2. CHAPTER II
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE
ANCIEN RÉGIME
1. The Absolute Monarchy and the Bases of the Ancien
Régime.
MANY historians assure us that the Revolution was directed
against the autocracy of the monarchy. In reality the kings of
France had ceased to be absolute monarchs long before its
outbreak.
Only very late in history—not until the reign of Louis
XIV.—did they finally obtain incontestable power. All the
preceding sovereigns, even the most powerful, such as Francis I.,
for example, had to sustain a constant struggle either against
the seigneurs, or the clergy, or the parliaments, and they did
not always win. Francis himself had not sufficient power to
protect his most intimate friends against the Sorbonne and the
Parliament. His friend and councillor Berquin, having offended
the Sorbonne, was arrested upon the order of the latter body.
The king ordered his release, which was refused. He was obliged
to send archers to remove him from the Conciergerie, and could
find no other means of protecting him than that of keeping him
beside him in the Louvre. The Sorbonne by no means considered
itself beaten. Profiting by the king's absence, it arrested
Berquin again and had him tried by Parliament. Condemned at ten
in the morning, he was burned alive at noon.
Built up very gradually, the power of the kings of France
was not absolute until the time of Louis XIV. It then rapidly
declined, and it would be truly difficult to speak of the
absolutism of Louis XVI.
This pretended master was the slave of his court, his
ministers, the clergy, and the nobles. He did what they forced
him to do and rarely what he wished. Perhaps no Frenchman was so
little free as the king.
The great power of the monarchy resided originally in the
Divine origin which was attributed to it, and in the traditions
which had accumulated during the ages. These formed the real
social framework of the country.
The true cause of the disappearance of the ancien
régime was simply the weakening of the traditions
which served as its foundations. When after repeated criticism
it could find no more defenders, the ancien régime
crumbled like a building whose foundations have been destroyed.
2. The Inconveniences of the Ancien
Régime
A long-established system of government will always finally
seem acceptable to the people governed. Habit masks its
inconveniences, which appear only when men begin to think. Then
they ask how they could ever have supported them. The truly
unhappy man is the man who believes himself miserable.
It was precisely this belief which was gaining ground at
the time of the Revolution, under the influence of the writers
whose work we shall presently study.
Then the imperfections of the
ancien régime stared
all men in the face. They were numerous; it is enough to mention
a few.
Despite the apparent authority of the central power, the
kingdom, formed by the successive conquest of independent
provinces, was divided into territories each of which had its own
laws and customs, and each of which paid different imposts.
Internal customs-houses separated them. The unity of France was
thus somewhat artificial. It represented an aggregate of various
countries which the repeated efforts of the kings, including
Louis XIV., had not succeeded in wholly unifying. The most
useful effect of the Revolution was this very unification.
To such material divisions were added social divisions
constituted by different classes—nobles, clergy, and the Third
Estate, whose rigid barriers could only with the utmost
difficulty be crossed.
Regarding the division of the classes as one of its
sources of power, the ancien régime had rigorously
maintained that division. This became the principal cause of the
hatreds which the system inspired. Much of the violence of the
triumphant bourgeoisie represented vengeance for a long
past of disdain and oppression. The wounds of self-love are the
most difficult of all to forget. The Third Estate had suffered
many such wounds. At a meeting of the States General in 1614, at
which its representatives were obliged to remain bareheaded on
their knees, one member of the Third Estate having dared to say
that the three orders were like three brothers, the spokesman of
the nobles replied “that there was no fraternity between it
and the Third; that the nobles did not
wish the children of cobblers and tanners to call them their
brothers.”
Despite the march of enlightenment the nobles and the
clergy obstinately preserved their privileges and their demands,
no longer justifiable now that these classes had ceased to render
services.
