A.D. 1789.1 SPREAD OF INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. rather, by suppression of all true Christian teaching, of all education, brutalised by contempt and harshness in those above them, were ripe for an outburst, but wholly incapacitated for any rational revolution. That revolution, when it came, must of necessity be one of blood and horror, a fierce revenge, knowing no restraints of conscience or knowledge. Whoever has read carefully this history, must have seen that, in all ages, the outbreaks of the French people were at once sanguinary, lawless, vindictive, and mingled with the most revolting features of levity and grimace. The tremendous atrocities, frivolities partaking largely of the horrible, and fury without restraint of principle, which astonished the world in the revolution of 1798, were only different from those of all former outbreaks, in that they were on a more extended scale. The character of the revolution lay in the character of the French people. Voltaire, their own countryman, described the Frenchman in a line, "half monkey and half tiger." Those elements of the grotesque and cruel are for ever mingled in French émeutes. We have only to refer to the popular insurrections of England, to the affairs of Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, Kett of Norfolk, and to the scenes of the civil wars of king and parliament, to perceive the essential difference. In the commotions of our most ignorant countrymen, in the least civilised times, there has always been mingled with a clearlydefined public object an absence of cruelty, and a knowing at what point to stop. In the French, blood once drawn, all the tiger broke loose, and the monkey element made the farious carnage more awfully revolting. Never was there more urgent cause for revolution, and for the sweeping away of a thousand tyrannies and intolerable customs and laws, than in France at this time; but the people were certain, from all past precedents, to abuse and tyrannise; in their turn, to grow more furious as they proneeded, and to put no limits to their destructive instincts. Unfortunately, there were none of the classes above them qualified, or likely to take part with them for any just and vise end. The limits of necessary change were sure to be gnored, from the causes already stated; but, still more anfortunately, a new element was introduced into the fermenting mass of political abuses, pregnant with the most unbounded desolation. For a long time there had been a systematic endeavour, by the wits and philosophers of France, to root out all faith the Christian religion. Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, the whole clique of the encyclopædists, Rousseau, Conreet, and numbers of others, had employed every weapon of ridicule, sarcasm, and argument to unchristianise Europe. They had drawn their original views from our own infidel writers, Hobbes, Tindal, Hume, &c., and they had applied them with wonderful effect to the inhuman and putrid dition of France. The tales of Voltaire, charged with the most vile, indecent, and insolent mockeries of the sacred writings, the Confessions and Nouvelle Heloise of Rousseau, l penetrated to every corner of France, and had produced the most ruinous effects. The grave reasonings of the encyciopedists, and the Contrat Sociale of Rousseau, though they id not reach the common people directly, were greedily Imbibed by those just above them, who were soon to become Their teachers, and from whose speeches and journals-the 419 foaming yeast of political levelling-they were to be amply leavened with them at second hand. By this new philosophy, so called, every ancient principle was annihilated; every binding and social force was destroyed, and, in their stead, the Rights of Man, and the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the human race, were preached as a most delectable doctrine to a multitude totally destitute of every motive for selfrestraint and every sense of duty towards others. Society, under such circumstances, must inevitably become only a scene of the wildest license; selfishness, without inward law, was set free from all outward law, and the result must be universal destruction of the old, without a single germ of reconstruction of the beneficial or the wise in the new. The doctrine of the Rights of Man, in a multitude without knowledge and without virtue, could only be the doctrine of every man seizing whatever he could. Carried out to its ultimate issue, it was an analytical principle which must throw down and divide so long as anything was tangible and divisible. True, these philosophers and soi-disant philanthropists dealt largely in certain phrases, such as brotherhood, and pure reason, and instincts of humanity; but as they, at the same time, asserted the mere materiality of man, and treated spiritual life and moral responsibility as fables, their fine words were words and nothing more, possessing no more force on the surface of the raging sea of excited human passion, than the foam on the crest of the ocean surge. Christianity once dethroned, the only religion and the only philosophy which ever opposed and demanded the annihilation of self was gone, and the new philosophy became only a spectre light playing over a charnel-house. The spiritual condition of the French people fully exposed them to the poison of this new teaching. They had never been taught the real truths of the New Testament ; they had never been permitted to make acquaintance with its text. They had received their religion from a race of priests, who