The Ancient Regime Part 38

[Footnote 5268: Archives nationales, G, 300; G, 322 ("Memoires" on the excise duties).]

[Footnote 5269: "Proces-verbaux de l'a.s.s. prov. des Trois-Eveches p.

442.]

[Footnote 5270: Archives nationales, H, 1422 (Letter of the intendant of Moulins, April 1779).]

[Footnote 5271: Archives nationales, H. 1312 (Letters of M. D'Antheman procureur-general of the excise court (May 19, 1783), and of the Archbishop of Aix (June 15, 1783).)--Provence produced wheat only sufficient for seven and a half months' consumption.]

[Footnote 5272: Abbreviation for the "cahier des doleances", in English 'register of grieviances', brought with them by the representatives of the people to the great gathering in Paris of the "States-Generaux" in 1789. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5273: The feudal dues may be estimated at a seventh of the net income and the dime also at a seventh. These are the figures given by the a.s.s. prov. of Haute-Guyenne (Proces-verbaux, p. 47).--Isolated instances, in other provinces, indicate similar results. The dime ranges from a tenth to the thirteenth of the gross product, and commonly the tenth. I regard the average as about the fourteenth, and as one-half of the gross product must be deducted for expenses of cultivation, it amounts to one-seventh. Letrosne says a fifth and even a quarter.]

[Footnote 5274: Boivin-Champeaux, 72.]

[Footnote 5275: Grievances of the community of Culmon (Election de Langres.)]

[Footnote 5276: Boivin-Champeaux, 34, 36, 41, 48.--Perin ("Doleances des paroisses rurales de l'Artuis," 301, 308).--Archives nationales, proces-verbaux and cahiers of the States-Generaux, vol. XVII. P. 12 (Letter of the inhabitants of Dracy-le Viteux).]

[Footnote 5277: Motte: a mound indicative of Seigniorial dominion; quevaise; the right of forcing a resident to remain on his property under penalty of forfeiture; domaine congeable; property held subject to capricious ejection. (TR)]

[Footnote 5278: Prud'homme, "Resume des cahiers," III. pa.s.sim, and especially from 317 to 340.]

CHAPTER III. INTELLECTUAL STATE OF THE PEOPLE.

I.

Intellectual incapacity.--How ideas are transformed into marvelous stories.

To comprehend their actions we ought now to look into the condition of their minds, to know the current train of their ideas, their mode of thinking. But is it really essential to draw this portrait, and are not the details of their mental condition we have just presented sufficient?

We shall obtain a knowledge of them later, and through their actions, when, in Touraine, they knock a mayor and his a.s.sistant, chosen by themselves, senseless with kicks from their wooden shoes, because, in obeying the national a.s.sembly, these two unfortunate men prepared a table of taxes; or when at Troyes, they drag through the streets and tear to pieces the venerable magistrate who was nouris.h.i.+ng them at that very moment, and who had just dictated his testament in their favor.-Take the still rude brain of a contemporary peasant and deprive it of the ideas which, for eighty years past, have entered it by so many channels, through the primary school of each village, through the return home of the conscript after seven years' service, through the prodigious multiplication of books, newspapers, roads, railroads, foreign travel and every other species of communication.[5301] Try to imagine the peasant of the eighteenth century, penned and shut up from father to son in his hamlet, without parish highways, deprived of news, with no instruction but the Sunday sermon, continuously worrying about his daily bread and the taxes, "with his wretched, dried-up aspect,"[5302] not daring to repair his house, always persecuted, distrustful, his mind contracted and stinted, so to say, by misery. His condition is almost that of his ox or his a.s.s, while his ideas are those of his condition.

He has been a long time stolid; "he lacks even instinct,"[5303]

mechanically and fixedly regarding the ground on which he drags along his hereditary plow. In 1751, d'Argenson wrote in his journal:

"nothing in the news from the court affects them; the reign is indifferent to them. . . . . the distance between the capital and the province daily widens. . . . Here they are ignorant of the striking occurrences that most impressed us at Paris. . . .The inhabitants of the country side are merely poverty-stricken slaves, draft cattle under a yoke, moving on as they are goaded, caring for nothing and embarra.s.sed by nothing, provided they can eat and sleep at regular hours."

