The character of the kings of France underwent modification; to the proud, unyielding Louis XIV succeeded Louis XV, the indolent, and the easytempered Louis XVI; but through all these surface permutations the nature of royalty itself remained unchanged. On his death-bed Louis XIV could still assert: "I am the state"; when Louis XV had occasion to express regret at having given offence to his people he saw fit to close with the words, "Although a king is accountable for his conduct only to God"; and on the eve of the Revolution Louis XVI made reply to certain representations of the duc d'Orléans: "It is legal because I wish it."

Nor was this royal absolutism a mere abstraction; by means of centralisation and an official organisation that was a complete hierarchy in itself the king was able to make his power felt in the remotest corners of his kingdom. Immediately about him were the ministers, chosen from the "low bourgeoisie" (Saint-Simon) that they might be the more completely under control; and in each province was an intendant as omnipotent as the ministers, having under him sub-delegates whom he himself appointed, and who filled a position similar to that of sub-prefect. In cities the municipal authorities either purchased their office direct from the king or, in case they were appointed by election, submitted themselves entirely to the will of his agents. In the rural districts where there were as yet no municipal councils the syndic or mayor was chosen by general assembly of the people; but in no case would the general assembly venture to elect another candidate than the one offered by the sub-delegate, nor would the syndic, once in office, dare take a single step unapproved by his redoubtable chief. Indeed there was no end to the annoyances to which cities and villages were alike subjected under such a system of "administrative tutelage." Before a church roof could be repaired or a damaged fountain be restored, before even so insignificant a sum as twentyfive francs could be expended for the public good it was necessary to obtain the authorisation of the intendant of the province. Elevation to municipal authority in villages, that is to the post of syndic or tax-collector, came to be regarded as a calamity by the peasants rather than as a blessing. In 1702 the king conceived the idea of creating in each provincial parish an office of permanent syndic that he might derive profit from its sale to the highest bidder; but so few purchasers presented themselves that it was necessary to return to the system of so-called elections. In this manner the monarch had contrived by means of agents less numerous than to-day but still present in every part of the realm sent out from the seat of power, to obliterate all influences handed down from a former age, to substitute his own authority for that of any surviving remnant of the past.

It was in the life of the rural populations that the substitution just referred to wrought the most momentous effects.

[1 To be consulted: Arthur Young, Travels in France (1787-1789). Rougier de la Bergerie, Recherches sur les principaux abus qui s'opposent au progrès de l'agriculture (1788) and Histoire de l'agriculture française (1815), Mémoire publiée par la société de l'agriculture à l'assemblée nationale. Dareste de la Chavanne, Histoire des classes agricoles en France. H. Doniol, Histoire des classes rurales en France, and La Révolution et la Féodalité. Chassin, L'Église et les derniers serfs. Babeau, Le Village sous l'ancien régime and La vie rurale dans l'ancienne France. Koréief, Les paysans et la question paysanne en France au XVIII siècle (in Russian), Moscow, 1789. L'abbé (now cardinal) Mathieu, L'Ancien régime en Lorraine, Paris, 1878. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières en France, 4 vols., 1867. A. Franklin, Les corporations ouvrières, et comment on devenait patron. Babeau, La ville sous l'ancien régime, and Les artisans et les domestiques d'autrefois.]

One thing must not be forgotten: France was at that time an essentially rural country, and agriculture was the occupation of three-fourths of the population. That the Revolution struck such deep root all over the land was due not so much to the political changes it brought about as to the fact that it modified the social condition of twenty millions of peasants; it reached far and lasted long because it was above all an agrarian revolution.

According to a document published in 1790 by the national assembly the population of France was divided at that time into two unequal parts; 20,521,000 inhabitants lived, or rather existed, by agriculture, and 5,709,000 were occupied in industry, commerce, the so-called liberal professions, or the performance of public functions. The agriculturists composed 78.24 per cent. of the whole, as against 21.76 per cent. attributed to the urban classes. A single example will illustrate the relative inferiority of France's industrial population, however real had been the progress made. In 1789 French industries combined did not consume more than 250,000 tons of coal, and in 1815, twenty-six years later, that amount had only been quadrupled.

Given the relatively slow progress of French industry and the limited number of industrial working-people in France, is it to be wondered at that during the revolutionary period there was not, properly speaking, any social question that had labour for its basis? Yet there was a decided agrariansocial question, and this formed the groundwork of the Revolution. It was a question that interested nearly the whole of the population; some, the nobles, in their capacity of property-owners, others as occupying the land under various titles.