taught them in a foreign language, and whose lives, as the interpretation of their tenets, presented only atheism. The people saw them only part and parcel of their oppressors; as living in pomp, luxury, and the grossest sensuality. Their religion was a mere tissue of forms, and rites, and spectacles, and the people had only to be told that this so-called Christianity was a hoax, and a machinery of selfish priestcraft, to abandon it, to trample upon it, and to rush to the plunder of its shrines. The French revolution, from mere political and physical causes, was certain to be fearful; but, with this addition of a philosophical atheism, it could be nothing but Pandemonium broken loose! Had there ascended the throne a monarch of vigorous character, who could have attached to his person the army, by consulting their interests and their ambition, the outbreak of the people would have been speedily crushed; for, after all that has been said of the bravery of the French mob, it is an undoubted fact, as will be seen, that it was brave only in the absence of any real danger. On every occasion when a vigorous resistance was made, not only the mob but the National Assembly trembled and recoiled; the most violent of the orators and journalists fled and hid themselves. But the whole government was demoralised and enfeebled; and whilst the mob grew daring from the consciousness of this fact, the monarch had neither vigour to quell the storm, nor political sagacity to guide the state through it. Sweeping changes were inevitable, and Louis had neither the head nor the hand to conduct them. The people might have dragged on a considerable time still in their misery; but the government was in its deaththroes for want of revenue. The administration groaned beneath a mountain of debts; the mass of the people were exhausted in their resources; trade was ruined by these causes; and the nobility and clergy clung convulsively to their prescriptive exemptions from taxation. Long before the American war, the state was in reality bankrupt. The prime minister of Louis XVI., the count de Maurepas, was never of a genius to extricate the nation from such enormous difficulties; but now he was upwards of eighty years of age; and, besides that, stereotyped in aristocratic prejudices. Still, he had the sense to catch at the wise propositions of Turgot, who was made comptroller general, and, had he been permitted to have his way, might have effected much. That he could ever have averted the revolution, is most improbable, but he might have softened its ferocity by abating some of the evils which provoked it. Turgot insisted that there must be a rigid and inflexible economy introduced into all departments of the state, in order gradually to discharge the debts. The excellent Malesherbes being also appointed minister of justice, these two able and good men recommended a series of reforms which must have struck the old and incorrigible courtiers and noblesse with consternation. They prevailed in having the parliament restored, and they recommended that the king should, by their hands, himself initiate the business of reform, thus preventing it falling into less scrupulous hands, and attaching the body of the people to him by the most encouraging expectations. They recommended the abolition of the infamous gabelle, or tax on salt, which was so severe a grievance on the people; the corvée, or compulsory labour on the roads without payment, equally infamous, and other tyrannical usages, arising out of the feudal system; and that the nobility and clergy should be compelled to pay taxes as well as the people. These reforms would, of course, cause a strong resistance from the influential bodies whose old, unjust immunities they attacked; but it was certain that the people and the commercial community would support the king in the work, without which these and a thousand other odious privileges must be brushed away by a ruder hand. They proposed that tallages, and other like services, which had been so long abolished in England, should be converted into fixed and equable imposts; that there should be a thorough reform of the criminal code and the whole system of judicature, and that torture, which at this late period still disgraced the French courts of law, should be abolished. They insisted on the declaration of full liberty of conscience, the gradual suppression of the convents and monasteries, and the withdrawal of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction from civil causes. They proposed that there should be a regulation of ecclesiastical revenues, so that the working clergy should no longer starve whilst the dignitaries of the church were living in sloth and luxury. In fact, they extended their schemes of reform to the whole public, social and religious. They demanded that old feudal rents and obligations should be extinguished by purchase; that all the ancient fetters of trade should be removed; that duties and customs, which separated one province of the empire from another, should be abolished, and that measures should be introduced for encouraging internal communication by canals and roads, and the formation of local boards of administration, in which the landowners and the municipal bodies should alike operate for public improvements. Turgot presented his calculations and his enlightened economic plans, and Malesherbes drew up his two memoirs "On the calamities of France, and the means of reparing them;" but they had not a monarch with the mind and the nerve to carry out the only reforms which could save the monarchy