CHAP. on that occult war for a century, which ended in the prostration of priesthood and monarchy.

XXXVII.

When such was the condition of the French civic population, what was that of the rustic? The people in the country were even more at the mercy of the intendant* and the governor, than their brethren in towns of the administration and the police. The obstructions to the transport, the sale, or the preservation of corn, have been mentioned. Customs' barriers were drawn round every province, each being allowed no sale in abundant years save within itself, and in years of bad harvest no supply. Wine was worse treated than corn, for the entire produce was obliged to be registered. Families were permitted to consume but a certain portion of their own wine. Far more than the value of the crop was added to the price in surcharges. For the farmer to produce either corn or wine, was not a blessing but a curse.

Then there was salt! What a source of oppression and of crime! It was decreed that every Frenchman should consume or pay for a certain quantity of salt, and that he should consume no more. Not every Frenchman; for the greater part of the Pays d'États continued to be free of salt duties and laws. Other provinces were less fortunate. In Amiens, for example, the people paid sixteen times the price for salt which it could be had for in Arras.† What cost eight sous at Clermont, cost four times eight on the hills above it. Of course, such difference of prices, established by the difference of tariffs, produced contraband. Who could resist? The frauding of the salt duties alone filled the gaols, and peopled the galleys.

Then came drawing for the militia; and when, instead

*"Know," said Law, on quitting France, to Dangeau, "that you have neither parliaments, nor committees, nor estates, nor governors, and I might add neither king nor minis

ter.

The kingdom I know is governed by thirty intendants." † Louis Blanc, Hist. de la Révolution.

XXXVII.

of drawing lots, parishes were charged with furnishing CHAP. a quota, conscripts escaped to the woods, and the rest of the valid population set forth to hunt and capture them, to avoid being drawn and carried off themselves. These réfractaires were the only game that the peasants were allowed to chase, and such sports sometimes resulted in a sanguinary battue.

If the peasant escaped the horrors of military service in that day, the corvée awaited him at home—the corvée, civil and military. The military obligation was to transport the baggage and provisions of troops without payment; the civil corvée was to make and repair roads and other public works, also without payment, and often at a distance from their habitation. Intendants and

the lords of the soil had thus the peasant at their mercy. The Duc d'Aiguillon nearly flung the whole peasantry of Brittany into revolt by the severity with which he enforced the corvée.

To crown these hard measures, came the taille, the vingtième, and capitation, which the clergy shook off altogether, and from which influential persons contrived to exonerate themselves by degrees. Turgot, intendant of the Limousin, calculated that the taille and the vingtième took from forty-five to fifty per cent. of the nett profit or produce of the soil. Landlord and tenant divided what remained, and, after paying dixième, and other charges, scarcely found one-fourth of the nett produce at their joint disposal.* In bad years, so common after 1765, proprietor and farmer divided nothing. The former found resources at court or elsewhere, the latter having none but mendicancy; † this, too, with all the penalties with which it was visited by Draconian edicts, found in these years of famine impossible to execute.‡ Turgot issued an order, that in the famine years the proprietor should feed the métayers or farmers. The

*Arthur Young.

† Turgot, Sur la Taille.

Ibid.

CHAP. proprietary class-with many exceptions, no doubtXXXVII. showed small sympathy for the peasant. They stoutly opposed the abolition of corvées, which Turgot began in the Limousin, and afterwards tried in vain to extend all over the kingdom. They fought hard for their seignorial rights, and rendered them more galling by the ineffable supremacy claimed as due in right of noble birth. In towns, this was galling to the pride and vanity of the professional and industrial man. But in the country, it was rank oppression to all who were not noble. Though seignorial power had been combated by intendants, these were not able to contend against court influence. And the aristocracy were still powerful in their own province.* They retained judicial rights, maintained seignorial dues, and the monopoly called banalité of oven, mill, and wine-press. They treated even the roturier, who had purchased landed property, as the native of another and inferior planet. No wonder that the strong, and soon to be fierce, aspirations of the French people were for equality.