The maxim "No land without a lord" had in the eleventh century become a reality. The alleu, or piece of ground owned by an independent proprietor, had almost entirely disappeared, every division of land being the property of some noble who allowed it to be held by a tenant. To the noble belonged the fields and woods, the mountains and rivers; and the villains, those at least who were serfs, were also his property. Towards the close of the fourteenth century and in the beginning of the fifteenth had occurred that process of evolution which transformed with a few exceptions that were apparent up to the time of the Revolution the villain who was a serf into the villain who could call himself a free man. In 1789 there were still serfs in the church (for example, those of the St. Claude chapter in the

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[1 At the end of the eighteenth century there were in France six hundred great forges which produced 196 million pounds of cast-iron yearly. In 1742 the factory of Creuzot made a modest start, in 1767 Frédéric Japy founded the great watch-making establishment of Beaucourt, and in 1784 a certain Martin imported from England a machine for spinning flax invented by Arkwright. As was the case everywhere the lower classes at first showed great hostility to the introduction of machines (examples Jacquard, Vaucanson). The weaving industry had already attained a certain development; St. Quentin, in the manufacture of fine cloths, employed 60,000 spinners, 6,000 weavers, and exported 20 millions' worth of goods annually. The silk industry in Lyons counted 15,000 looms and 30,000 workers, while for the manufacture of silk stockings Lyons had 2,000 looms, Paris nearly as many, and Nîmes 3,000. At Wesserling and Mülhausen in Alsace, even at Jouy, near Paris, was started the manufacture of printed calicoes and chintzes.

In many branches of industry, especially the manufacture of pins, the machinery used, according to the Encyclopédie, was very primitive. France was enormously behind Great Britain in most respects and did not make any considerable progress until the time of Napoleon I.

In 1722 Bielefeld, a German, wrote: "The industries of the country are admirable, every article it sends forth is finished and complete, and charms by the merit of its invention and the perfection of its workmanship. It is these qualities that give to French manufactures their enormous sale, and the rumour is current that the nation realises from its foreign trade in fashionable stuffs alone 14 millions of livres." These indications certainly announced bright prospects for French industries, but what were they compared to the future that stretched before agricultural France ?]

Jura) and a few in the possession of nobles; these serfs were held in mortmain, that is, they had no power to will away either the lands they occupied or their personal belongings, because all they owned was the property of the

nobles.

Those of the peasants who had remained free, had mostly all become proprietors in their own right. There were, according to Necker, when he entered upon office, “an immense number of small properties in France." How had the French peasant who, in addition to bearing practically the whole burden of royal taxation, was obliged to pay ground-rent to the lord and tithes to the church, to render statute labour to the crown and support the passage of troops through his farms, to endure wars, famine, scant crops, and disease, contrived through it all to add constantly to his possessions of land? The answer is mainly to be found in a study of the traits that made up his character at that time and that still distinguish him in certain provinces to-day, namely: his wonderful ability to save, his greed for gain, his talent at concealing the true condition of his affairs, his passionate love for the soil; but the reason for the phenomenon also lies in the very nature of things themselves.

Now the natural laws that govern such conditions decreed then as they do to-day that the proprietor who does not cultivate his land shall derive from it but little profit, also that the proprietor who does not live upon his land shall obtain from it virtually nothing. At that epoch if the proprietor of an estate happened to belong to the lesser provincial nobility, the chances were that he was ruining himself trying to keep in repair a château, often immensely large, that was little more than a monument of past opulence and power; he was not in his own person a source of riches since he held it beneath him to live otherwise than "nobly"; that is, to pass his days in any other occupation than that of the hunt. Should he, however, belong to the court nobility, unless he was fortunate enough to secure some remunerative post, he was certain to ruin himself all the more speedily in splendid attire and extravagant living, at play at the king's table where enormous sums were lost, and in all the wild and wasteful follies that had their origin at Versailles.

The noble, great or lesser, who sees his resources dwindle to a point where they are insufficient to meet all his demands, makes up his mind to part with a portion of his ancestral estates; not the château, ornamented with coats-ofarms and crowned with weather-cocks, but some little piece of the land that lies about it. Even then, after he has gone so far, pride steps in and prevents his making a definite transaction of the sale; consequently all purchasers of his own rank or of the bourgeoisie withdraw leaving only the peasant, who alone is willing to accede to terms whereby the former owner reserves a "superior proprietary right," or a "right of repurchase." The peasant knows by experience that the noble will never be in a position to buy back what he has sold; nevertheless he faces with a courage that is truly admirable the necessity of paying this same noble his claim of lods et ventes, which are recurrent taxes and will be put into effect at every death on one side or the other, and has also the full knowledge that his position as an independent proprietor will be a far more difficult one to support than that of the farmer on the estate, whom the noble feels himself in a measure bound to uphold in time of trouble. Some writers have even declared his condition to be worse than that of the negro slave in our colonies whom the master at least feeds and clothes. But what of all that? The French peasant is determined to be a proprietor in his own right, to expend the labour of his hands on soil

that belongs to him. Hence it was found, after 1760, that one-third of the national territory, according to the estimation of Young, had passed into the hands of the peasants, who would not have been content to rest there if the vastest domains in France, those belonging to the clergy, had not come under the law of mortmain, that is, had not been inalienable.

Thus on the one side is the noble who has sold everything salable that he possesses except his château, but still retains superior rights over his former property, and on the other the peasant who gradually, bit by bit, has become the real proprietor. The one grew steadily poorer though he was practically exempt from the payment of taxes, while the other grew constantly richer though bearing the whole burden of state taxation, and paying certain dues to the noble besides.

