lands, rivers, forests, rights of chase. These rights did not much wrong to any one, as the country was half desert, and the lord employed all his leisure in hunting wild beasts. He alone having anything that could be called capital, he alone could build mills, bakingovens, wine-presses, bridges; could establish ferries, make roads, embank ponds, rear or purchase bulls. Accordingly he levied dues for all these services, and monopolised their performance. By degrees the fetters of feudal obligation became relaxed, and the sentiment of feudal loyalty became rooted. The lordship, the county, the duchy became objects of local patriotism. Thus revived, after a thousand years of suspended animation, the most powerful, energetic, and vivacious of the sentiments that maintain society amongst men-a sentiment the more potent in its influence the wider its range. In order that the little feudal country may merge in the nation, it suffices that the seigneuries recognise a central power in the Sovereign, and that the King stand forth as head and chief of the nobles.'

If the French nobility could have transformed themselves in modern times from a military into a political aristocracy largely dashed with democracy, as in England, the evolution from feudalism into modern life and laws might have been gradual, as in England, and the evils and excesses of the French Revolution obviated. Or if it had been recast on the Prussian model into a phalanx of instructed and serviceable military and civil functionaries, the monarch might have made use of them in peace or war, as in Prussia, and the monarchy might have been saved.

It is not necessary, however, to look to England, and still less to Germany, for examples of the manner in which a feudal might have been transformed into a political aristocracy in France, and combined with other classes in all the practical functions of local administration. The instruments for effecting that transformation lay ready at hand in France herself; in the old institutions of the provinces called pays d'État, in each of which the local administration had formerly been carried on under the King's Government by the gens des trois états, as they were then called, i.e. the representatives of the clergy, the nobility, and the commons. But the King's Government chose to break those instruments instead of using them. 'A small portion,' says Tocqueville, of the perseverance and the exertions which the Sovereigns of France employed for the abolition or the dislocation of the provincial estates would have sufficed to adapt them to all the wants of modern civilisation, if those Sovereigns had ever had any other aim than to become and remain the masters of France.'

The old provincial liberties had substantially survived, down to the Revolution, in two important provinces only-Brittany in the

the west, Languedoc in the south of France. In Brittany the nobles had the right individually of attending the States in person, which made their meetings, according to Tocqueville, a sort of Polish diets. But in Languedoc the better system prevailed of representation of the three orders. The nobles were represented by twenty-three of their order, the clergy by the twentythree bishops of the province, and the towns had as many representatives as the two first orders taken together. The peasantry do not appear to have been directly represented, unless so far as the resident nobles and clergy really represented their interests and so far it certainly seems they did, that the States of Languedoc imposed no corvées on the peasantry; but executed public works, which no other province dreamed of undertaking, without either robbing private proprietors of their lands or wretched peasants of their labour. The States of Languedoc presented for centuries a model of vigorous and successful local administration, which the central government, under Richelieu, crushed for a moment, but which was happily restored in the minority of Louis XIV., and flourished till the Revolution. Two or three years before that event the Government of Louis XVI., so many of whose good intentions went to pave a bad place, instituted throughout France provincial assemblies of a very different type from the States of Languedoc, and which served no purpose but substituting popular anarchy for royal despotism. All local affairs were devolved on local assemblies elected by ignorant constituencies, and no provision made for any executive agency, or any central control. The States of Languedoc had presented an unique spectacle of three orders, which elsewhere fell into fatal discord, working together in perfect harmony in a single assembly. As the tiers-état had an equal voting power to that of the two other orders, its spirit became diffused through the whole body. The three magistrates, who, under the name of syndics généraux, were entrusted with the general conduct of business, were always lawyers, that is to say, roturiers. Ecclesiastics were almost always delegated to discuss with the ministry at Versailles whatever points of dispute might arise between the States and the royal authority. It may be said,' concludes Tocqueville, that, during the whole of the last century, Languedoc was administered by bourgeois, controlled [or rather influenced] by nobles, and assisted by bishops. And thus the spirit of modern times came to penetrate peacefully this old institution, and modify everything, while destroying nothing. It might have been so everywhere else throughout France.'

But the King's Government in France had aimed for centuries to convert the nobles into courtiers, thus drawing them away

from

from the natural sphere of their influence, where they might have been useful (and formidable), to make them mere ornamental appendages of royal state; mere servile accomplices in crushing the peasantry, whom it was their special duty to protect, under an overwhelming load of feudal and fiscal dues and imposts from which they had bargained for their own exemption. This system of self-exemption from their share of public charges, as ultimately from public duties of all descriptions, save military and Court service, began as far back as Charles VII. and the wars of the Plantagenets. 'It was at that era,' says Tocqueville, that the nation, fatigued with the long disorders which had followed upon the captivity of King John and the insanity of Charles VI., suffered the kings to impose general taxes without consulting it, and that the nobles had the baseness to let the tiers-état be taxed at discretion, on the condition only that they themselves should be left untaxed. I cannot but admire the singular sagacity of Philip de Commines in saying that “Charles VII., who carried this point of imposing the taille without the consent of the States, laid a heavy burthen on his own soul and the souls of his successors, and inflicted on the kingdom a deep wound, which will long bleed."'

