Chapter 24
Part III, Chapter V, Louis XVI, Part II. Anger against a government which wasted the public fortunes of France, rancour against an aristocracy which borrowed all the avenues to fortune save those of finance, these were the sentiments with which the middle class greeted Ségur's Edict. They asked a fair field and no favor, an equal taxation for the men of every class. The common people had their own grievances. The working class was organized in guilds or
corporations, the number of whose members was fixed and might not be exceeded. Even as today the Royal Academy in England, the Stock Exchange in France, and as the sons of the master workmen generally succeeded to their fathers in the exercise of their craft, it was difficult for an apprentice, born with no silver spoon in his mouth, to rise from the ranks. It was even hard enough to enter those ranks as an apprentice, for the number of apprentices was also fixed and
formal. The workmen asked free access to their craft and the abolition of the guilds. But the farmers and peasants had most of all a pressing need of reform. They were more and more conscious that their life was little better than a state of servitude. The king's taxes and the parson's tithe ate up the profit of their harvests. They were compelled to labor for their landlords so many days in the month or year without pay, to lend them on all occasions their carts and horses,
to offer them as a present certain portions of their crops and stock, to bake their own bread at a fixed tariff in the landlord's oven, to buy their own wine at his press, with other vexations which once had been conveniences or at least due reward for service rendered. What angered the peasant with a slow sullen dangerous ire was that he was beginning to perceive that in exchange no service was rendered. His corvée and his redevance had been part of his
rent and he paid the rent as well. The money and goods he expended had been in exchange for military protection and the nobles no longer protected him, were incapable of protecting him, had no right to attempt it, for the system of government had changed while his dues and debts alone remained unchanged. In fact he was keeping up two distinct governments, a feudal system which had long ceased to exist save in its abuses and a centralized monarchy no less oppressive. For every hundred
francs he gained he had to squeeze out 53 for the necessities of king and country, another turn of the screw rung 14 for the landlord's dues, then the church came exacted another 14 and left the poor man crushed with how much remaining for his rent, for his daily bread and the nurture of his family, wonderful thrift of france there was still sometimes a sue in his stocking. But the fear of the fisc made him hide it like a crime, exaggerate even the appearance of his most real misery,
lest the tax gatherer should come and take also the one you lamb. If the land was so exorbitantly taxed there was an excellent reason to account for it, only the poor paid toll. Those alone who had nothing to spare supported the immense expense of state, army, law and church. The thing appeared iniquitous to the conscience of the age and the first reform that Thiers etat meant to exact was the abolition of the privileges of the nobles. When Arthur Young traveled in France on the eve
of the revolution he told the peasants as it were a fairy tale that we in England have a great number of taxes but the poor do not pay them they are laid on the rich and what is more we have in England a tax paid by the rich for the relief of the poor. Sure those poor people had never heard of such a topsy-turvy land. Most of the miseries of their distressful country sprang from the opposite system. Only the poor were required to pay who could not pay and the rich who wanted for
nothing were in nothing mulked of their affluence. Thus since the reign of Francois Premier every year the king of France had spent more money than he received and had tried to annul the deficit by heaping a further burden on the poor peasants back that was already broken. By the accession of Louis Cès even a minister of finance could see that this process would yield nothing further. Louis had had some of the best ministers and some of the worst in French history. He had begun with a man of genius
his name was Thurgo. Il n'y a que Monsieur Thurgo et moi qui aimons le peuple said the king. Only Thurgo and I really care about the people. Thurgo had attacked the sacrosanct system of the nobles privileges and had begun by abolishing the corvée the forced labor of peasants. He was a free trader and had attempted to reform the corn laws but great was the ire of the lords and landed gentry and the weak Louis against his will had abandoned his minister. His successor Necker the
father of Madame de Staal a Swiss banker of English origin had not the bold wide views of Thurgo the reformer the first free trader but he was a wise financier a cautious economist a clear-headed painstaking administrator. He had already found some sort of a clue in the chaos of French finance when some court cabal the court had no relish for economy and disliked Necker for his bourgeois stiffness for his foreign origin and his Protestantism again turned the king against the servant who might
have saved him. This time the finances of France were entrusted to a man of the world Monsieur de who gave satisfaction to everybody with whom he came in contract. His talent appeared prodigious the poor king owned that he had never been so tranquil his long confabulations with Thurgo and especially with Necker had sometimes fatigued him but such was the facility of Monsieur de Calonne that the maze of financial difficulties appeared illuminated no trouble in the present no anxiety
in the future. And the people at court were just as pleased as the king unlike that bear of a neck care unlike the cold proud Thurgo Monsieur de Calonne never refused to grant a favor or to do a kindness no wonder if he were the most popular man if not in France at any rate at Versailles. Unfortunately when after four years in place Monsieur de Calonne looked carefully into his accounts he found there was a deficit of a hundred and fifteen millions of francs.
This was the verge of bankruptcy. Arthur Young who was traveling in France that year 1787 remarks how in every serious conversation that topic of a national bankruptcy would occur with the further question he puts it in italics would a bankruptcy occasion a civil war and a total overthrow of the government? The king was obliged to recall Necker but Necker was no magician and though at the news of his return the French loan rose some 30 points all he could do was to advise poor Louis to convoke
the state's general that is to say to unite the members of the three orders of France nobility clergy and tierzata in order to ask them to furnish forth the funds which must redeem the debt. The state's general had not met since 1614 since the majority of Louis the 13th and the king knew well that they would not meet simply to find a way out of his financial difficulties. They would insist upon reform all sorts of reforms they would exhume old abuses and make bad blood.