Kept from the exercise of public functions by the royal
power, which distrusted them, and progressively replaced by a
bourgeoisie which was more and more learned and capable,
the social rôle of nobility and clergy was only an
empty show. This point has been luminously expounded by Taine:—
“Since the nobility, having lost its special capacity,
and the Third Estate, having acquired general capacity, were now
on a level in respect of education and aptitudes, the inequality
which divided them had become hurtful and useless. Instituted by
custom, it was no longer ratified by the consciousness, and the
Third Estate was with reason angered by privileges which nothing
justified, neither the capacity of the nobles nor the incapacity
of the bourgeoisie.”
By reason of the rigidity of castes established by a long
past we cannot see what could have persuaded the nobles and the
clergy to renounce their privileges. Certainly they did finally
abandon them one memorable evening, when events forced them to do
so; but then it was too late, and the Revolution, unchained, was
pursuing its course.
It is certain that modern progress would successively have
established all that the Revolution effected—the equality of
citizens before the law, the suppression of the privileges of
birth, &c. Despite the conservative spirit of the Latins, these
things would have
been won, as they were by the majority of the peoples. We might
in this manner have been saved twenty years of warfare and
devastation; but we must have had a different mental
constitution, and, above all, different statesmen.
The profound hostility of the bourgeoisie against
the classes maintained above it by tradition was one of the great
factors of the Revolution, and perfectly explains why, after its
triumph, the first class despoiled the vanquished of their
wealth. They behaved as conquerors—like William the Conqueror,
who, after the conquest of England, distributed the soil among
his soldiers.
But although the bourgeoisie detested the nobility
they had no hatred for royalty, and did not regard it as
revocable. The maladdress of the king and his appeals to foreign
powers only very gradually made him unpopular.
The first Assembly never dreamed of founding a republic.
Extremely royalist, in fact, it thought simply to substitute a
constitutional for an absolute monarchy. Only the consciousness
of its increasing power exasperated it against the resistance of
the king; but it dared not overthrow him.
3. Life under the Ancien Régime.
It is difficult to form a very clear idea of life under the
ancien régime, and, above all, of the real
situation of the peasants.
The writers who defend the Revolution as theologians
defend religious dogmas draw such gloomy pictures of the
existence of the peasants under the ancien régime
that we ask ourselves how it was that
all these unhappy creatures had not died of hunger long before.
A good example of this style of writing may be found in a book by
M. A. Rambaud, formerly professor at the Sorbonne, published
under the title
History of the French Revolution. One
notices especially an engraving bearing the legend,
Poverty of
Peasants under Louis XIV. In the foreground a man is
fighting some dogs for some bones, which for that matter are
already quite fleshless. Beside him a wretched fellow is
twisting himself and compressing his stomach. Farther back a
woman lying on the ground is eating grass. At the back of the
landscape figures of which one cannot say whether they are
corpses or persons starving are also stretched on the soil. As
an example of the administration of the
ancien
régime the same author assures us that “a place in
the police cost 300 livres and brought in 400,000.” Such
figures surely indicate a great disinterestedness on the part of
those who sold such productive employment! He also informs us
“that it cost only 120 livres to get people arrested,”
and that “under Louis XV. more than 150,000
lettres de
cachet were distributed.”
The majority of books dealing with the Revolution are
conceived with as little impartiality and critical spirit, which
is one reason why this period is really so little known to us.
Certainly there is no lack of documents, but they are
absolutely contradictory. To the celebrated description of La
Bruyére we may oppose the enthusiastic picture drawn by
the English traveller Young of the prosperous condition of the
peasants of some of the French provinces.
Were they really crushed by taxation, and did they, as has
been stated, pay four-fifths of their revenue instead of a fifth
as to-day? Impossible to say with certainty. One capital fact,
however, seems to prove that under the ancien
régime the situation of the inhabitants of the rural
districts could not have been so very wretched, since it seems
established that more than a third of the soil had been bought by
peasants.
We are better informed as to the financial system. It was
very oppressive and extremely complicated. The budgets usually
showed deficits, and the imposts of all kinds were raised by
tyrannical farmers-general. At the very moment of the Revolution
this condition of the finances became the cause of universal
discontent, which is expressed in the cahiers of the
States General. Let us remark that these cahiers did not
represent a previous state of affairs, but an actual condition
due to a crisis of poverty produced by the bad harvest of 1788
and the hard winter of 1789. What would these cahiers
have told us had they been written ten years earlier?
