Chapter 3

In 1789 three classes of persons, the Clergy, the Nobles and the King, occupied the most prominent position in the State with all the advantages pertaining thereto namely, authority, property, honors, or, at the very least, privileges, immunities, favors, pensions, preferences, and the like. If they occupied this position for so long a time, it is because for so long a time they had deserved it. They had, in short, through an immense and secular effort, constructed by degrees the three principal foundations of modern society.

I. Services and Recompenses of the Clergy.

Of these three layered foundations the most ancient and deepest was the work of the clergy. For twelve hundred years and more they had labored upon it, both as architects and workmen, at first alone and then almost alone.--In the beginning, during the first four centuries, they constituted religion and the church. Let us ponder over these two words; in order to weigh them well. On the one hand, in a society founded on conquest, hard and cold like a machine of brass, forced by its very structure to destroy among its subjects all courage to act and all desire to live, they had proclaimed the "glad tidings," held forth the "kingdom of God," preached loving resignation in the hands of a Heavenly Father, inspired patience, gentleness, humility, self-abnegation, and charity, and opened the only issues by which Man stifling in the Roman 'ergastulum' could again breathe and see daylight: and here we have religion. On the other hand, in a State gradually undergoing depopulation, crumbling away, and fatally becoming a prey, they had formed a living society governed by laws and discipline, rallying around a common aim and a common doctrine, sustained by the devotion of chiefs and by the obedience of believes, alone capable of subsisting beneath the flood of barbarians which the empire in ruin suffered to pour in through its breaches: and here we have the church.--It continues to build on these two first foundations, and after the invasion, for over five hundred years, it saves what it can still save of human culture. It marches in the van of the barbarians or converts them directly after their entrance, which is a wonderful advantage. Let us judge of it by a single fact: In Great Britain, which like Gaul had become Latin, but whereof the conquerors remain pagan during a century and a half, arts, industries, society, language, all were destroyed; nothing remained of an entire people, either massacred or fugitive, but slaves. We have still to divine their traces; reduced to the condition of beasts of burden, they disappear from history. Such might have been the fate of Europe if the clergy had not promptly tamed the fierce brutes to which it belonged.

