Part 13

D'Argenson had arrived at the conviction that the causes of the evil from which the country was suffering were the practical nullity of the Crown and the political nullity of the people; and he felt that the remedy was to be found in the admission of the people to a share of power. He knew not less than any of his critics, that where power is divided differences will arise; but he saw no reason to doubt that if King and people were guided by a common patriotism and mutual respect, such differences need never issue in violent collision. At the same time he knew that when the interests of the King were obstinately opposed to those of the people, such collisions would occur; they were calamitous, but they were the lesser of two calamities. He declares that in the case of "a King who is worthy of the name," such divergence of interest need never be feared. Should there be a King who was not worthy of the name, he might be left to the discretion of an indignant people, and of the most daring and determined man who happened at the moment to possess their confidence. It was none of d'Argenson's concern.

It is true that we do not find him stating, in this uncompromising way, the revolutionary aspect of his programme; he would have shrunk from formulating it clearly even to himself. At the same time we know that it was by no means distant from his mind. Notwithstanding, he cannot have regarded it as of any immediate or direct importance; for he could not but think that only by an access of inconceivable folly on the part of the people or of inconceivable madness on the part of the Crown, could such a revolutionary ferment be occasioned.

We cannot better appreciate the spirit and scope of d'Argenson's proposal than by comparing it with the universally admired design broached, about twenty years later, by the great minister Turgot. The principle of the two policies was practically the same. Turgot proposed, like d'Argenson, to entrust to the people and popular organisations the whole administration of the interior, while retaining the entire legislative authority in the hands of the Crown.[432] The people, as in d'Argenson's scheme, had merely the power of suggesting legislation, though the actual law must proceed from the King. Between the two plans, however, there was one great difference of detail. D'Argenson had surrounded the authority of the Crown with a sacred barrier; behind that barrier the people might exercise all the effective powers of popular control: beyond it they were forbidden to pass. In the proposal of Turgot that barrier was destroyed. Above the circle of Provincial Estates he desired to constitute a Municipality of the Whole Realm; by doing so he would have brought the sphere of popular action into direct juxtaposition with that of the Crown, and have surrounded the very palace gates with the acclamations or with the clamour of the people.

Perhaps both policies, at their several periods, had equally little prospect of realisation; but if it were necessary to choose between them with regard to the state of feeling existing and likely to exist in France, the preference might be given to the earlier plan. For a time of disturbance and strain, it can claim one signal excellence, in attempting to provide for the maximum of exasperation with the minimum of indecency and danger. It is the great vice of central, but not sovereign assemblies that they can never come into collision with the Crown without inflicting a grievous blow upon the prestige and authority of the Crown. The veil which shroud it from the vulgar gaze, which surrounds it with an air of sacramental mystery, is torn into a thousand disreputable pieces, and the solemn difference between King and citizen is seen to fade guiltily away. D'Argenson feared, and had always feared, that blighting closeness of contact; and he endeavoured to preserve the influence of the Crown while placing the people in a position from which, in cases of the last emergency, they would be able to control the Crown. It is easy to see how the King at Versailles and a number of Estates in the provincial cities might have quarrelled to the verge of revolution, and yet how the King, by timely concession, might have retained his authority unimpaired.

Nor is it hard to answer the question which some have found it necessary to ask, and to sketch the progress of a revolution proceeding from the basis of d'Argenson's scheme. Had the Government become utterly despicable and bad, and had the King shown himself unable or unwilling to undertake reform, the Provincial Estates might have waited in patience until popular feeling was at fever height, and then they might have offered the King his choice between a national insurrection

"_Les jalousies réciproques des Princes Chrétiens sont peut-être aujourd'hui son appui le plus solide._"--"Considérations" (1784). [Of the Turkish Empire.]