Despite these unfavourable circumstances the
cahiers contained no revolutionary ideas. The most
advanced merely asked that taxes should be imposed only with the
consent of the States General and paid by all alike. The same
cahiers sometimes expressed a wish that the power of the
king should be limited by a Constitution defining his rights and
those of the nation. If these wishes had been granted a
constitutional monarchy could very easily have been
substituted for the absolute monarchy, and the Revolution
would probably have been avoided.
Unhappily, the nobility and the clergy were too strong and
Louis XVI. too weak for such a solution to be possible.
Moreover, it would have been rendered extremely difficult
by the demands of the bourgeoisie, who claimed to
substitute themselves for the nobles, and were the real authors
of the Revolution. The movement started by the middle classes
rapidly exceeded their hopes, needs, and aspirations. They had
claimed equality for their own profit, but the people also
demanded equality. The Revolution thus finally became the
popular government which it was not and had no intention of
becoming at the outset.
4. Evolution of Monarchical Feeling during the
Revolution.
Despite the slow evolution of the affective elements, it is
certain that during the Revolution the sentiments, not of the
people only, but also of the revolutionary Assemblies with regard
to the monarchy, underwent a very rapid change. Between the
moment when the legislators of the first Assembly surrounded
Louis XVI. with respect and the moment when his head was cut off
a very few years had elapsed.
These changes, superficial rather than profound, were in
reality a mere transposition of sentiments of the same order.
The love which the men of this period professed for the king was
transferred to the new Government which had inherited his power.
The mechanism of such a transfer may easily be demonstrated.
Under the ancien régime, the sovereign,
holding his power by Divine right, was for this reason
invested with a kind of supernatural power. His people looked up
to him from every corner of the country.
This mystic belief in the absolute power of royalty was
shattered only when repeated experience proved that the power
attributed to the adored being was fictitious. He then lost his
prestige. Now, when prestige is lost the crowd will not forgive
the fallen idol for deluding them, and seek anew the idol without
which they cannot exist.
From the outset of the Revolution numerous facts, which
were daily repeated, revealed to the most fervent believers the
fact that royalty no longer possessed any power, and that there
were other powers capable, not only of contending with royalty,
but possessed of superior force.
What, for instance, was thought of the royal power by the
multitudes who saw the king held in check by the Assembly, and
incapable, in the heart of Paris, of defending his strongest
fortress against the attacks of armed bands?
The royal weakness thus being obvious, the power of the
Assembly was increasing. Now, in the eyes of the crowd weakness
has no prestige; it turns always to force.
In the Assemblies feeling was very fluid, but did not
evolve very rapidly, for which reason the monarchical faith
survived the taking of the Bastille the flight of the king, and
his understanding with foreign sovereigns.
The royalist faith was still so powerful that the Parisian
riots and the events which led to the execution of Louis XVI.
were not enough finally
to destroy, in the provinces, the species of secular piety which
enveloped the old monarchy.
8
It persisted in a great part of France during the whole of
the Revolution, and was the origin of the royalist conspiracies
and insurrections in various departments which the Convention had
such trouble to suppress. The royalist faith had disappeared in
Paris, where the weakness of the king was too plainly visible;
but in the provinces the royal power, representing God on earth,
still retained its prestige.
The royalist sentiments of the people must have been
deeply rooted to survive the guillotine. The royalist movements
persisted, indeed, during the whole of the Revolution, and were
accentuated under the Directory, when forty-nine departments sent
royalist deputies to Paris, which provoked the Directory to the
coup d'État of Fructidor.
This monarchical-feeling, with difficulty repressed by the
Revolution, contributed to the success of Bonaparte when he came
to occupy the throne of the ancient kings, and in great measure
to re-establish the ancien régime.