Turgot, who was of the modern school of philosophy himself and well knew the heads of the school, recommended that they should be employed by government. Had this been done, the voices that were raised so fatally against the king and crown, might have been raised for them, and the grand catastrophe averted. But Louis could not be brought to listen to any measures so politic; indeed, he was listening. instead, to the cries of fierce indignation which the privileged classes were raising against all reform. Turgot succeedel in abolishing the corvées, the interior custom-houses between one province and another, and some other abuses, but there the great plan was stopped. Both Louis and his minister, Maurepas, shrank from the wrath of the noblesse and the clergy, and desisted from all further reform. By a still greater fatality, Louis was persuaded to comply with the solicitations of the American colonists, to assist them in throwing off their allegiance to England To rend these colonies from England, who had deprivel France of Canada and Nova Scotia, was too flattering to French vanity and French desire of revenge. Turgot in vain protested that the first cannon that was fired would insure revolution; Louis consented to the American alliance. and thus set the seal to his own destruction. Bitterly did he rue this afterwards, still more bitterly was it rued by his queen, when they both saw the fatal infection of republicanism brought back from America by the army. When Turgot saw that this fatal war was determined upon, he retiral before the wild rage of the noblesse and clergy, and from, the ruinous weakness of the king. Minister after minister rapidly succeeded each other in the vain endeavour to keep up the old partial laws and privileges, the old extravagance and incumbrances, at the command of the king, and ye avert revolution. Maurepas, Vergennes, Calonne, Brienne, Necker, went on with petty reforms, or no reforms, struggling with the colossal evils of the government, till driven to th summoning of the states-general, which was at once opening the door, and inaugurating the revolution. Clugny assumed the arduous post of Turgot, as comptroller of the finances, but held it only for six month Then came the celebrated Necker. James Necker hai made a large fortune as a banker, first in the house Thellusson, and then in one in which himself and his brothe had been the chief partners. After his retirement fr trade, he continued to reside in Paris, and employed tumet in writing on matters of political economy. His week, "Sur la Legislation et le Commerce de Grain," procur him a great reputation, which was increased by another treatise on the affairs of the French East India Company. A.D. 1789.] NECKER'S FINANCIAL SCHEME. 421 Necker's reputation was not a little advanced by the dinners written "Reflections on Divorce," and other things; and, by and entertainments which he gave to the most distinguished the additional attractions of their more celebrated daughter, men in Paris, including the new school of literati and Madame de Stäel, the Neckers were raised to a wonderful Maurepas caught at the proposal as a drowning man clutches accumulated an enormous amount of fresh debts, and the at a straw. There were, however, formidable obstacles to whole monarchy lay in a condition of irredeemable prostrathe acceptance of Necker as a financial saviour, in the tion; and, as if the court despaired itself of any ultimate then bigoted notions of the French monarch and his escape from utter bankruptcy, the choice was made of a courtiers. Necker was neither a Frenchman nor a catholic. minister, who professed an ability to carry on the diseased But the need of some rescue was imminent: Necker government without any retrenchments at all, but solely on demanded no salary or emoluments of office; he demanded the strength of loans, so long as these could be procured. the opportunity of saving France from ruin and disgrace. This minister, who succeeded Necker in 1783, was the gay He was reluctantly permitted to undertake this herculean and brilliant Charles Alexander de Calonne. It is difficult labour, but without being admitted to a seat in the council. to imagine that Calonne was fully aware of the desperate conAt first, he was not even honoured with the title of comp-dition of the finances, or of the plainest principles of human troller, but merely of director of the treasury, under Taboureau de Réaux, the comptroller - general, and afterwards was favoured with the title of director-general. The scheme of Necker, however, seems to have consisted in little more than in endeavouring to introduce a more accurate system of bookkeeping, and in avoiding impossible draughts on the purses of the tiers état, by resorting to loans. Loan after loan was contracted, and the evil day thus, for a time, was put off; but in 1781 Necker published his famous Comptes Rendus, or statement of the finances of the kingdom. This, which he expected to give him great credit, certainly procured him much applause from the new school of reformers, but it was because, for the first time, it threw the blaze of daylight on the almost unfathomable gulph of debt, and corruption, and extravagance, which had hitherto been shrouded in impenetrable darkness. But the same cause brought down upon him the cries and maledictions of the whole race of placemen, pensioners, contractors, and sinecurists, who were fattening on the unfortunate nation till this moment in secrecy. It was felt by the revolutionists that this was a step in advance towards their object; the