and the acceptance of a certain demand. That demand would have been that the hundred and twenty-eight deputies who represented the several Estates at the Court,[433] should be combined in a single assembly in order to concert measures for the future of the Kingdom. If the King had yielded, the deputies would have met, and have offered him the choice between a national insurrection and the acceptance of their advice. If he chose the latter alternative and endeavoured loyally to fulfil it, the assembly would disperse, matters would revert to their normal condition, and a politic effort would be made by all parties to forget the past. If, on the other hand, he remained contumacious, the people would resort to that last of political resources employed by England with such signal success a century and a half before. Such a state of things was never for a moment likely to arise. In 1755 the tradition of the French Monarchy remained unshaken.[434] A popular constitution would have been accepted as an act of grace; and the people would have been engaged too busily in remedying abuses to spend their strength in factious opposition. Only by suicidal folly on the part of the Crown could any danger have arisen. A moderate endowment of public spirit and common sense would have sufficed to protect the Government; and a monarch with one-half of the ability even of Louis XVI., or one tithe of the devotion maintained for generations in the House of Hohenzollern, would have been able to maintain his position with ease.

As a general constitutional proposition d'Argenson's plan is admirable enough; but when considered in relation to the paramount need of France at that particular moment it becomes a very master-work of statesmanship and sagacity. He alone could diagnose the conditions of the disease and discern the only remedy it was possible to apply. It is scarcely half the truth to say that the French Revolution was induced by bad government; there were times when the Government had been infinitely worse. The cause lay deeper. It lay in a social revolution which was already complete, and which the Crown refused to recognise.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the institutions of France had drifted into a condition of which history perhaps can afford no parallel. The aristocratic corporations of the Church, the law, and the land, whose influence the Crown for its own purposes had so often used and abused, were losing every particle of vital force; and the Monarchy found itself burdened and overborne by the weight of the great classes upon whom in times past it had leaned for support. The history of its last forty years is the history of a series of spasmodic efforts to rise to the grandeur of its great position: and the continual frustration of those efforts through the stolid egotism of the privileged orders.

Why was it, it may be asked, that what had once been an inexhaustible source of strength had become a fatal element of weakness? The cause is to be found in a social revolution which had been silently proceeding for nearly a century. Ever since the time of Colbert, the middle classes, the class of tax-farmers, merchants and manufacturers, had been increasing rapidly in wealth and importance. It was not the mere growth of a bourgeoisie; it was the rise of a new society, whose leaders were ready to sow their wealth in the garden of art and letters. So it was that while lordly ineptitude upon the field of battle made the French Government a byword in Europe, the name of France was rendered illustrious by bourgeois triumphs in literature and the arts.

Coincident with the rise of the middle class was the declining influence of the Church and the Nobility. For fifty years the Church had been engaged in one of the most despicable party fights which history records; its most successful men were witty libertines, who officiated at the unhallowed sacrament of the "petit souper," and whose only belief in heaven or earth was in the redeeming virtues of a cardinal's hat. The nobles were despised by the best among them. They were hopelessly sunk in debt; and those whose magnificence paid no interest were subsisting on pensions dispensed by favourites and wrung from wretches who fed on grass and had no stomach for resistance. The nobles were outshone by the farmers-general; the Church had ceded her empire to the "Philosophes"; while financier and "philosophe" were the social and intellectual leaders of a great society whose growth was transforming the aspect of France.

Had Fortune dealt as kindly with the Bourbon House as she had lately done with the failing Hapsburgs: could she have given to France in Louis XV. the latest and greatest of her kings, the Revolution might have been undreamed of, and the Bourbons absolute to this day. Such a man would have discerned the tendency of events: he would have thrown himself into line with it.[435] He would have sent his nobles beyond the Rhine, with a mission to die or to justify their existence; he would have crushed with an iron hand the pretensions of the Church; and turning Versailles into a national museum, he would have transferred his Court to the Louvre or the Tuileries, nor would he have allowed it to be surpassed in brilliance by the salons of the farmers-general.

By putting himself at the head of the new France, he might have renewed the tradition of the French Monarchy. Such might have been the work of a great King; but the Great King reviewed his squadrons on the plain of Potsdam, and devoted to France but a passing jest; and she was left to the guidance of one of the most pitiable and mean of men, who could do no more than watch

"_C'est la déportation qui constitue principalement l'esclavage; nul n'est facilement esclave dans son pays._"--"Considérations" (1784).

the clouds and predict the bursting of "Le Déluge."

