WH

CHAPTER X.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

HILE the struggle between the Federalists and Republicans was going on in this country, the champions of power and the champions of freedom were engaged in a life-and-death struggle in France. For

The convocation of the States-General.

years the finances of the French government had been in a wretched condition. The long and unnecessary wars of the monarchy, the extravagance of the court and nobility had imposed upon the common people a burden that they were unable to bear. They had to pay the greater part of the taxes, but when they had been taxed to their utmost capacity, the government found itself without the means of indulging in its customary extravagance. What was to be done? Finance minister after finance minister had been able to point to but one way out of the difficulty-increased taxation of the privileged classes, the nobles and priests. But these classes obstinately and stupidly refused to help the State out of the difficulty, created to a great extent by their own extravagance. In consequence of the emergency, it was finally decided to call a meeting of the States-General-representatives of the three great orders in France-nobles priests and commons.

The news that there was to be a meeting of the States-General sounded in the ears of the common people like the voice of hope to the dying. Under the reign of Louis XV they had seen justice bought and sold as though it were an ordinary article of com

the peasantry.

merce. They had seen the money coined Oppression of out of their very life blood, squandered in presents to the profligate and abandoned, and paid in absurdly high salaries to civil and military officials, who made no pretense of performing the duties of their offices. It is said that Louis XV probably spent more money on his pleasures than was spent during his reign in any department of state. They saw, says Alison, "the most important operations of agriculture" fettered or prevented by the game laws and the restrictions intended for their support. Game of the most destructive kind, such as wild boars and herds of deer were permitted to go at large through spacious districts without any enclosures to protect the crops. Numerous edicts existed which prohibited hoeing and weeding lest the young partridges should be disturbed; mowing hay lest the eggs should be destroyed; taking away the stubble lest the birds should be deprived of shelter. They had to "grind their corn at the landlord's mill, press their grapes at his press, bake their bread in his oven," and then pay what he asked for the privilege. In some provinces they had not even the right to use hand mills without paying for it, and the nobles had the power to sell to the

wretched peasants the right of bruising buckwheat and barley between two stones.

This robbery under the guise of law was made all the harder to bear through the insupportable insolence and arrogance of the robbers. "It was quite usual," we are told, "for the young noblesse of that day to run down the canaille of the streets, and to insult the wives of the burgeoise to their husbands' faces." About the middle of the eighteenth century, a grand seigneur thought it a great grievance that Louis XV should have rebuked him for indulging in the amusement of shooting peasants.

But the twenty-five millions of the French commons "who counted as nothing in France," and who looked forward with such hopefulness to the meeting of the States-General, were themselves divided by a chasm almost as wide as that which separated the nobles from them. An aristocracy of riches and culture had gradually grown up, composed of professional and business men, and although it was the most intelligent and enlightened part of the State, it was thoroughly imbued with the aristocratic spirit of the nobles, and regarded the toiling multitudes below it with the utmost contempt.

Roughly speaking, then, we may say that the French people prior to the Revolution was composed of three elements; the first composed of til

Classes of

which the French people

were composed lers of the soil whose food in some disprior to the tricts was chiefly grass and the barks of

revolution.

trees, and who hated with inexpressible intensity the

rapacious, grasping, grinding, tyrannical nobles who doomed them to such a life-and the artisans and workmen of the cities, supplied with the bare necessaries of life and loathing the aristocratic commoners who employed them as the cause of all their wretchedness; the second, of aristocratic commoners consisting of professional and business men, despising the people below them, and hating the arrogant and insolent nobles, who assumed to be above them; and the third of nobles, clerical and lay, the great majority of whom were infamous, or would have been at any other time, for their dissoluteness and profligacy and extravagance.

In May, 1789, the States-General met at Versailles. When they met the last time, more than one hundred and seventy years before, the three bodies

struggles be

tween the com

mons and the

other two
orders.

of which it was composed-nobles, priests and commoners-had voted separately so that any two had a veto on the proceedings of the other. But France had been taught by Rousseau that all men are equal; and the commoners, who outnumbered the other two bodies, refused to transact any business unless the nobles and priests would meet with them and vote as one body. When these obstinately and persistently refused, the commoners declared themselves the National Assembly of France, and as such proceeded to make a constitution.

When the nobles and priests saw that they could not prevent the action of the commoners, they joined that

rights of man.

body after it had assumed to be the repreDeclarations of sentatives of the people. Before the assembly began to make a constitution, they made a declaration of the rights of man. They declared among other things that all men are born free and equal; that sovereignty resides in the nation; that the natural rights of man can be limited only in such a way as to secure the same rights to others; that all men are entitled to religious freedom, and the freedom of speech and the press; that no one can be deprived of property save when necessity demands it, and then only in a legal way, and upon condition that he receives just compensation previously determined.

Abolition of nobility, etc.

It followed up this declaration with the abolition of such institutions as were inconsistent with it. Nobility, peerage, hereditary distinctions of ordersevery institution which was out of harmony with the doctrine of the liberty and equality of the rights of man, was swept away. It framed a constitution providing for a single chamber with supreme legislative authority, and a limited. monarch with only a suspensive veto.

If the Revolution could have stopped here, if the French monarch could have summoned the magnanimity to take the position of a constitutional king, if the French nobles, disregarding the habits and traditions of centuries, could

Conditions essential to success of this Revolution.

have acquiesced in the abolition of institutions which