counted on to re-establish them. Articles 291 and following of his penal code interdict all associations of more than twenty persons formed "without the consent of the government." Liberty of the press had been legally recognised under the constituent assembly, but it was not long before the revolutionists seized all the "moderate" newspapers and made bonfires of them in the street. After the fall of the monarchy, the revolutionary commune of Paris decreed on the 12th of August, 1792, that the "poisoners of public opinion should be cast into prison and their presses, type, and instruments be distributed among the patriot printers." Suleau, editor of the Acts of the Apostles was massacred by the populace on August 10th; du Rozoy, editor of the Gazette de Paris was judged, condemned to death, and executed. On the 29th of March, 1793, the convention declared subject to the pain of death any writer who should advocate the abolition of proprietary rights or the re-establishment of the monarchy. With the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, 1793, liberty had ceased to exist for the Girondins. Soon after the Vieux Cordelier of Camille Desmoulins was burned, and Desmoulins himself, as well as the great poet André Chénier, editor of the Journal de Paris, was decapitated. After the 9th Thermidor, it was the turn of the Jacobin papers to suffer oppression. Under the Directory, following upon the coup d'état of the 18th Fructidor fifty-four newspapers were suppressed and sixty-seven journalists deported.

Bonaparte, as first consul, permitted only thirteen journals to exist; when he became emperor he declared that the profession of journalism was a public function and re-established the censorship of the old régime. For the surviving newspapers he arrogated to himself the right of naming and revoking journalists and caused the oath of allegiance to be sworn to him by the printers. In 1811 he suppressed all the newspapers except four, originally intending to leave in existence only one, the Moniteur. A favourite remark of his was, "I am a child of the people and do not wish to be insulted like a king."

During the period extending from 1789 to 1815 France cannot be said to have had either liberty or constitution, since the constitution formulated in 1791, which instituted the legislative assembly, remained valid less than a year. The convention being a constituent assembly, voted two widely different constitutions, that of 1793, wildly demagogic, which was never made to serve, and that of the year III (1795). The latter accorded the right of suffrage in a superior degree - which was alone effective-only to citizens who possessed property yielding a revenue equal to that produced by a hundred and fifty or two hundred days' labour; and while pretending to respect the right of the people to vote, it in reality imposed great curtailment upon the mass of poor electors. It placed the executive power in the hands of five directors, and divided the legislative power, having learned wisdom by the unfortunate experience of the constitution of 1791, between two separate councils; that of the anciens and that of the Five Hundred. The period of the Directory up to its close with the coup d'état of Napoleon, on the 18th Brumaire, 1799, was marked by a series of coups d'état, occurring on the 18th Fructidor, 22nd Floreal, and 30th Prairial.

The convention, to sum up, gave France despotism exercised by an assembly. The government of Napoleon, whether consulate or empire, notwithstanding the constitutions of the years 8, 10, 12, etc., its republican features and popular aspects, its plebiscites and consul-senators, can be fitly characterised only by two words: military despotism. In it was exemplified the absolute power of the ancient Cæsars.

The Despotism of Napoleon

Napoleon recovered all the prerogatives that had been taken from the king; the right to make war and peace, to appoint bishops, magistrates, officers and functionaries of all kinds. He re-established the ancient system of administrative jurisdiction, and instituted in each department a conseil de préfecture with the conseil d'état at the head of all. By article 75 of the constitution of the year 8 he made public functionaries exempt from the judgment of ordinary tribunals. He appointed prefects and sub-prefects, in whom were revived the intendants and sub-delegates of former times; he chose mayors and adjuncts, and selected almost all the members of the general councils in districts and cities. He placed the prefects in charge of levying the troops, and the raising of contributions was entrusted to a whole hierarchy of financial functionaries.

After having created the state council, the senate, the legislative body (corps legislatif), and the tribunate, he made of the first the pivot of the Napoleonic rule, suppressed the fourth in 1807 as being too independent, and reduced the second and third to the condition of being merely chambers of registry for his will. On his own unsupported authority he regulated by decrees the budget of 1813, and ordered fresh levies of troops. Of what consequence beside him, who had been rendered three times sacred by the plebiscit, the expression of the national will, were any number of deputies appointed after the most extraordinary proceedings by a handful of electors united in a district or department college, who no longer had the least connection with any other electoral body? What did a deputy represent? A small division of territory, nothing more. The emperor, on the contrary, could lay claim to having received from the totality of the sovereign people the sovereign power. Like the Cæsars of Rome he was the "nation incarnate.