Effort to avert it there was none. Versailles displayed perhaps as strange a combination of pomp and vanity as was ever known in the history of the world. It retained the profusion, without the dignity, of the Grand Age; and public affairs went as they could while incapable nobles and dissolute Churchmen exchanged the shuttle of an endless intrigue. In tradition and spirit it was utterly alien from the new society. But one representative of the rising classes won her way into the charmed circle; she entered the Court as Madame d'Etioles; but before long the wife of the farmer-general was lost in Madame la Marquise de Pompadour. In public affairs the blindness was equally insensate. The King consented to trail his ermine in the slush of ecclesiastical quarrels; and such men as Tencin were the rulers of France, while Voltaire was reduced to crave the favour of some obscure lieutenant of police. When at last a man arises who will not take Madame's gifts, but will consent to copy her music, and who will not accept a hundred louis for work worth a dozen francs, he is spoken of as some strange kind of wild animal, "un original d'une nouvelle espèce," in Madame's own words.[436] And meanwhile the silver-tongued "bourreau" went on correcting his proofs--of the "Contrat Social"--and inditing the charter of those great classes which the French Monarchy continued to ignore.

No man had cherished more fondly than d'Argenson his hopes of Louis XV., and none had been more cruelly disappointed. He acknowledged at last that the Monarchy could not save itself; he would have tried to save it in spite of itself. His method was the only possible one. Flinging aside, like a damaged tool, the decrepit organisation of the privileged orders, he would have called in the assistance of that great people who held the future in the hollow of their hand. He would have given them power by their own efforts to redeem the vices of the Government, and to free that Government from the vesture of privilege and tradition which clung to it like the shirt of Nessus. For the two-fold evil from which France was suffering, his scheme provided a double remedy. The people had no power to demand good government; the Crown, burdened as it was by the privileged orders, had scarcely the power to afford it. D'Argenson would have given the people the necessary power: he would have given the Crown the necessary freedom: and he would have left it to the patriotism of the nation and the good sense of the King to restore prosperity to their common country.

D'Argenson's constitution died with him, and he who will may call it a dream.

It is a pity that such dreams are not more frequent.

END OF THE ESSAY.

_For the portrait at the beginning of the book the author is obliged to the present Marquis d'Argenson. He is pleased to have this opportunity of thanking Mr. H. L. Samuel, of Balliol College, and also Mr. T. A. Vans Best and Mr. F .S. P. Swann, of Magdalen, for invaluable advice and help._

_APPENDICES._

APPENDICES.

A.

THE FLASSAN MEMOIR.

This Memoir (see pp. 116-18 and note 312) is noticed by M. de Broglie, who rejects it as--

(i.) Probably unauthentic; as it has not been discovered by him or by M. Zevort among the ordinary sources; and

(ii.) Certainly unimportant; since it is nowhere referred to, as it assuredly would have been, in d'Argenson's Memoirs.

Now (i.) unless there existed, not merely this Memoir, but the whole policy of which it may have been a part, a considerable portion of the "Mémoires du Ministère" becomes unintelligible. That policy is constantly referred to throughout Book I., Art. 4 (Rathery, IV. pp. 239-66); and it is mentioned occasionally in the "Mémoires" of 1746, and in d'Argenson's Journal after he had ceased to be minister. Such a document, therefore, may naturally exist.

(ii.) This Memoir is given in Flassan, "Histoire de la Diplomatie Française," V. pp. 242-45 (published [second edition] in 1811). It deals with facts and not with ideas, and so cannot at once be recognised as d'Argenson's.

