in
time, his son, as his lieutenant. It would seem that in the years
immediately preceding the French Revolution these kindly relations were
in some measure dying out. The captain was no longer so closely
connected with his company as he had been. Officialism was taking the
place of those personal connections which had characterized the feudal
system. The gulf between soldiers and officers, if not harder to cross
for the ambitious, separated the commonplace members of each group more
widely from those of the other.[Footnote: Babeau, Vie militaire, i. 43,
189. Montbarey, ii. 272. Moore's View, i. 365.]

The private soldiers of King Louis XVI., who stood in long white lines
on parade at Newport, while their many colored flags floated above and
the officers brandished their spontoons in front, or who rushed in
night attack on the advanced redoubt at Yorktown, were not, like
modern European soldiers, brought together by conscription. They were,
nominally at least, volunteers. Unruly lads, mechanics out of work,
runaway apprentices, were readily drawn into the service by skillful
recruiting officers. Thirty years before, it had been the custom of
these landsharks to cheat or bully young men into the service. The raw
youth, arriving in Paris from the country, had been offered by a
chance acquaintance a place as servant in a gentleman's family, and
after signing an engagement had found himself bound for eight years to
serve His Majesty, in one of his regiments of foot. The young
barber-surgeon had waked from a carouse with the king's silver in his
pocket. Such things were still common in Germany. In France some
effort had been made to regulate the activity of the recruiting
officers. Complaints of force or fraud in enlistment received
attention from the authorities. The soldiers of Louis XVI., therefore,
were engaged with comparative fairness. The infantry came mostly from
the towns, the cavalry and artillery from the country. The soldiers
were derived from the lowest part of the population. Whether they
improved or deteriorated in the service depended on their officers. In
any case they became entirely absorbed in it. The soldier did not keep
even the name by which he had been known in common life. He assumed,
or was given, a _nom de guerre_ such as La Tulippe, La Tendresse,
Pollux, Pot-de-Vin, Vide-bouteille, or Va-de-bon-coeur. His term of
service was seven or eight years, but he was by no means sure of
getting a fair discharge at the end of it; and was in any case likely
to reenlist. Thus the recruit had, in fact entered upon the profession
of his life.[Footnote: Babeau, _Vie militaire_, i. 55, 136,
182. Mercier, x. 273. Ségur, i. 222; _Encyc. méth. Art milit._ ii. 177
(_Desertion_)]

The uniforms of the day were ill adapted to campaigning. The French
soldier of the line wore white clothes with colored trimmings, varying
according to his regiment. On his head was perched the triangular cocked
hat of the period, standing well out over his ears, but hardly shading
his eyes. Beneath it his hair was powdered, or rather, pasted; for the
powder was sifted on to the wet hair, and caked in the process. The
condition of the mass after a rainy night at the camp-fire may be
imagined. In some regiments the wearing of a moustache was required, and
those soldiers whom nature had not supplied with such an ornament were
obliged to put on a false one, fastened with pitch, which was liable to
cause abcesses on the lip. Sometimes a fine, uniform color was produced
in the moustaches of a whole regiment by means of boot-blacking. Broad
white belts were crossed upon the breast. The linen gaiters, white on
parade, black for the march, came well above the knee, and a superfluous
number of garters impeded the step. It was a tedious matter to put these
things on; and if a pebble got in through a button-hole, the soldier was
tempted to leave it in his shoe, until it had made his foot sore.
Uniforms were seldom renewed. The coat was expected to last three years,
the hat two, the breeches one.[Footnote: Babeau, _Vie militaire_,
i. 93. _Encyc. méth. Art milit._ i. 589 (_Chaussure_) ii. 179.
Susane, ix. (_Plates_). See also a very interesting little book by
a great man, Maurice de Saxe, _Les Rêveries_.]

All parts of the soldier's uniform were tight and close fitting. I think
that this was learned from the Prussians. The ideal of the army as a
machine seems to have originated, or at least to have been first worked
out in Germany. Such an ideal was a natural consequence of the military
system of the age. Of the soldiers of Frederick the Great only one-half
were his born subjects. Other German princes enlisted as many foreigners
as they could. In the French army were many regiments of foreign
mercenaries. Nowhere was the pay high, or the soldier well treated.
Desertion was very common. Under these circumstances mechanical
precision became an invaluable quality. The soldier must be held in very
strict bands, for if left free he might turn against the power that
employed him.

