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.