(iii.) On turning to the pages which precede the Memoir, we feel we are strangely familiar with M. Flassan's text. The fact is explained by a comparison with Rathery, Vol. IV. We find, for instance, that Flassan, V. pp. 236-41, is positively little else than a verbal transcription from d'Argenson, "Mémoires du Ministère," I. Art. 4 (Rathery, IV. pp. 239-66). It is not a question of the use of an authority, but simply of the wholesale appropriation of his text. It is generally given in inverted commas, though the source does not appear to be mentioned; but in Flassan, V. p. 239, we find a paragraph, beginning "Quoique véritablement" (Rathery, IV. pp. 256-57), and two entire pages, "La Savoie," &c., pp. 240-42 (cf. Rathery, IV. pp. 257, 259-60), bodily transferred without acknowledgment, M. Flassan securing his interest in the whole by occasionally changing a word or an expression. An example of the process is a sentence, taken haphazard, on Flassan, V. p. 240; in four lines of letter-press the only alterations are "dans" (for d'Argenson's "sur"), and "domaine de l'Autriche" (for d'Argenson's "domaine autrichienne"; see Rathery, IV. p. 259, line 21). In fact, the whole account of the early part of d'Argenson's ministry is a conscientious copy of d'Argenson's text, M. Flassan confining himself to the transposition, or occasional omission, of paragraphs, and the changing of unimportant words. The transcription is from the original manuscripts then in possession of the d'Argenson family, and afterwards in the Library of the Louvre; and it was executed about fifty years before the editions either of Jannet or Rathery were issued from the press.

(iv.) The question suggested by the preceding is, how far is M. Flassan's account, and therefore presumably the Memoir in question, derived, borrowed, or taken from the manuscript of d'Argenson's "Mémoires du Ministère." The answer is that M. Flassan's obligations are nearly as great throughout the year 1746 as at the close of 1744; and the only other source of original information a brief examination has been able to disclose, are the letters and papers of Marshal de Noailles.

The inference is that the memoir ascribed to d'Argenson by a historian who had ransacked his papers, coinciding with d'Argenson's stated views (_cf._ Rathery, IV. p. 257), and found among copious extracts from what Rathery reproduces as d'Argenson's text, is authentic.

There is scarcely need to fall back upon a second line of proof, if possible even more convincing.

(v.) In his Introduction to the "Mémoires," M. Rathery states (IV. pp. 127-28) that of the four volumes of Memoirs designed by d'Argenson, each containing twelve articles, only Arts. I-4 of Vol. I. have been finally written. Arts. 5-12 of Vol. I. and the whole of Vol. II. were never edited, but remained in the form of notes and memoranda (IV. p. 125). The whole of Vol. III. exists, but imperfectly; and also Vol. IV., with the exception of the last few articles. In brief, the memoirs of the first six weeks of d'Argenson's ministry (Nov. 18-Dec. 31, 1744; "Mémoires," I. Arts. I-4) are edited completely; _those of the year 1745_ ("Mémoires," I., Arts. 5-12, and II.) _are not edited at all_, but were left as notes and memoranda; and those of 1746 are edited, but imperfectly.

Now (vi.) we find that the second half of Flassan, Vol. V. book 4, is occupied with a careful and copious account of _the first six weeks_ of d'Argenson's ministry (mostly in d'Argenson's own words); but no sooner are those first six weeks over than d'Argenson's manuscript and Flassan's fulness come to a sudden and simultaneous end; and the events of the whole year 1745 are disposed of in eight pages, of which the relations between France and Prussia occupy the four following lines:--

"En conséquence de cette communication [Frederick's proposal for peace, December, 1744, _see_ this essay, p. 103], le roi de Prusse fit, le 25 décembre 1745, sa paix à Dresde, afin de s'assurer la Silésie, qu'il se fit garantir par l'Angleterre."

In the year 1746 (when the "Mémoires" are edited, but imperfectly) d'Argenson and M. Flassan are again intimately associated.

(vii.) The appearance of fulness given to the account of 1745 is produced by the insertion of three long memoirs: (_a_) this disputed memoir to Louis XV.; and (_b_) a couple more designed by d'Argenson for the king of Poland. The manner of their appearance is peculiar.