Before the bishop in his gilded cope or before the monk, the converted German "emaciated, clad in skins," wan, "dirtier and more spotted than a chameleon,"[1101] stood fear-stricken as before a sorcerer. In his calm moments, after the chase or inebriety, the vague divination of a mysterious and grandiose future, the dim conception of an unknown tribunal, the rudiment of conscience which he already had in his forests beyond the Rhine, arouses in him through sudden alarms half-formed, menacing visions. At the moment of violating a sanctuary he asks himself whether he may not fall on its threshold with vertigo and a broken neck.[1102] Convicted through his own perplexity, he stops and spares the farm, the village, and the town, which live under the priest's protection. If the animal impulse of rage, or of primitive lusts, leads him to murder or to rob, later, after satiety, in times of sickness or of misfortune, taking the advice of his concubine or of his wife, he repents and makes restitution twofold, tenfold, a hundredfold, unstinted in his gifts and immunities.[1103] Thus, over the whole territory the clergy maintain and enlarge their asylums for the oppressed and the vanquished.--On the other hand, among the warrior chiefs with long hair, by the side of kings clad in furs, the mitered bishop and abbot, with shaven brows, take seats in the assemblies; they alone know how to use the pen and how to discuss. Secretaries, councilors, theologians, they participate in all edicts; they have their hand in the government; they strive through its agency to bring a little order out of immense disorder; to render the law more rational and more humane, to re-establish or preserve piety, instruction, justice, property, and especially marriage. To their ascendancy is certainly due the police system, such as it was, intermittent and incomplete, which prevented Europe from falling into a Mongolian anarchy. If, down to the end of the twelfth century, the clergy bears heavily on the princes, it is especially to repress in them and beneath them the brutal appetites, the rebellions of flesh and blood, the outbursts and relapses of irresistible ferocity which are undermining the social fabric.--Meanwhile, in its churches and in its convents, it preserves the ancient acquisitions of humanity, the Latin tongue, Christian literature and theology, a portion of pagan literature and science, architecture, sculpture, painting, the arts and industries which aid worship. It also preserved the more valuable industries, which provide man with bread, clothing, and shelter, and especially the greatest of all human acquisitions, and the most opposed to the vagabond humor of the idle and plundering barbarian, the habit and taste for labor. In the districts depopulated through Roman exactions, through the revolt of the Bagaudes, through the invasion of the Germans, and the raids of brigands, the Benedictine monk built his cabin of boughs amid briers and brambles.[1104] Large areas around him, formerly cultivated, are nothing but abandoned thickets. Along with his associates he clears the ground and erects buildings; he domesticates half-tamed animals, he establishes a farm, a mill, a forge, an oven, and shops for shoes and clothing. According to the rules of his order, he reads daily for two hours. He gives seven hours to manual labor, and he neither eats nor drinks more than is absolutely essential. Through his intelligent, voluntary labor, conscientiously performed and with a view to the future, he produces more than the layman does. Through his temperate, judicious, economical system he consumes less than the layman does. Hence it is that where the layman had failed he sustains himself and even prospers.[1105] He welcomes the unfortunate, feeds them, sets them to work, and unites them in matrimony; and beggars, vagabonds, and fugitive peasants gather around the sanctuary. Their camp gradually becomes a village and next a small town; man plows as soon as he can be sure of his crops, and becomes the father of a family as soon as he considers himself able to provide for his offspring. In this way new centers of agriculture and industry are formed, which likewise become new centers of population.[1106]

To food for the body add food for the soul, not less essential. For, along with nourishment, it was still necessary to furnish Man with inducements to live, or, at the very least, with the resignation that makes life endurable, and also with the poetic daydreams taking the place of missing happiness.[1107] Down to the middle of the thirteenth century the clergy stands almost alone in furnishing this. Through its innumerable legends of saints, through its cathedrals and their construction, through its statues and their expression, through its services and their still transparent meaning, it rendered visible "the kingdom of God." It finally sets up an ideal world at the end of the present one, like a magnificent golden pavilion at the end of a miry morass.[1108] The saddened heart, athirst for tenderness and serenity, takes refuge in this divine and gentle world. Persecutors there, about to strike, are arrested by an invisible hand; wild beasts become docile; the stags of the forest come of their own accord every morning to draw the chariots of the saints; the country blooms for them like a new Paradise; they die only when it pleases them. Meanwhile they comfort mankind; goodness, piety, forgiveness flows from their lips with ineffable sweetness; with eyes upturned to heaven, they see God, and without effort, as in a dream, they ascend into the light and seat themselves at His right hand. How divine the legend, how inestimable in value, when, under the universal reign of brute force, to endure this life it was necessary to imagine another, and to render the second as visible to the spiritual eye as the first was to the physical eye. The clergy thus nourished men for more than twelve centuries, and in the grandeur of its recompense we can estimate the depth of their gratitude. Its popes, for two hundred years, were the dictators of Europe. It organized crusades, dethroned monarchs, and distributed kingdoms. Its bishops and abbots became here, sovereign princes, and there, veritable founders of dynasties. It held in its grasp a third of the territory, one-half of the revenue, and two-thirds of the capital of Europe. Let us not believe that Man counterfeits gratitude, or that he gives without a valid motive; he is too selfish and too envious for that. Whatever may be the institution, ecclesiastic or secular, whatever may be the clergy, Buddhist or Christian, the contemporaries who observe it for forty generations are not bad judges. They surrender to it their will and their possessions, just in proportion to its services, and the excess of their devotion may measure the immensity of its benefaction.