whole fearful condition of the national finances was before the public, and there could be no further mystification. To enable him to cope with his aristocratic assailants, Necker demanded a seat at the council board; but this was refused, on account of his not being a catholic. He threatened to resign, and his resignation was not only accepted, but he was ordered to retire to his country seat. He thereupon returned to Switzerland, purchased the barony of Copet, and published his work, the "Administration des Finances de la France," in three volumes octavo, and eighty thousand copies of it were sold in a few days. This raised his reputation still higher, and drew strong censures on the court, which had sacrificed the services of such a man to etiquette and church prejudice. Poor old Maurepas soon afterwards died, and was succeeded by the count de Vergennes. Vergennes was an able diplomatist, and all his skill and experience were demanded to carry on the war in America on an empty exchequer. For a time, the attention of the country was agreeably diverted from domestic difficulties to the pleasing prospect of completing the downfall of England, which Lafayette, who was campaigning in the United States, assured the minister would be the certain result of the severance of those States. The desired object was achieved so far as America was concerned, but by the ruin of France rather than of England. The guns which had been fired had fulfilled Turgot's prophecy, and the revolution was by many degrees nearer to the door. France had nature. He went gaily through the routine of his office, as though he had coffers crammed with wealth. He professed that there was no need of the extreme economy insisted upon by Turgot and Necker. He encouraged rather than restrained the expensive gaieties of the court, and was always ready to listen to the solicitations of the princes, peers, and ladies about the court, for money and favours. This career, under the circumstances, could not be long, and when he was completely brought to a stand by his necessities, he proposed the summoning an Assembly of Notables. With the same shallow ignorance of men as of business, he thought that these notables, on most of whom he had conferred favours whilst he could, would be ready to listen to the absolute need of taxing themselves, as it was impossible to tax the people any further. The notables consisted of one hundred and fourteen persons, of whom seven were princes of the blood, and the rest nobles, ministers of the crown, high dignitaries of the church, great officers of the law and the army, deputies of the Pay d'Etats, and magistrates from various towns. From such persons, accustomed to tax and screw the people on all occasions to the utmost, and to pay nothing themselves. Calonne fondly imagined that he could draw the necessary revenue for carrying on the government. He was speedily undeceived. He laid before them, with great confidence, his plan for a subvention territoriale, or land-tax, from which no class was to be exempt. The notables, who had laude! Calonne to the skies, in their individual persons, so long he did not trouble them, but, on the contrary, was ever ready to oblige them, received his proposals with indignant astonishment, and refused to contribute a penny to the public needs. He explained to them the impossibility of resorting further to the people, and the tremendous deficiencies in the treasury, but to no purpose; the princes. nobles, and great dignitaries, declared that they were exempt by their ancient charters and grants from the crown, and that it was impossible for them to violate their own sacred immunities. They were now as ready to denounce Calonte as they had been to praise him before. They declared that they were his own thoughtlessness and extravagance which had plunged him into difficulties, and did not hesitate to accuse him of peculation. It was clear enough that nothing but the irresistible tempest of a revolution would ever force from these selfish classes their fair quota of public tax, and spite of the zealous support of the queen, Calonne wa driven from office, poorer than when he entered it. The next person to attempt the impossible in the va endeavour to keep the vessel of the old French monarchy afloat with all its leaks and rottenness, was the archbishop A.D. 1789.] PROPOSAL TO CONVOKE THE STATES-GENERAL. 423 of Toulouse, Loménie de Brienne. He had vigorously the edict was null and void; and that every person endea opposed Calonne; but there was no way of raising the neces-vouring to carry the stamp-tax into effect should be judged sary revenue, but to adopt some of the very proposals of a traitor. The excitement of the public was intense, and Calonne, and tax the privileged classes, or to endeavour to this was kept up by the press, which poured forth all sorts draw something still from the exhausted people. As the of attacks and libels on the king, queen, and government. least difficult experiment of the two, he was compelled to The parliament, on the other hand, was extolled to the cast his eyes towards the property of the nobles and the skies as the only defenders of the people. Jefferson, church; but he found the nobles and the clergy as ready to Governeur Morris, and many other Americans, were still in sacrifice him as they had been to sacrifice Calonne. When Paris. Jefferson, being the minister of the United States one or two of the more pliant or more enlightened members there, must have been strongly reminded of the days of the of those classes ventured to remark on the vast amount