We have seen how fared freedom of the press and freedom of association under Napoleon; other liberties and guarantees were no more faithfully observed. In 1805 he suspended the functions of the jury in cases of high treason, which was virtually a return to trial by "commission" as practised under Richelieu and Louis XIV. In 1813 he annulled a decision rendered by the jury at Antwerp, and summoned both jury and accused to appear before another court. His decree issued in 1810 concerning state prisons, where it was possible to be confined without legal judgment, recalls the period when lettres de cachet were in full vigour. The constituent assembly had abolished confiscation, a penalty often disproportionate to the fault and falling most heavily on the children of the condemned; Napoleon maintained it after it had been re-established by the convention. A certain house, belonging to the father of the poet Lemercier, being needed for the widening of the rue de Rivoli, Napoleon had it demolished and then refused to pay indemnity. The story reflects less credit on him than did that of the miller of Sans Souci on Frederick II.

In the Concordat Napoleon became the restorer of the Catholic faith, and in the organic articles the legislator of all forms of worship; whereby it cannot be denied that he rendered a great service to a country afflicted as this had been by religious persecutions. It is plainly to be seen, however, that he also wished to make of the church an instrumentum regni. He imposed upon it a certain catechism wherein the duties of Christians towards "Napoleon I, our emperor," were vigorously set forth. He was fond of speaking of "my bishops," "my gendarmes," and he introduced into the

church calendar a new saint-day, that of Saint Napoleon, - the 15th of August. After this, in 1808, we find him offering grave offence to Catholics by abducting Pope Pius VII and detaining him a prisoner at Fontainebleau; by uniting to his empire, which was already so vast, the Roman states; and by bestowing, three years later, the title of King of Rome upon his new-born son.

His system of customs exceeded in rigour that of the convention, and was later to terminate in the gigantic folly of the European blockade. He had also re-established all the earlier indirect imposts under the name of "united duties," had restored to the state its monopoly in tobacco and other products, but had retained the fiscal inventions of the Directory such as the tax on doors and windows.

Napoleon, the former sans-culottes officer and Jacobin general, the friend of the brothers Robespierre, seemed to have forgotten all the principles of democracy he had once imbibed. He drew to his court the aristocracy of the old régime, and brought into being an imperial nobility of his own whose titles were derived from victories, or the names of conquered towns. He created not only barons, counts, dukes, and princes, but kings as well: setting his brother Joseph on the thrones of Naples and of Spain, his brother Louis on that of Holland, raising a kingdom in Westphalia for his brother Jerome, making his sisters reigning duchesses, his brother-in-law, Murat, king of Naples, and his son-in-law, Eugène Beauharnais, viceroy of Italy. He formed a court for himself of the highest dignitaries, marshals, and ministers attired in silks and gold, and his own sword-hilt was adorned with the famous diamond called the Regent's.

Napoleon had so despotically forced his way into a position where he could dominate not France alone but the other European powers that he was free to undertake at his will expeditions into Spain and Russia, and there leave the greater part of his armies. He reigned by grace of the victories he achieved, but all glory fell from him when success began to desert him, and his doom was sealed by the silent voices in the Senate and Chamber of 1814 and 1815.

SOCIAL PROBLEMS 1

The only task in which the revolutionary assemblies can be said to have fully succeeded was the solution after many vain attempts of the social question, which, as we have said, was almost wholly an agrarian question.

During the year 1789 there succeeded each other in Paris the initial events of the great drama that was about to be enacted, the oath of the Jeu de Paume (tennis-court), the royal sitting of the 23rd of June, and the taking of the Bastille. But under the revolution that had Paris for its scene was a second one kindling, spreading, leaping into flame-the revolution of the peasantry. King and assembly might enter into conflict and become reconciled, new legislators might soar into the region of pure abstractions and talk grandly of liberty, equality, fraternity, justice; the true significance of the situation lay in this, that "Jacques Bonhomme" had at last risen to his full stature on his wooden-shod feet. In July it was learned at Paris that everywhere chateaux were being burned, and with them the seignorial archives wherein were kept the titles by the aid of which the intendants of the nobles made the peasants give up their money. Almost all local histories

1 Works to be consulted already cited above, p. 191.

of the Revolution1 have described the singular panic caused by the alarm of brigands, raised once and never repeated, that placed arms in the hands of peasants from one end to the other of the country.

In some localities the peasants set fire to the man of business and his papers together to make him confess where certain deeds were hidden. Everything that was nearly or remotely connected with the nobility, every act however insignificant in itself that seemed to conflict with the doctrine of equality, gave rise to excesses that were given the name of reprisals by the insurgents. The latter caused to be delivered up to them the weather-vanes that only the owners of castles had a right to possess, and these trophies they fastened to the tops of "liberty poles" which they had everywhere erected. They seized and carried away the contents of granaries and cellars, claiming that they were thus simply regaining possession of their own wheat and wine. They cut down what trees they wanted in the noble's wood, and removed his carved bench (banc d'œuvre) from the parish church. As for the noble's exclusive right to fish, hunt, and keep pigeons and rabbits, armed bands of peasants went about emptying all the streams and warrens, while others entered the very courts of the castles and shot all the pigeons that were to be seen. Louis XVI, the impassioned hunter, was obliged to listen for several days to the noise of shooting in his park, where stags, hinds, wild boars, and hares were brought down by thousands. In some places the rioters, to exercise and confirm the new principles of equality, forced the former noble to extend to them his hand in greeting, or the lady of the castle to bestow upon them a kiss. The surprise of all these terrible scenes might have been spared the nobility, the clergy, and the new legislators if they had taken the trouble to glance over the rural registers of 1789.