II. Services and Recompenses of the Nobles.

Up to this point no aid is found against the power of the sword and the battle-ax except in persuasion and in patience. Those States which, imitating the old empire, attempted to rise up into compact organizations, and to interpose a barrier against constant invasion, obtained no hold on the shifting soil; after Charlemagne everything melts away. There are no more soldiers after the battle of Fontanet; during half a century bands of four or five hundred outlaws sweep over the country, killing, burning, and devastating with impunity. But, by way of compensation, the dissolution of the State raises up at this very time a military generation. Each petty chieftain has planted his feet firmly on the domain he occupies, or which he withholds; he no longer keeps it in trust, or for use, but as property, and an inheritance. It is his own manor, his own village, his own earldom; it no longer belongs to the king; he contends for it in his own right. The benefactor, the conservator at this time is the man capable of fighting, of defending others, and such really is the character of the newly established class. The noble, in the language of the day, is the man of war, the soldier (miles), and it is he who lays the second foundation of modern society.

In the tenth century his extraction is of little consequence. He is oftentimes a Carlovingian count, a beneficiary of the king, the sturdy proprietor of one of the last of the Frank estates. In one place he is a martial bishop or a valiant abbot in another a converted pagan, a retired bandit, a prosperous adventurer, a rude huntsman, who long supported himself by the chase and on wild fruits.[1109] The ancestors of Robert the Strong are unknown, and later the story runs that the Capets are descended from a Parisian butcher. In any event the noble of that epoch is the brave, the powerful man, expert in the use of arms, who, at the head of a troop, instead of flying or paying ransom, offers his breast, stands firm, and protects a patch of the soil with his sword. To perform this service he has no need of ancestors; all that he requires is courage, for he is himself an ancestor; security for the present, which he insures, is too acceptable to permit any quibbling about his title. Finally, after so many centuries, we find each district possessing its armed men, a settled body of troops capable of resisting nomadic invasion; the community is no longer a prey to strangers. At the end of a century this Europe, which had been sacked by the Vikings, is to throw 200,000 armed men into Asia. Henceforth, both north and south, in the face of Moslems and of pagans, instead of being conquered it is to conquer. For the second time an ideal figure becomes apparent after that of the saint,[1110] the hero; and the newborn sentiment, as effective as the old one, thus groups men together into a stable society.--This consists of a resident corps of men-at-arms, in which, from father to son, one is always a soldier. Each individual is born into it with his hereditary rank, his local post, his pay in landed property, with the certainty of never being abandoned by his chieftain, and with the obligation of giving his life for his chieftain in time of need. In this epoch of perpetual warfare only one set-up is valid, that of a body of men confronting the enemy, and such is the feudal system; we can judge by this trait alone of the perils which it wards off, and of the service which it enjoins. "In those days," says the Spanish general chronicle, "kings, counts, nobles, and knights, in order to be ready at all hours, kept their horses in the rooms in which they slept with their wives." The viscount in his tower defending the entrance to a valley or the passage of a ford, the marquis thrown as a forlorn hope on the burning frontier, sleeps with his hand on his weapon, like an American lieutenant among the Sioux behind a western stockade. His dwelling is simply a camp and a refuge. Straw and heaps of leaves cover the pavement of the great hall, here he rests with his troopers, taking off a spur if he has a chance to sleep. The loopholes in the wall scarcely allow daylight to enter; the main thing is not to be shot with arrows. Every taste, every sentiment is subordinated to military service; there are certain places on the European frontier where a child of fourteen is required to march, and where the widow up to sixty is required to remarry. Men to fill up the ranks, men to mount guard, is the call, which at this moment issues from all institutions like the summons of a brazen horn.--Thanks to these braves, the peasant(villanus) enjoys protection. He is no longer to be slaughtered, no longer to be led captive with his family, in herds, with his neck in the yoke. He ventures to plow and to sow, and to rely upon his crops; in case of danger he knows that he can find an asylum for himself, and for his grain and cattle, in the circle of palisades at the base of the fortress. By degrees necessity establishes a tacit contract between the military chieftain of the donjon and the early settlers of the open country, and this becomes a recognized custom. They work for him, cultivate his ground, do his carting, pay him quittances, so much for house, so much per head for cattle, so much to inherit or to sell; he is compelled to support his troop. But when these rights are discharged he errs if, through pride or greed, he takes more than his due.--As to the vagabonds, the wretched, who, in the universal disorder and devastation, seek refuge under his guardianship, their condition is harder. The soil belongs to the lord because without him it would be uninhabitable. If he assigns them a plot of ground, if he permits them merely to encamp on it, if he sets them to work or furnishes them with seeds it is on conditions, which he prescribes. They are to become his serfs, subject to the laws on mainmorte.[1111] Wherever they may go he is to have the right of fetching them back. From father to son they are his born domestics, applicable to any pursuit he pleases, taxable and workable at his discretion. They are not allowed to transmit anything to a child unless the latter, "living from their pot," can, after their death, continue their service. "Not to be killed," says Stendhal, "and to have a good sheepskin coat in winter, was, for many people in the tenth century, the height of felicity"; let us add, for a woman, that of not being violated by a whole band. When we clearly represent to ourselves the condition of humanity in those days, we can comprehend how men readily accepted the most obnoxious of feudal rights, even that of the droit du seigneur. The risks to which they were daily exposed were even worse.[1112] The proof of it is that the people flocked to the feudal structure as soon as it was completed. In Normandy, for instance, when Rollo had divided off the lands with a line, and hung the robbers, the inhabitants of the neighboring provinces rushed in to establish themselves. The slightest security sufficed to repopulate a country.