The king himself was not so much opposed to a certain measure of enlightened reform but his youngest brother octua he who was afterwards Charles the 10th and especially the queen would be violently passionately against it. The king knew well that he would be asked to abolish the privilege of the nobles and the clergy and partly from conviction and a sense of honor but partly also from what I dare hardly call the dread of a row with his wife
the king did not mean to consent to any such abolishment. The state's general met at Versailles on the 5th of May 1789. Thanks to the influence of Necker a double representation as it was called secured the tierzata which stood for 98 percent of the nation as many deputies as the two other orders. From the very first hour its superior ardor and energy were manifest. Those young men who had found no outlet for their powers in the army in diplomacy in the church were there in
crowds. There were 1100 deputies of the state's general and half of them belonged to the tierzata. There they were members of the state's general or spectators and encouragers of its proceedings. They with their wounded vanity, their relentless logic, their burning utopian dreams. Nothing is so dangerous as the logician who is also a dreamer. He may be Laclo, he may be Robespierre, he may be Bonaparte. In any case he is sure to be an uncomfortable neighbor.
Such silent and concentrated ambitions were not rare in 1789 when success was a privilege of birth or royal favor, when unprotected genius in a modest rank was frequently compelled to eat its heart out unremarked, when the issues were closed in front of a proud spirit, when humiliations were frequent and anger mute. At last the floodgates were opened. Like the barons of our King John these young men asked of the King that which France had never possessed, a written charter,
a constitution. They demanded the suppression of privileges. They decided that the state's general should be called the National Assembly, that its members all equal should no longer be divided into orders. They declared the equal rights of man born free admissible to all careers. They maintained that no sealed letter of the kings could ravish from them this, their own inherent freedom, but only the judgment of the law. They decreed the sovereignty of the people. They pronounced
the abolition of privileges and the equality of all men before the tax gatherer. The king should no longer demand a sum fixed at his own good pleasure. It was the deputies of the National Assembly who henceforth should decide what monies they would vote and over the expenditure of these monies they would keep a right of control. So far so good. The King fretted and fumed. To one of the royal proposals the Duke of Orléans objected that it was illegal. Legal enough since I wish it, cried
Louis, voicing in his pettish discontent the very principle of autocracy. Si c'est légal parce que je le veux. He spoke of his divine right, his good pleasure, and his absolute power and then sank into his plump and smiling apathy ending invariably by granting what indeed he had no longer the power to refuse. The National Assembly was intoxicated with its own success. Admirable so long as it was occupied and framing a permanent constitution for the future it lacked discipline, experience,
tradition. Would it show itself equally adequate to the crucial difficulties of the present? The Assembly was now the sovereign of France. The King, though King in name, had lost all executive power. Can we blame Louis XVI that he sought to evade this sad position of a faenéon king? He appealed to his troops to maintain his authority. In his horror of civil war he imagined that the foreign mercenaries, Swiss and German, which the government kept at its disposal,
would be less inflamed and angry than the French and doubtless also he thought that they would be less easily converted by the enthusiasts for liberty. He summoned them all and soon round Paris on all sides at Charonton, at Saint-Denis, at Courpois, at Sèvres, at La Mouette, on the Champ de Mars, a complete wing of troops, some 25,000 strong, French and foreign, surrounded the capital. Paris lay in the midst of them like a beleaguered city. This move of the kings or as the people
supposed of the queens and especially his appeal to the Germans exasperated the Parisians. Bread was already cruelly short. Did the King mean by a set blockade, by the argument of fire and famine, to refute the rights of man? False rumors flared up like wildfire that the King and Artois had a plot to poison the King, Young, that the German dragoons were massacring the people in the Tuileries gardens, Marmontel, and the knowledge that the capital was unprovided with either food or
firearms added the keen tip of fear to the popular anger. On the morning of the 12th of July Paris learned, and this time the news was true, that the King had dismissed Necker and all the liberal ministry. A somber wrath smoldered all day in the mind of the people that flared up at night on the boulevards into a great fierce blaze of indignation. Next day the mob attacked the Hôtel de Ville and the Invalides, demanding arms. If the King meant to fight, they too would show him what Paris could
do in that line. Especially the public feeling incriminated the Queen. No doubt but Paris imagined itself in the snare of a second Catherine de' Medici. The lion roared its wrath of her feminine treachery. The people surged in the streets, sleepless by day and night, shouting arms and bread. By a miracle the city which possessed no soldiers found in its every citizen a soldier equally able to obey or to command. The sack of the arsenal and of the Invalides supplied a certain
insufficient quantity of arms, and on the morning of the 14th of July, ever memorable date, henceforth the national holiday, the people of Paris, dragging with them the cannons of the Esplanade, marched on the Bastille, the King's fortress, the bulwark of the monarchy, the immense frowning keep, which for 400 years had thrown the gloom and threat of its colossal shadow across the popular quarter of Saint-Antoine. The Bastille was part of the fortifications of Paris, but above all it was
the state prison. It was to Paris what the tower was to London. Its eight vast towers with the cannon on their platforms seemed to menace the seething Fulberg at its feet. Down, dog, crouch, be quiet. The governor of the Bastille had neither garrison munitions nor food to withstand the siege, and doubtless he feared to bombard the unruly capital. He had no orders to destroy Paris. And so, like a young lion in sport, in the course of a summer's day Paris tore the great mass to
pieces. By the end of the afternoon the King had no Bastille. Today the tranquil waters of the canal of Saint-Martin cover its ruins. When the Duke of Viancourt broke the news to the King at Versailles, c'est une révolte, said Louis. Ney sire, replied the Duke, it is not a revolt, it is a revolution. End of section 24.