The connection between a rigid system in which nothing is left to the
soldier's intelligence or initiative, and a tight uniform, which
confines his movements, is both deep and evident. If a man is never to
have his own way, his master will inevitably find means to make him
needlessly uncomfortable. As the modern owner of a horse sometimes
diminishes the working power of the animal by check-reins and
martingales, so the despot of the eighteenth century buckled and
buttoned his military cattle into shape, and made them take unnatural
paces. But even under these disadvantages the French soldiers
surpassed all others in grace and ease of bearing. Officers were
sometimes accused of sacrificing the efficiency of their commands to
appearances. The evolutions of the troops involved steps more
appropriate to the dancing-master than to the drill sergeant.
[Footnote: Montbarey, ii. 272.] Such criticisms as these have often
been made on the French soldier by his own countrymen and by
foreigners. But those who think he can be trifled with on this
account, are apt to find themselves terribly mistaken.

The food of the soldiers was coarse and barely sufficient. The pay was
so absorbed by the requirements of the uniform, many of the smaller
parts of which were at the expense of the men, and by the diet, that
little was left for the almost necessary comforts of drink and tobacco.
The barracks, handsome outside, were close and crowded within. During
this reign orders were given that only two men should sleep in a bed. In
some garrisons soldiers were still billeted on the inhabitants. In
sickness they were better cared for than civilians, the military
hospitals being decidedly better than those open to the general public.
[Footnote: Lafayette told the Assembly of Notables in 1787 that the food
of the soldiers was insufficient for their maintenance. _Mémoires_,
i. 215. Ségur, i. 161.]

If we compare the material condition of the French soldier in the latter
years of the old monarchy with that of other European soldiers of his
day, we shall find him about as well treated as they were. If we compare
those times with these, we shall find that he is now better clothed, but
not better fed than he was then.[Footnote: Babeau, _Vie
militaire_, i. 374]

"The soldiers are very clean," writes an English traveler in France in
the year 1789; "so far from being meagre and ill-looking fellows, as
John Bull would persuade us, they are well-formed, tall, handsome men,
and have a cheerfulness and civility in their countenances and manner
which is peculiarly pleasing. They also looked very healthy, great care
is taken of them."[Footnote: Rigby, 13.]

The period of twenty-five years that preceded the Revolution was a time
of attempted reform in the French army. The defeats of the Seven Years'
War had served as a lesson. The Duke of Choiseul, the able minister
of Louis XV., abolished many abuses. The manoeuvres of the troops
became more regular, the discipline stricter and more exact for a time.
The Duke of Aiguillon ousted Choiseul, by making himself the courtier of
the strumpet Du Barry, and things appear to have slipped back. Then the
old king died, and Aiguillon followed his accomplice into exile. Louis
XVI. found his finances in disorder, his army and navy demoralized. The
death of the minister of war in 1775 gave him the opportunity to make
one of his well-meant and feeble attempts at reform. He called to the
ministry an old soldier, the Count of Saint-Germain, who had for some
time been living in retirement. The count had seen much foreign service,
was in full sympathy neither with the French army nor with the French
court, and was moreover a man who had little knack at getting on with
anybody. He had written a paper on military reforms, and thus attracted
notice. In vain, when in office, he attacked some crying abuses,
especially the privileges granted to favored regiments and favored
persons. While he disgusted the court in this way, he raised a storm of
indignation in the army by his love of foreign innovations, and
especially of one practice considered deeply degrading. This was the
punishment of minor offenses by flogging with the flat of the sword;
using a weapon especially made for that purpose. The arguments in favor
of this punishment are obvious. It is expeditious; it is disagreeable to
the sufferer, but does not rob the state of his services, nor subject
him to the bad influences and foul air of the guard-house. The
objections are equally apparent. Flogging, which seems the most natural
and simple of punishments to many men in an advanced state of
civilization, is hated by others, hardly more civilized, with a deadly
hatred. In the former case it inflicts but a moderate injury upon the
skin; in the latter, it strikes deep into the mind and soul. It would be
hard to say beforehand in which way a nation will take it. The English
soldier of Waterloo, like the German of Rossbach, received the lash
almost as a joke. The Frenchman, their unsuccessful opponent on those
fields, could hardly endure it. Grenadiers wept at inflicting the sword
stroke, and their colonel mingled his tears with theirs. "Strike with
the point," cried a soldier, "it hurts less!"