People accordingly lived, or rather began to live once more, under the rude, iron-gloved hand which used them roughly, but which afforded them protection. The seignior, sovereign and proprietor, maintains for himself under this double title, the moors, the river, the forest, all the game. It is no great evil, since the country is nearly a desert, and he devotes his leisure to exterminating large wild beasts. He alone possessed the resources. He is the only one that is able to construct the mill, the oven, and the winepress; to establish the ferry, the bridge, or the highway, to dike in a marsh, and to raise or purchase a bull. To indemnify himself he taxes for these, or forces their use. If he is intelligent and a good manager of men, if he seeks to derive the greatest profit from his ground, he gradually relaxes, or allows to become relaxed, the meshes of the net in which his peasants and serfs work unprofitably because they are too tightly drawn. Habits, necessity, a voluntary or forced conformity, have their effect. Lords, peasants, serfs, and bourgeois, in the end adapted to their condition, bound together by a common interest, form together a society, a veritable corporation. The seigniory, the county, the duchy becomes a patrimony which is loved through a blind instinct, and to which all are devoted. It is confounded with the seignior and his family; in this relation people are proud of him. They narrate his feats of arms; they cheer him as his cavalcade passes along the street; they rejoice in his magnificence through sympathy.[1113] If he becomes a widower and has no children, they send deputations to him to entreat him to remarry, in order that at his death the country may not fall into a war of succession or be given up to the encroachment of neighbors. Thus there is a revival, after a thousand years, of the most powerful and the most vivacious of the sentiments that support human society. This one is the more precious because it is capable of expanding. In order that the small feudal patrimony to become the great national patrimony, it now suffices for the seigniories to be combined in the hands of a single lord, and that the king, chief of the nobles, should overlay the work of the nobles with the third foundation of France.