On p. 241 (Vol. V.), without any clear connection with the preceding, M. Flassan writes an original twenty lines of introduction, and suddenly reproduces the Flassan Memoir (V. pp. 242-45). The Memoir is followed, not by any consecutive argument, or even by any original writing, but is simply wedged in its place with a couple of paragraphs taken word for word from d'Argenson's "Mémoires," I. Art. 4 (one of the articles perfectly edited, and referring to a period some time before). Comp. Flassan, V. p. 245, and Rathery, IV. p. 261.

Then follow the eight pages referred to above. They bring Book IV. to a close.

(viii.) Book V. opens with three pages of introduction (pp. 257-60),--certainly borrowed, we believe from d'Argenson's Journal (which was in manuscript along with the "Mémoires")--and these are followed (pp. 260-72) by the two long memoirs for the king of Poland. Now _these memoirs are written by d'Argenson_. Unlike the former, they deal with ideas and not with facts; and we recognise them at once. This is not a matter of argument; to question any one's opinion upon such a matter would be simply to impeach his knowledge of the man. The inference is clear. If these are d'Argenson's, so presumably is the other.

Having dealt with these memoirs, M. Flassan (V. p. 273) proceeds at a bound to the help given by France to the Chevalier St. George, or, in other words, to the end of 1745. In 1746 his task is easy.

In brief, we have a copious account of the wholly uneventful first six weeks; the eventful year 1745 is represented by eight pages of original writing, and three memoirs attributed to d'Argenson and wedged in their places with pieces of d'Argenson's text. We submit that the inference is as follows:--

That for his account of the year 1745, and of the last six weeks of 1744, M. Flassan relied entirely upon d'Argenson's manuscript; that he made copious use of the perfectly edited articles so long as they held out; and that, finding the year 1745 represented solely by notes and memoranda, he selected three documents as of peculiar importance, and one of them the Flassan Memoir. That consequently the Memoir is authentic, and was one of the documents designed by d'Argenson as the basis of the unedited "Mémoires du Ministère," Vol. I. Arts. 5-12, or Vol. II. It was turned over, but not published, by M. Rathery, who could not, of course, have realised its critical importance.

The last piece of evidence remains.

(ix.) This Memoir, with the rest of d'Argenson's manuscripts, perished in the burning of the Library of the Louvre in 1871. It follows that neither M. de Broglie (who wrote in 1888 "Marie Thérèse") nor M. Zevort (in 1879) would have expected to find it if they had known where it might have been found.

M. de Broglie protests that, even if authentic, it is at least unimportant, as it is not mentioned by d'Argenson in his published memoirs. To this we reply--

(i.) That it could not have been, as the memoirs during the period into which it would have fallen ("au mois de février"--Flassan) have been neither edited nor published.

(ii.) That a memoir of an exactly similar character is categorically mentioned by d'Argenson as having been presented by him to the king a few weeks before (_cf._ "Mémoires du Ministère" [Rathery], IV. p. 257, and this essay, p. 104).

(iii.) That unless the policy set forth in this memoir had a very real existence, much of the "Mémoires du Ministère," I. Art. 4, and many scattered references to be found elsewhere, are simply unintelligible.

The question is important; for if this memoir is authentic, it follows that the history of d'Argenson's ministry during the year 1745 has yet to be written.

B.

THE TEXTS OF THE "CONSIDÉRATIONS."

Since this essay was written, the two editions of 1764 and 1784 have been carefully collated, with the object of clearing up the obscurity which surrounds them. The conclusions are as follows:--

A. The text of 1764 was completed some years before d'Argenson's accession to the ministry, and is based upon a genuine manuscript, probably as early as those of 1737.

B. The text of 1784, the whole of which is subsequent to his retirement from the ministry, divides into two parts.

(_a_) Chapters I.--VI., and VIII. These chapters represent a part of the original work as revised and enlarged by the author. The "plan," however, which they are designed to elucidate disappears from the edition, and is replaced (Chapter VII.) by a much vaster project with which they are not concerned. The date of this revision is probably about 1750, and it may be placed generally from 1748 to 1752.