To some of the foreigners in the French service this sensitiveness
seemed absurd. The Count of Saint-Germain consulted, on the subject, a
major of the regiment of Nassau, who had risen from the ranks. "Sir,"
said the veteran, "I have received a great many blows; I have given a
great many, and all to my advantage."[Footnote: Ségur, i. 80. Mercier,
vii. 212. Besenval, ii. 19. Allonville. _Mem. sec._ 84. Montbarey,
i. 311. Flogging in some form and German ways in general seem to have
been introduced into the French army as early as Choiseul's time, and
more or less practiced through the reign of Louis XVI.; but the great
discontent appears to date from the more rigorous application of such
methods by Saint-Germain. Montbarey. Dumouriez, i. 370 (liv. ii. ch.
iii).]

The spirit of reform was in the air, and ardent young officers would let
nothing pass untried. The Count of Ségur tells a story of such an one;
and although no name be given, he seems to point to the brother-in-law
of Lafayette, the brave Viscount of Noailles.

"One morning," says Ségur, "I saw a young man of one of the first
families of the court enter my bedroom. I had been his friend from
childhood. He had long hated study, and thought only of pleasure, play,
and women. But recently he had been seized with military ardor, and
dreamed but of arms, horses, school of theory, exercises, and German
discipline.

"As he came into my room, he looked profoundly serious; he begged me to
send away my valet. When we were alone: `What is the meaning, my dear
Viscount,' said I, `of so early a visit and so grave a beginning? Is it
some new affair of honor or of love?'

"`By no means,' said he, `but it is on account of a very important
matter, and of an experiment that I have absolutely resolved to make. It
will undoubtedly seem very strange to you; but it is necessary in order
to enlighten me on the great subject we are all discussing; we can judge
well only of what we have ourselves undergone. When I tell you my plan
you will feel at once that I could intrust it only to my best friend,
and that none but he can help me to execute it. In a word, here is the
case: I want to know positively what effect strokes with the flat of the
sword may have on a strong, courageous, well-balanced man, and how far
his obstinacy could bear this punishment without weakening. So I beg you
to lay on until I say "Enough."'

"Bursting out laughing at this speech, I did all I could to turn him
aside from his strange plan, and to convince him of the folly of his
proposal; but it was useless. He insisted, begged and conjured me to do
him this pleasure, with as many entreaties as if it had been a question
of getting me to render him some great service.

"At last I consented and resolved to punish his fancy by giving him his
money's worth. So I set to work; but, to my great astonishment, the
sufferer, coldly meditating on the effect of each blow, and collecting
all his courage to support it, spoke not a word and constrained himself
to appear unmoved; so that it was only after letting me repeat the
experiment a score of times that he said: `Friend, it is enough. I am
contented; and I now understand that this must be an efficacious method
of conquering many faults.'

"I thought all was over; and up to that point the scene had seemed to me
simply comic; but just as I was about to ring for my valet to dress me,
the Viscount, suddenly stopping me, said: `One moment, please; all is
not finished; it is well that you should make this experiment, too.'

"I assured him that I had no desire to do so, and that it would by no
means change my opinion, which was entirely adverse to an innovation so
opposed to the French character.

"`Very well,' answered he, `but I ask it not for your sake but for mine.
I know you; although you are a perfect friend, you are very lively, a
little fond of poking fun, and you would perhaps make a very amusing
story of what has just happened between us, at my expense, among your
ladies.'

"`But is not my word enough for you?' I rejoined.

"`Yes,' said he, `in any more serious matter; but anyway, if I am only
afraid of an indiscretion, that fear is too much. And so, in the name of
friendship, I beg you, set me completely at ease on that point by taking
back what you have been kind enough to lend me so gracefully. Moreover,
I repeat it, believe me, you will profit by it and be glad to have
judged for yourself this new method that is so much discussed.'

"Overcome by his prayers, I let him take the fatal weapon; but after he
had given me the first stroke, far from imitating his obstinate
endurance, I quickly called out that it was enough, and that I
considered myself sufficiently enlightened on this grave question. Thus
ended this mad scene; we embraced at parting; and in spite of my desire
to tell the story, I kept his secret as long as he pleased."[Footnote:
Ségur, i. 84.]