III. Services and Recompenses of the King.

Kings built the whole of this foundation, one stone after another. Hugues Capet laid the first one. Before him royalty conferred on the King no right to a province, not even Laon; it is he who added his domain to the title. During eight hundred years, through conquest, craft, inheritance, the work of acquisition goes on; even under Louis XV France is augmented by the acquisition of Lorraine and Corsica. Starting from nothing, the King is the maker of a compact State, containing the population of twenty-six millions, and then the most powerful in Europe.--Throughout this interval he is at the head of the national defense. He is the liberator of the country against foreigners, against the Pope in the fourteenth century, against the English in the fifteenth, against the Spaniards in the sixteenth. In the interior, from the twelfth century onward, with the helmet on his brow, and always on the road, he is the great justiciary, demolishing the towers of the feudal brigands, repressing the excesses of the powerful, and protecting the oppressed.[1114] He puts an end to private warfare; he establishes order and tranquility. This was an immense accomplishment, which, from Louis le Gros to St. Louis, from Philippe le Bel to Charles VII, continues uninterruptedly up to the middle of the eighteenth century in the edict against duels and in the "Grand Jours."[1115] Meanwhile all useful projects carried out under his orders, or developed under his patronage, roads, harbors, canals, asylums, universities, academies, institutions of piety, of refuge, of education, of science, of industry, and of commerce, bears his imprint and proclaim the public benefactor. Services of this character challenge a proportionate recompense; it is allowed that from father to son he is wedded to France; that she acts only through him; that he acts only for her; while every souvenir of the past and every present interest combine to sanction this union. The Church consecrates it at Rheims by a sort of eighth sacrament, accompanied with legends and miracles; he is the anointed of God.[1116] The nobles, through an old instinct of military fealty, consider themselves his bodyguard, and down to August 10, 1789, rush forward to die for him on his staircase; he is their general by birth. The people, down to 1789, regard him as the redresser of abuses, the guardian of the right, the protector of the weak, the great almoner and the universal refuge. At the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI "shouts of Vive le roi, which began at six o'clock in the morning, continued scarcely interrupted until after sunset."[1117] When the Dauphin was born the joy of France was that of a whole family. "People stopped each other in the streets, spoke together without any acquaintance, and everybody embraced everybody he knew."[1118] Every one, through vague tradition, through immemorial respect, feels that France is a ship constructed by his hands and the hands of his ancestors. In this sense, the vessel is his property; it is his right to it is the same as that of each passenger to his private goods. The king's only duty consists in being expert and vigilant in guiding across the oceans and beneath his banner the magnificent ship upon which everyone's welfare depends. Under the ascendancy of such an idea he was allowed to do everything. By fair means or foul, he so reduced ancient authorities as to make them a fragment, a pretense, a souvenir. The nobles are simply his officials or his courtiers. Since the Concordat he nominates the dignitaries of the Church. The States-General were not convoked for a hundred and seventy-five years; the provincial assemblies, which continue to subsist, do nothing but apportion the taxes; the parliaments are exiled when they risk a remonstrance. Through his council, his intendants, his sub-delegates, he intervenes in the most trifling of local matters. His revenue is four hundred and seventy-seven millions.[1119] He disburses one-half of that of the Clergy. In short, he is absolute master, and he so declares himself.[1120]--Possessions, freedom from taxation, the satisfactions of vanity, a few remnants of local jurisdiction and authority, are consequently all that is left to his ancient rivals; in exchange for these they enjoy his favors and marks of preference. Such, in brief, is the history of the privileged classes, the Clergy, the Nobles, and the King. It must be kept in mind to comprehend their situation at the moment of their fall; having created France, they enjoy it. Let us see clearly what becomes of them at the end of the eighteenth century; what portion of their advantages they preserved; what services they still render, and what services they do not render.

NOTES:

[Footnote 1101: "Les Moines d'Occident," by Montalembert, I. 277. St. Lupicin before the Burgundian King Chilperic, II. 416. Saint Karileff before King Childebert. Cf. passim, Gregory of Tours and the Bollandist collection.]

[Footnote 1102: No legend is more frequently encountered; we find it as late as the twelfth century.]

[Footnote 1103: Chilperic, for example, acting under the advice of Fredegonde after the death of all their children.]