The parish records, the contents of which rarely entered into the general reports drawn up in cities, have been preserved in the national archives. "Side by side with handsomely transcribed copies of leases bound in fine registers, they stand, and the dingy bands which hold them together, the coarse paper, scribbled over with innumerable rustic signatures on which they are made out, give an exact idea of the conditions and people they represent. On the margins of the stately registers is written what was supposed to be a complete political constitution, but one that has never been brought into effect; whereas those sordid pages inscribed by peasants changed the face of the world in a few days." 2

The "privileged classes," that is the clergy and the nobility, which formed half of the national assembly, took the news of pillaging and burning very much to heart. The same may be said of a great number among the representatives of the Third Estate (Tiers État) some of whom had acquired the lands of nobles and exercised seignorial rights, while others, procureurs, lawyers, country judges and business agents were what were called at the time "seignorial valets."

Sacrifices of the Nobility and Clergy

On the third of August the count of Clermont-Tonnerre read before the assembly a report describing the recent events. The peasants affected to believe that they had acted under the orders of the king and displayed "deep sympathy for the kind masters whom imperative commands had obliged them to harm."

1A very curious book of this nature has recently appeared; Georges Bussière, Études historiques sur les révolutions en Périgord.

2 Doniol, La Révolution française, et la féodalite, chapter IX.

Obeying the impulse given by a party of nobles wiser and more liberal than the rest, the national assembly in a unanimous movement of generosity voted during the night of the 4th of August the abolition of the feudal régime. But the most difficult remained to be accomplished; France had seen so much agitation on the subject of feudalism, so much had been written, said, and argued about fiefs, feudal rights, seigneuriaux, and domaniaux and the "feudal" lawyers had shown themselves such wells of knowledge that the whole matter was plunged in deep obscurity. Moreover it was not merely a conflict of doctrines that was certain to ensue; personal interests were also involved, and the bitterness shown in equal degrees by proprietors and financiers would prevent truth and equity from ever coming to the light.

At least one good result was obtained, a decree issued on the 12th of August which abolished without indemnity ecclesiastical tithes. Thus a gift of 123 million was made to the taxpayers without distinction between rich and poor, while the state undertook to maintain the clergy and all the institutions of worship on funds that it did not possess. The peasants were gainers to the extent of 100 millions more by the abolition of ecclesiastical seignorial rights. The clergy had become the target upon which the shots of all parties were directed. By the decree of November 2nd its immense estates were given over to be disposed of by the nation, and were again immediately placed on sale, the French peasant being thus afforded another occasion of widening the boundaries of his land.1

Seignorial Rights

Infinitely more complicated than the questions of church tithes or church property was that of seignorial rights.

The constituent assembly had deemed it wise to establish a distinction between the rights which were handed down as a relic of ancient rural servitude and those which might be freely granted, as in any other contract, between ci-devant noble and ci-devant tenant. Thus there came to be two separate categories of rights or claims; those formulated by the feudality of domination and those appertaining to the feudality of contracts. It was the first alone that were abolished.

Thus servitude became a thing of the past, together with the exclusive right of hunting, fishing, and maintaining pigeons; with the tax on legacies and unclaimed heritages, on strangers dying within the seigneury, on bastards and on wreckage on the shores; with the special tax and hours of labour due the noble, the banalités, or payment for the use of mill, oven, and wine-press, and the toll on roads, bridges, and market-places. All these

1 We must not, however, exaggerate the share taken in these sales of ecclesiastical property to the peasants who ordinarily had little money either in coin or assignats, and who preserved certain scruples of conscience which made the purchase of such estates seem to them a sort of sacrilege. Monks and curés, moreover, never ceased reminding them that property so obtained must one day be returned. The parties who chiefly profited were the syndicates of buyers called "black bands " which broke up the great domains and resold them in little bits, and the bourgeois of cities and lesser towns who presented themselves with coins or assignats in hand and a total absence of religious scruples.

A recent study of M. G. Lecarpentier, La propriété foncière de la clerge, et la vente des biens ecclésiastiques dans la Seine supérieure (Paris et Rouen, 1901) throws great light on the subject; in the district of Caudebec more than half of the land either became part of the urban municipalities or passed into the hands of citizens, such as lawyers, merchants, etc. To those who deplore the small number of purchasers that offered for the church domains Mirabeau replied, "What does it matter to us? If no one buys them we shall give them away!" After 1793 the convention was forced to divide up the property to be sold in small lots for the benefit of the peasant.