The discipline of the French army, like that of other bodies, military
and civil, depended much less on regulations than on the individual
character of the men in command for the time being. France was engaged
in but one war during the reign of Louis XVI., and in that war the
land forces were occupied only in America. "The French discipline is
such," writes Lafayette to Washington from Newport, "that chickens and
pigs walk between the lines without being disturbed, and that there is
in the camp a cornfield of which not one leaf has been touched." And
Rochambeau tells with honest pride of apples hanging on the trees
which shaded the soldier's tents. "The discipline of the French army,"
he says, "has always followed it in all its campaigns. It was due to
the zeal of the generals, of the superior and regimental officers, and
especially to the good spirit of the soldier, which never failed." But
Rochambeau was a working general, and Lafayette had done his best in
France that, as far as was possible, the French commander in America
should have working officers under him. Neither in war nor in peace
have the French always been famous for their discipline; and the
discontent which had been caused by the changes above mentioned had
not tended to strengthen it in the closing years of the monarchy.
"Whatever idea I may have formed of the want of discipline and of the
anarchy which reigned among the troops," says Besenval, "it was far
below what I found when I saw them close," and circumstances confirm
the testimony of this not over-trustworthy witness.[Footnote:
Washington, vii. 518. Rochambeau, i. 255, 314. Fersen,
i. 39. 67. Besenval, ii. 36.]

It was in the latter part of the previous reign that the adventure of
the Count of Bréhan had taken place; but the story is too characteristic
to be omitted, and the spirit which it showed continued to exist down to
the very end of the old monarchy.

The Count of Bréhan, after serving with distinction in the Seven Years'
War, had retired from the army, and devoted his time to society and the
fine arts. He was called to Versailles one day by the Duke of Aiguillon,
prime minister to Louis XV., his friend and cousin. "I have named you to
the king," said the duke, "as the only man who would be able to bring
the Dauphiny regiment into a state of discipline. The line officers, by
their insubordinate behavior, have driven away several colonels in
succession. If I were offering you a favor, you might refuse; but this
is an act of duty, and I have assured the king that you would undertake
it."

"You do me justice," answered Bréhan. "I will take the command of the
regiment, but I must make three conditions. I must have unlimited power
to reward and punish; I must be pardoned if I overstep the regulations;
and if I succeed in bringing the regiment into good condition, I am not
to be obliged to keep it for more than a year."

His conditions granted, Bréhan set out for Marseilles, where the
regiment was quartered. On his arrival in that city, he put up at a
small and inconspicuous inn, and, dressed as a civilian, made his way on
foot to a coffee-house, which was said to be a favorite lounging-place
of the officers of the Dauphiny regiment. Taking a seat, he listened to
the conversation going on about him, and soon made out that the
insubordinate subalterns were talking about their new colonel, and of
the fine tricks they would play him on his arrival. Picking out two
young officers who were making themselves particularly conspicuous, he
interrupted their conversation.

"You do not know," he says, "the man whom you want to drive away. I
advise you to mind what you do, or you may get into a scrape."

"Who is this jackanapes that dares to give us advice?"

"A man who will not stand any rudeness, and who demands satisfaction!"
cries Bréhan, unbuttoning his civilian's coat and showing his military
order of Saint Louis.

So he goes out with the young fellows, and all the way to the place
where they are to fight, he chaffs and badgers them. This puts them more
and more out of temper, so that when they reach the ground they are very
much excited, while he is perfectly cool. He wounds them one after the
other; then, turning to the witnesses: "Gentlemen," says he, "I believe
I have done enough, for a man who has been traveling night and day all
the way from Paris. If anybody wants any more, he can easily find me. I
am not one of the people who get out of the way."

Thereupon he leaves them, goes back to his inn, puts on his uniform,
calls on the general commanding the garrison, and sends orders to the
officers of the Dauphiny regiment to come and see him. These presently
arrive, and are thoroughly astonished when they recognize the man whom
they met in the coffee-house, and who has just wounded two of their
comrades. But Bréhan pretends not to know any of them, speaks to all
kindly, tells them of the severe orders that he bears in case of
insubordination, and expresses the hope and conviction that there will
be no trouble. He then asks if all the officers of the regiment are
present. They answer that two gentlemen are ill. "I will go to see
them," says the new colonel, "and make sure that they are well taken
care of." He does in fact visit his late adversaries, and finds them in
great trepidation. They try to make excuses, but Bréhan stops them. "I
do not want to know about anything that happened before I took command,"
he says, "and I am quite sure that henceforth I shall have only a good
report to make to the king of all the officers of my regiment, with whom
I hope to live on the best of terms."