[Footnote 1104: Montalembert, ibid., II. book 8; and especially "Les Forêts de la France dans l'antiquité et au Moyen Age," by Alfred Maury. Spinoe et vepres is a phrase constantly recurring in the lives of the saints.]

[Footnote 1105: We find the same thing to day with the colonies of Trappists in Algiers.]

[Footnote 1106: "Polyptique d'Irminon," by Guérard. In this work we see the prosperity of the domain belonging to the Abbey of St. Germain des Près at the end of the eighth century. According to M. Guérard's statistics, the peasantry of Paliseau were about as prosperous in the time of Charlemagne as at the present day.]

[Footnote 1107: Taine's definition would also fit contemporary (1999) drugs and video entertainment which also provide mankind with both hope, pleasure and entertainment. (SR.)]

[Footnote 1108: There are twenty-five thousand lives of the saints, between the sixth and the tenth centuries, collected by the Bollandists.--The last that are truly inspired are those of St. Francis of Assisi and his companions at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The same vivid sentiment extends down to the end of the fifteenth century in the works of Fra Angelico and Hans Memling.--The Sainte Chapelle in Paris, the upper church at Assisi, Dante's Paradise, and the Fioretti, furnish an idea of these visions. As regards modern literature, the state of a believer's soul in the middle ages is perfectly described in the "Pélerinage à Kevlaar," by Henri Heine, and in "Les Reliques vivantes," by Tourgueneff.]

[Footnote 1109: As, for example, Tertulle, founder of the Platagenet family, Rollo, Duke of Normandy, Hugues, Abbot of St. Martin of Tours and of St. Denis.]

[Footnote 1110: See the "Cantilenes" of the tenth century in which the "Chansons de Geste" are foreshadowed.]

[Footnote 1111: Laws governing the feudal system (1372) where the feudal lord is unable to transmit his property by testament but has to leave them to the next holder of the title. The "mainmortables" were serfs who belonged to the property. (SR.)]

[Footnote 1112: See in the "Voyages du Caillaud," in Nubia and Abyssinia, the raids for slaves made by the Pacha's armies; Europe presented about the same spectacle between the years 800 and 900.]

[Footnote 1113: See the zeal of subjects for their lords in the historians of the middle ages; Gaston Phoebus, Comte de Foix, and Guy, Comte de Flandres in Froissart; Raymond de Béziers and Raymond de Toulouse, in the chronicle of Toulouse. This profound sentiment of small local patrimonics is apparent at each provincial assembly in Normandy, Brittany, Franche-Comté, etc.]

[Footnote 1114: Suger, Life of Louis VI.]

[Footnote 1115: "Les Grand Jours d'Auvergne," by Fléchier, ed. Chéruel. The last feudal brigand, the Baron of Plumartin, in Poitou, was taken, tried, and beheaded under Louis XV in 1756.]

[Footnote 1116: As late as Louis XV a procès verbal is made of a number of cures of the King's evil.]

[Footnote 1117: "Mémoires of Madame Campan," I. 89; II. 215.]

[Footnote 1118: In 1785 an Englishman visiting France boasts of the political liberty enjoyed in his country. As an offset to this the French reproach the English for having decapitated Charles I., and "glory in having always maintained an inviolable attachment to their own king; a fidelity, a respect which no excess or severity on his part has ever shaken." ("A Comparative View of the French and of the English Nation," by John Andrews, p.257.)]

[Footnote 1119: Memoirs of D'Augeard, private secretary of the Queen, and a former farmer-general.]

[Footnote 1120: The following is the reply of Louis XV. to the Parliament of Paris, March 3, 1766, in a lit de justice: "The sovereign authority is vested in my person. . . The legislative power, without dependence and without division, exists in myself alone. Public security emanates wholly from myself; I am its supreme custodian. My people are one only with me; national rights and interests, of which an attempt is made to form a body separate from those of the monarch, are necessarily combined with my own, and rests only in my hands."]