It was impossible for M. Taine to take any other view than Tocqueville had taken of the ultimate consequences of throwing on the peasantry the main weight of taxation, and leaving the amount of that taxation discretionary to the King's Government from year to year. But even that unlimited concession to royalty, with regard to the taille, did not place it in funds to defray the extravagant expenditure of the Court in the last ages of the monarchy, when, having converted its nobles into courtiers, it had to attach its courtiers by dividing among them the spoils of the people. Another source of supply was hit upon in France, unparalleled elsewhere in modern European history, the regular sale of judicial and municipal appointments. It is remarked by Tocqueville that these practices were resorted to by the best, as well as the worst, French monarchs. 'It was Louis XII. who completed the system of the sale of offices. It was Henri IV. who first put up to sale the hereditary succession to them. So much stronger are the vices of a system than the virtues of those who conduct it.'

The sale of judicial offices, of municipal functions and privileges to the towns, and of titles of nobility to all who had money to purchase them, became the regular and habitual financial resources of a Government, which had once for all resolved not to go for supplies to the representatives of the people. To the people it was at last compelled to go by convoking the States

General

General of 1789, but not till the people had become thoroughly exasperated by the rapacious and spendthrift system of centuries. For centuries two most oppressive aristocracies, or rather three, had been favoured at their expense: first, that of the old nobles, who, as we have seen, had surrendered the vassals they should have protected to taille à merci et à miséricorde, to save themselves from their fair share of the public taxation. Secondly, the bastard aristocracy of the long robe, and the nouveaux anoblis, who, or whose forefathers, had bought with hard money their bran-new titles, or hereditary judicial offices, and had therewith purchased the supercilious scorn of the old nobility, and the envy and hatred of all who had not money wherewith to purchase privilege. Lastly, a sort of third bourgeois aristocracy, so far as regarded exemption from taille, consisting of the holders of petty municipal offices in the towns, which were constantly being multiplied by the Government for no purpose but to sell them-the charters of the towns, at recurring short periods, being revoked and renewed, solely for the purpose of selling those offices over again! That such a system should have gone on with continual aggravations in a country calling itself civilised-the most civilised in Europetill nearly the close of the last century-left little to wonder at in Revolution, except that it came no sooner.

The main weight of all these accumulated abuses in the matter of taxation-the most vital point where political abuses make themselves felt-fell on the broad but bent shoulders of Jacques Bonhomme-the peasant of the old régime. And that weight was increased infinitely in oppressive effect by its incalculableness from one year to another. It lay in the breast of the conseil du roi, and the contrôleur-général, what addition should be made year by year, to the amount of the taille; what public works should be undertaken, in what province, and what corvées (forced labours), at arbitrary and inadequate wages, imposed on the peasantry for their execution. It lay in the breast of the military administration what troops should be marched in what directions-corvées again on the wretched peasantry to provide means of transport, and probably get their horses lamed without compensation. But, besides all these burdens, laid mainly on Jacques Bonhomme's shoulders by the King's Government, were those laid exclusively on his shoulders not by the King's Government, but by the hereditary holders of feudal rights and dues-themselves, in large proportion, a most impoverished class, whose presence in the country was felt by the peasant only through their incessant exactionsfelt the more gallingly as relics of a system of feudal dependence,

whose

whose raison d'être (the payment of services for protection) had long ceased. The great nobles in the last ages of the monarchy were, for the most part, adorning Versailles and Paris with their (often unpaid for) fripperies; the poor provincial nobles -hobereaux, as Jacques Bonhomme nicknamed them-were snatching the last fowl from the peasant's pot in payment of their feudal dues-if, indeed, the poule au pot, which Henri Quatre wished for the peasant's pot, ever found its way there.

6

Picture to yourself,' says Tocqueville,* a French peasant of the eighteenth century, or, I might rather say, the peasant now before your eyes, for the man is the same; his condition is altered, but not his character. Take him as he is described in the documents I have quoted-so passionately enamoured of the soil, that he will spend all his savings to purchase it, and to purchase it at any price. To complete this purchase he must first pay a tax, not to the Government, but to other landowners of the neighbourhood, as unconnected as himself with the administration of public affairs, and hardly more influential than he is. He possesses it at last; his heart is buried in it with the seed he sows. This little nook of ground, which is his own in this vast universe, fills him with pride and independence. But again these neighbours call him from his furrow, and compel him to come to work for them without wages. He tries to defend his young crops from their game; again they prevent him. As he crosses the river they wait for his passage to levy a toll. He finds them at the market, where they sell him the right of selling his own produce; and when, on his return home, he wants to use the remainder of his wheat for his own sustenance-of that wheat which was planted by his hands, and has grown under his eyes-he cannot touch it till he has ground it at the mill and baked it at the bakehouse of these same men. A portion of the income of his little property is paid away in quit-rents to them also, and these dues can neither be extinguished nor redeemed.

'Whatever he does, those troublesome neighbours are everywhere in his path, to disturb his happiness, to interfere with his labour, to consume his profits; and when these are dismissed, others in the black garb of the Church present themselves to carry off the clearest profit of his harvest. Picture to yourself the condition, the wants, the character, the passions of this man, and compute, if you are able, the stores of hatred and of envy which are accumulated in his heart.'

An incident related in Rousseau's Confessions,' which M. Taine does not cite, probably because he supposes it already familiar to French readers, is strikingly illustrative of the sort of vexatious espionage practised on the French peasantry, for the purpose of discovering fresh matter for fiscal extortion, and which was naturally encountered by every art of concealment of

Mr. Reeve's Translation, p. 37.

whatever