By this firm and conciliatory conduct, the Count of Bréhan inspired the
Dauphiny regiment with respect and affection. He restored its discipline
and left it when his service was over, much regretted by all its
officers.[Footnote: Allonville, i. 162.]

The lieutenants of the French army were united in an association called
the Calotte. The legitimate object of this society was to lick young
officers into shape, by obliging them to conform to the rules of
politeness and proper behavior, as understood by their class. For this
purpose the senior lieutenant of each regiment was the chief of the
regimental club, and there was a general chief for the whole army.
Offenses against good manners, faults of meanness, or oddity of
behavior, were discouraged by admonitions, given privately by the chief,
or publicly in the convivial meetings of the club. Moral pressure might
be carried so far in an aggravated case, as to cause the culprit to
resign his commission. The society in fact represented an organized
professional spirit; and although not recognized by the regulations, was
favored by the superior officers.[Footnote: Calotte=scull cap, here
fool's-cap. Concerning this society, see a series of _feuilletons_
in the _Moniteur Universel,_ Nov. 25th to 30th, 1864 by Gen.
Ambert; also _Encyclopédie méthodique, Art militaire. Militaire,_
iv. 101-103 (article _Calotte_); Ségur, i. 132.]

When discipline was relaxed, the Calotte assumed too great powers. Not
content with moral means, it undertook to enforce its decrees by
physical ones; and it extended its jurisdiction far above the rank of
lieutenant.

At the outbreak of the war between France and England in 1778, two camps
were formed in Normandy and Brittany for the purpose of training the
army, and perhaps with some intention of making a descent on the English
coast. The young French officers swarmed to these camps and divided
their time between drill and pleasure. On one occasion, seats had been
reserved on a hill for some Breton ladies, who were to see the
manoeuvres. Two colonels, escorting two ladies of the court who had
recently arrived from Paris, undertook to appropriate the chairs for
their companions. A squabble such as is common on such occasions was the
result.

The Count of Ségur, above mentioned, was acting as aide-de-camp to the
commanding general. A few days after the quarrel about the chairs, just
as he was going to begin a game of prisoners' base, two officers who
were his friends informed him privately that the Calotte had ordered the
two colonels who had given offense on that occasion to be publicly
tossed in blankets and that the sentence was about to be carried out.
Ségur, to gain time, ordered the drummers to beat an alarm. The game was
broken up, every officer ran to his colors, and the aide-de-camp
hastened to explain the matter to the astonished general. The proposed
punishment was deferred and finally prevented; but the escape from a
scandalous breach of discipline had been a narrow one.

As the Revolution drew nearer, its spirit became evident in the army.
The Count of Guibert, the most talented and influential member of the
Board of War in 1788, was the object of satire and epigram. The younger
officers conspired to spoil the success of his manoeuvres. The
experiments that had been tried, the frequent changes in the
regulations, had unsettled their ideas. In their reaction against the
disagreeable rigor of German discipline, they protested that English
officers alone, and not the machine-like soldiers of a despot, were the
models for freemen. The common soldiers caught the spirit of
insubordination from those who commanded them. Especially, the large
regiment of French Guards, a highly privileged body, permanently
quartered in Paris, was infected with the spirit of revolt. Its men were
conspicuous in the early troubles of the Revolution, acting on the side
of the mob.[Footnote: Chérest, i. 552. Miot de Mélito, i. 3.]

The militia of old France does not call for a long notice. It consisted
of from sixty to eighty thousand men, whose chief duty was in garrison
in time of war, and who during peace were not kept constantly together,
but assembled from time to time for drill. As the term of service was
six years, the number of men drawn did not exceed fifteen thousand
annually. This was surely no great drain on a population of twenty-six
millions. Militia duty was greatly hated, however. This appears to have
been because men did not volunteer for it, but were drafted; and because
many persons were exempted from the draft. This immunity covered not
only the sons of aged parents who were dependent on them for support,
but privileged persons of all sorts, from apothecaries to advocates,
gentlemen and their servants and game-keepers. The burden was thus
thrown entirely on the poorer peasantry.[Footnote: Broc, i. 117;
Babeau, _Le Village_, 259.]