In most cases the noble retained a right of sovereignty over his former estate which gave him the exclusive privilege of hunting and fishing within its boundaries. After his pigeons (right to maintain a colombier, pigeonhouse) had done damage to the newly sown seed, his hunting packs would devastate the crops; and all the year around depredations were committed by the rabbits of his warren and the wild beasts of his forests. Occasionally he could constrain the later owner to make exclusive use of his wine-press, mill, and ovens, against the payment of rent (right of banalités), and also claimed the right to demand hours of service, toll on all merchandise that crossed the bridge or any part of the lands, and a certain percentage of profit (right of potage and of boucherie) on all the wine and animals that were sold, and a guard-right in return for freedom from duty of guarding the castle; and this even where the castle had not been in existence for centuries.

Sometimes the noble counts, among the appurtenances of his estate, a prison, a pillory and, should he possess power of life or death, a gallows (potence. The meaning of the word potence, according to its etymology, is power). In the neighbourhood of certain villages there are to-day places designated by the name of "Justice," or "Fourches" (forks), which indicate the precise spot on which a gallows formerly stood.

After his duty to the noble has been fulfilled the peasant still owes a debt to the church-the tithe; and to the king he is obliged to pay talliage, capitation and the vingtièmes (twentieths). He is bothered by agents on account of his salt, his wine and other liquors, and in rendering his enforced service it is always upon the king's highways, never upon his own roads that he is obliged to work. He must further assist in the erection of barracks, in the deportation of beggars, galley-slaves, exiles, military baggage and ammunition.

If he has occasion to draw up a legal document there are the registryclerks with whom he has to deal and the stamp-tax that he has to pay; but last and heaviest burden of all, it was the peasant who took part almost alone in the drawing of lots for the militia-a system for which the modern one of conscription offers an equivalent.

There was another thing which added to the French peasant's distress; he felt himself stranded and alone in the midst of his difficulties, the old seignorial hierarchy having completely broken up, and his natural protectors no longer offering him protection. The noble took to being absent most of the time, living at court, or with the regiment; or, in case he still resided in the village, he interested himself in nothing but his own affairs. Had he chosen to oversee the election of the syndic and the assessment of taxes, to regulate the hours of statute-labour and the drawing of lots for the militia, he could have rendered great service to his former dependents by prevent

ing much injustice; but the fallen petty sovereign regarded all such tasks as beneath him. When the peasant became rich he sent his sons to school with the intention of making them bourgeois, or of buying for them a small office of the king; thus a force native to the village became lost to it in after years. The peasant could of course betake himself with his troubles to the curé, who was a man of far higher culture than himself; but the curé, while he usually remained as poor as the man who labours with his hands was yet the church-official to whom was paid the tithe. In this fashion the peasant found himself caught in a circle formed of employés, minor functionaries, and the syndic of the village, who were by no means his natural chiefs. After having been "devoured for centuries by wolves," as he complained, he was now to be "devoured by insects.'

In England the true protector of the peasant against arbitrary taxation, the exactions of fiscal agents, and the insolence of royal functionaries was the proprietary-lord, the landlord.

Between the French seigneur and the landlord, between the fief and the manor, the lapse of several centuries had created a vast difference. The English lord, not deeming it beneath his dignity to perform useful service, and refusing to ruin himself in court living, or to be cheated out of his substance at cards with the king, had found means to grow rich, instead of constantly poorer as had been the case with the French nobility, by taking advantage of all the new ideas introduced into a system of agriculture far in advance; but more especially by raising cattle, an industry that had rapidly developed in England, bestowing upon its inhabitants their classic name of "beef-eaters." Far from allowing his domains to crumble away from him bit by bit, he kept constantly widening their confines; and the rights he retained for himself were only those which offered some solid advantage, the purely vexatious claims he willingly relinquished.

As early as the reign of Charles VII the French nobility had begun to accept and profit by a system that relieved its members of all necessity of paying taxes, allowing the whole weight of the public burden to fall upon the shoulders of the people; whereas in England nobility and commons stood united against royal despotism, ready to share all public charges provided they were given equal recognition by the representatives of the nation. The English agriculturist had no causes of complaint against his landlord; side by side with him he grew in wealth, suffering no extortions such as oppressed the peasant of France, and knowing not the hate and rancour with which the latter's heart was filled. If in certain respects he still depended on his landlord, he could always be sure of finding in him a strong support. While the French noble, when he did not vegetate in idleness, was occupied in seeking adventures in the army, or his fortune at court, the landlord lived quietly in his own house, on his own estates, happy to feel himself master in his home, and indifferent to the royal favour; quite content with the distinction of having the finest breed of cattle in his stables, and the latest pattern of machines in his sheds. He was the recognised chief, acknowledged even by the king, of the community in which he lived; was president of the Factory Council, commandant of the militia—even justice of the peace when occasion arose.

The French noble, on the other hand, had ceased to be treated as a person of any consequence by the royal administration; in official language he was merely "first citizen" of the village to which he belonged. If he happened to reside in the village he enjoyed the proud distinction of occupying the bench of honour (banc d'œuvre, so called because it was elaborately