Nor did the freedom, the competence, and the wealth thus ravished from the peasant, go to the ennobling or enriching of any other person or class. The nobles obtained small rent from an impoverished tenantry.† Though many may have paid their debts through the trickery of Law, future indebtedness became only the more onerous and the more difficult to shake off. At the commencement of the century, the great portion of the public revenue went to pay offices, dignitaries, pensions, and places. These sources were dried up towards the

* When it was proposed to introduce provincial assemblies, the Duke of Orleans complained to the Marquis de Bouillé, that this would cut off 300,000 livres of his revenue. "How is that?" asked the Marquis. "Because at present I make my arrangement with the

intendant, and pay pretty much what I please. It would be greatly different had we provincial assemblies." Bouillé's Memoirs.

The average produce of corn in England is 24 bushels to the acre, in France 18. Arthur Young.

7

XXXVII.

close of Louis' reign. Pensions were unpaid. Navy CHAP. and army were reduced; and the noblesse, dependent on their own revenue, were, with the exception of a few, as impoverished as their tenants. There were as many malcontents in the class of nobles as in that of the ignoble. As to the clergy, it resembled the nation, consisting of a few high prelates who monopolised power and wealth, whilst the curate of the parish was just as narrowed in his means and as discontented in his mind, as the peasants among whom he lived and whose oppression he shared.

Whilst the property as well as the just pride of the millions were thus sacrificed to the ignorance, the rapacity, and the vanity of a few, what had become of that great conservative element, the doctrines of religion,· which inculcated patience and acquiescence in all the ills of this world, promising retribution in the next? It was sapped and destroyed by those most interested in maintaining it. The clergy indeed allowed religion to die out; routine and intolerance being their only principles, the servility of intellect, which was part of their profession, rendering it impossible for them to form an idea, or conduct a defence, of their belief against the freer intellects that attacked it.* The nobles, and the intellectual society of which they formed a part, saw religion, both in its acts and in its functionaries, the one exciting reprobation and ridicule, and the latter anxious to shake off the weight of both. Government was so bad that all admitted a completely new one to be indispensable. The corollary was that religion had equally failed in attaining any useful result, and that since it could not be renewed, it required to be abolished.

Such was the wretched and depressed, though froward state of French men and French mind, which prévalu, le Christianisme véritable 'où le déspotisme civil a fermement s'est à peu près éteint.'

*Partout,' writes Lacordaire,

XXXVII.

CHAP. Louis the Sixteenth at twenty was called upon to govern. The first resolution required of him was the choice of a prime minister, the Duc d'Aiguillon being too unpopular to be continued in office. In this first choice Louis experienced the embarrassment which he was destined to feel through life, that of two conflicting motives. His impulse was to appoint a liberal politician and a reformer; but then he was determined not to appoint any whom his father might have disapproved of -a prince as bigoted as he had been retrograde.* The name of Machault, however, was one the prince approved, owing no doubt to his having been exiled by Pompadour. He was therefore fixed upon by the king, and a letter written and addressed to him; when the old court and priestly party, full of alarm, urged the king's aunts to interfere and expostulate with him on the bad effects of appointing a minister who, like Machault, had dared to ask the clergy for the amount of their revenue, and who consequently was odious to them. Would the new monarch commence his reign by an affront to the bishops and the church? The king hesitated. The letter was taken from the messenger about to start with it, and the missive despatched, not to Machault, but to Maurepas, requesting his attendance.† Maurepas, exiled for an epigram on Pompadour, was the fittest of men to manage a court. Notwithstanding his advanced age, he was still gay, witty, adroit, and superficial. But to the courtiers, to the high clergy, and to mesdames the king's aunts, the court was a far more important object of care than the nation. Ignorant as the young king himself of politics, Maurepas had the same desire to please, although what in Louis was goodness and amiability was merely self and laziness in the new minister. But whatever the motive, Maurepas felt, as well as the

*Soulavie, Mémoires de Louis Seize.

+ Mémoires de Campan. Droz, Hist. de Louis Seize.