The navy in the time of Louis XVI. reached a high state of efficiency.
The war of 1778 to 1783 was in great measure a naval war, and although
the French and their allies were worsted in some of the principal
actions, the general result may be held to have been favorable to them.
The navy at the outbreak of hostilities consisted of about seventy ships
of the line, and as many frigates and large corvettes, with a hundred
smaller vessels. These ships were built on admirable models, for the
French marine architects were well-trained and skillful; but the
materials and the construction were not equal in excellence to the
design. The invention of coppering the ships' bottoms, and thus adding
to their speed, although generally practiced in England, had been
applied in France only to the smaller part of the navy. The French,
however, had an advantage over the English in the fact that ships of the
same nominal class were in reality larger and broader of beam among the
former than among the latter, so that the French were sometimes able to
fight their lower batteries in rough water, when the English had to keep
their lower ports closed.

The naval officers of France were almost all noblemen, and received a
careful professional training. Yet the practice of transferring officers
of high rank from the army to the navy had not been completely
abandoned. Thus d'Estaing, who commanded with little distinction on the
North American coast in 1778, was no sailor, but a lieutenant-général,
artificially turned into a vice-admiral. Such cases, however, were not
common, and in general the French commanders erred rather by adhering
too closely to naval rule, than by want of professional training. In the
navy, as elsewhere, no great original talent was developed during this
reign, which was a time of expectation rather than of action.

The men, like the officers, were good and well-trained, except when the
lack of sailors obliged the government to employ soldiers on shipboard.
It is noticeable that the seamen bore the rope's end with equanimity,
although the landsmen were so much offended at flogging with the flat of
the sword. Nor do I find any complaint of want of discipline at sea.

The administration of naval affairs was less satisfactory than the ships
or the crews. The magazines were not well provided; and the stores were
probably bad, for the fleets were subject to epidemics.[Footnote:
Chabaud-Arnault, 189, 196, 214. Charnoek, iii. 222, 282 Ségur, i. 138.
Chevalier.]

In general the navy appears to have suffered less than the army from the
fermentation of the public mind. Marine affairs must always remain the
concern of a special class of men, cut off by absorbing occupations from
the interests and sympathies of the rest of mankind.



CHAPTER VIII

THE COURTS OF LAW.


While the greater and more conspicuous part of the French nobility lived
by the sword, a highly respectable portion of the order wore the
judicial gown. Prominent in French affairs in the eighteenth century we
find the Parliaments, a branch of the old feudal courts of the kings of
France, retaining the function of high courts of justice, and playing,
moreover, a certain political part. In the Parliament of Paris, on
solemn occasions, sat those few members of the highest nobility who held
the title of Peers of France. With these came the legal hierarchy of
First President, presidents _à mortier_ and counselors, numbering
about two hundred. The members were distributed, for the purposes of
ordinary business, among several courts, the Great Chamber, five courts
of Inquest, two courts of Petitions, etc.[Footnote: Grand' Chambre,
Cour des Enquêtes, Cour des Requêtes.] The Parliament of Paris possessed
original and appellate jurisdiction over a large part of central
France,--too large a part for the convenience of suitors,--but there
were twelve provincial parliaments set over other portions of the
kingdom. The members of these courts, and of several other tribunals of
inferior jurisdiction, formed the magistracy, a body of great dignity
and importance.

We have seen that the church possessed certain political rights; that it
held assemblies and controlled taxes. The political powers of the
parliaments were more limited, amounting to little more than the right
of solemn remonstrance. Under a strong monarch, like Louis XIV., this
power remained dormant; under weak kings, like his successors, it became
important.

The method of passing a law in the French monarchy was this. The king,
in one of his councils, issued an edict, and sent it to the Parliament
of Paris, or to such other Parliaments as it might concern, for
registration. If the Parliament accepted the edict, the latter was
entered in its books, and immediately promulgated as law. If the
Parliament did not approve, and was willing to enter on a contest with
the king and his advisers, it refused to register. In that case the king
might recede, or he might force the registration. This was done by means
of what was called a _bed of justice_. His Majesty, sitting on a
throne (whence the name of the ceremony), and surrounded by his officers
of state, personally commanded the Parliament to register, and the
Parliament was legally bound to comply. As a matter of fact, it did
sometimes continue to remonstrate; it sometimes adjourned, or ceased to
administer justice, 

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