of stamp act in his own country. It was clear that the untaxed property, and particularly of tithes, there was an revolution was beginning. Jefferson wrote home :—" All actual tempest of fury raised. Tithes were declared to be the the tongues of Paris-and it is said in France-have been voluntary offerings of the piety of the faithful, and therefore let loose; and never was a licence of speaking against the not to be touched. At which the duke de Rochefoucauld government exercised in London more freely or more uniexclaimed, "The voluntary offerings of the faithful, about versally. Caricatures, placards, bon-mots, have been inwhich forty thousand law-suits are now pending!" As dulged in by all ranks of people, and I know of no wellfarther loans were out of the question, some one ventured attested instance of a single punishment. For some time to assert that the only means of solving the difficulty was mobs of ten, twenty, and thirty thousand people have to assemble the states-general. "You would convoke the collected daily, surrounded the parliament house, huzzaed states-general?" said the minister, in consternation. "Yes," the members, even entered the doors and examined into replied Lafayette, who was bent on revolutionising France, their conduct" (a liberty that they afterwards were in the as he had helped to revolutionise America-" yes, and some- habit of taking with the National Assembly and the Conthing more than that!” These words were taken down as vention), "have taken the horses out of the carriages of most exceptionable and dangerous. All that the assembly those who did well, and drawn them home." He adds, of notables could be brought to do was to confirm the aboli- "The queen, going to the theatre at Versailles with madame tion of the corvée, and to pass a stamp act. They would de Polignac, was received with a general hiss. The king, not move a step further, and they were dismissed by the long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges king on the 25th of May, 1787. deeper and deeper," &c. The dismissal of the notables, or not-ables, as Lafayette called them, by no means improved the situation of Brienne, who now was advanced to the richer archbishopric of Sens. He now entertained the idea of continuing the old plan of taxing the tiers état; but the parliament of Paris not only refused to sanction such taxation, but also refused to register the stamp act passed by the notables. They presented in July an address to the king, demanding a statement of the real condition of the finances, and this the king declined to furnish. Whereupon the parliament, at the instigation of Rochefoucauld and d'Espréménil, who were not prescient enough to see that they were calling for the utter extinction of their own order, and with it of the monarchy itself, issued a strong remonstrance, declaring that neither king, nor parliament, nor any other body, except the states-general, which comprised the three estates of the kingdom, had the power of making laws, and they demanded that this body should be summoned, as it had been in former times. This demand carried consternation throughout the court, and still further excited the expectations of the people. The king refused to call the states together; and, to compel the registry of the stamp act, he decided to summon a bed of justice for that purpose. The bed of justice was held at Versailles on the 6th of August, 1787, and the parliament of Paris was, as a matter of course, obliged to attend it; but it took care, before going, to enter a protest against any measure which might be passed there contrary to the laws of the kingdom; and no sooner did the parliament return to the Palais de Justice at Paris than they issued a protest, declaring that they had not iven their consent to the registration, and that therefore The count d'Artois, the younger brother of the king, told the members of the parliament, that, were he king, he would soon make them obedient, and was mobbed and insulted in the streets in consequence. It was now determined to employ force to compel the people to quietness, and the parliament to submission. Twelve thousand troops were assembled in Paris, and, whilst these paraded the streets, an officer of the guards, with a posse of soldiers, waited, very early in the morning, on each member of the parliament at his house, and ordered him to enter his carriage, and proceed to Troyes. This was easily effected; but no sooner was the fact known, than there was the wildest commotion, which the soldiers, however, managed to put down. But the excitement was spread by the active exertions and representations of numbers of the active patriots. Amongst these, Lafayette was particularly conspicuous. He appeared in the highest delight at the visible elements of a new revolution in action. He wrote to his quondam friends in America that notions of liberty had come with them from the United States, and had been spreading ever since; that the combustible materials had been kindled by the notables and the parlements, and that liberty was cantering and prancing from one end of the kingdom to the other. And this was true. The new minister, De Brienne, was completely paralysed. All that he could do was to cause the troops to keep the streets quiet, and to order the suppression of the political clubs. But the discussions on the unpopular measure of carrying off the parliament, went on just as vehemently in other places-in all places—and the same excitement was almost universal in the provinces. Open insurrections broke out in Dauphiny, Brittany, Provence, |