They make no complaints, "they do not even dream of complaining;"[5304]

their wretchedness seems to them natural like winter or hail. Their minds, like their agriculture, still belong to the middle ages.-In the environment of Toulouse,[5305] to ascertain who committed a robbery, to cure a man or a sick animal, they resort to a sorcerer, who divines this by means of a sieve. The countryman fully believes in ghosts and, on All Saints' eve, he lays the cloth for the dead.--In Auvergne, at the outbreak the Revolution, on a contagious fever making its appearance, M. de Montlosier, declared to be a sorcerer, is the cause of it, and two hundred men a.s.semble together to demolish his dwelling. Their religious belief is on the same level.[5306] "Their priests drink with them and sell them absolution. On Sundays, at the sermon, they put up lieutenancies and sub-lieutenancies (among the saints) for sale: so much for a lieutenant's place under St. Peter!--If the peasant hesitates in his bid, an eulogy of St. Peter at once begins, and then our peasants run it up fast enough."--To intellects in a primitive state, barren of ideas and crowded with images, idols on earth are as essential as idols in heaven. "No doubt whatever existed in my mind," says Ret.i.t de la Bretonne,[5307] "of the power of the king to compel any man to bestow his wife or daughter on me, and my village (Sacy, in Burgundy) thought as I did."[5308] There is no room in minds of this description for abstract conceptions, for any idea of social order; they are submissive to it and that is all. "The ma.s.s of the people," writes Governor in 1789, "have no religion but that of their priests, no law but that of those above them, no morality but that of self-interest; these are the beings who, led on by drunken curates, are now on the high road to liberty, and the first use they make of it is to rebel on all sides because there is dearth."[5309]

How could things be otherwise? Every idea, previous to taking root in their brain, must possess a legendary form, as absurd as it is simple, adapted to their experiences, their faculties, their fears and their aspirations. Once planted in this uncultivated and fertile soil it vegetates and becomes transformed, developing into gross excrescences, somber foliage and poisonous fruit. The more monstrous the greater its vigor, clinging to the slightest of probabilities and tenacious against the most certain of demonstrations. Under Louis XV, in an arrest of vagabonds, a few children having been carried off willfully or by mistake, the rumor spreads that the king takes baths in blood to restore his exhausted functions, and, so true does this seem to be, the women, horrified through their maternal instincts, join in the riot; a policeman is seized and knocked down, and, on his demanding a confessor, a woman in the crowd, picking up a stone, cries out that he must not have time to go to heaven, and smashes his head with it, believing that she is performing an act of justice[5310]. Under Louis XVI evidence is presented to the people that there is no scarcity: in 1789, [5311] an officer, listening to the conversation of his soldiers, hears them state "with full belief that the princes and courtiers, with a view to starve Paris out, are throwing flour into the Seine." Turning to a quarter-master he asks him how he can possibly believe such an absurd story. "Lieutenant," he replies, "'tis time--the bags were tied with blue strings (cordons bleus)." To them this is a sufficient reason, and no argument could convince them to the contrary. Thus, among the dregs of society, foul and horrible romances are forged, in connection the famine and the Bastille, in which Louis XVI., the queen Marie Antoinette, the Comte d'Artois, Madame de Lamballe, the Polignacs, the revenue farmers, the seigniors and ladies of high rank are portrayed as vampires and ghouls. I have seen many editions of these in the pamphlets of the day, in the engravings not exhibited, and among popular prints and ill.u.s.trations, the latter the most effective, since they appeal to the eye. They surpa.s.s the stories of Mandrin[5312] and Cartouche, being exactly suitable for men whose literature consists of the popular laments of Mandrin and Cartouche.

II.

Political incapacity.--Interpretation of political rumors and of government action.

By this we can judge of their political intelligence. Every object appears to them in a false light; they are like children who, at each turn of the road, see in each tree or bush some frightful hobgoblin.

Arthur Young, on visiting the springs near Clermont, is arrested,[5313]

and the people want to imprison a woman, his guide, some of the bystanders regarding him as an "agent of the Queen, who intended to blow the town up with a mine, and send all that escaped to the galleys."

Six days after this, beyond Puy, and notwithstanding his pa.s.sport, the village guard come and take him out of bed at eleven o'clock at nights, declaring that "I was undoubtedly a conspirator with the Queen, the Count d'Artois and the Count d'Entragues (who has property here), who had employed me as arpenteur to measure their fields in order to double their taxes." We here take the unconscious, apprehensive, popular imagination in the act; a slight indication, a word, prompting the construction of either air castles or fantastic dungeons, and seeing these as plainly as if they were so many substantial realities. They have not the inward resources that render capable of separating and discerning; their conceptions are formed in a lump; both object and fancy appear together and are united in one single perception. At the moment of electing deputies the report is current in Province[5314] that "the best of kings desires perfect equality, that there are to be no more bishops, nor seigniors, nor t.i.thes, nor seigniorial dues, no more t.i.thes or distinctions, no more hunting or fis.h.i.+ng rights,. . . that the people are to be wholly relieved of taxation, and that the first two orders alone are to provide the expenses of the government." Whereupon forty or fifty riots take place in one day. "Several communities refuse to make any payments to their treasurer outside of royal requisitions."

Others do better: "on pillaging the strong-box of the receiver of the tax on leather at Brignolles, they shout out Vive le Roi!" "The peasant constantly a.s.serts his pillage and destruction to be in conformity with the king's will." A little later, in Auvergne, the peasants who burn castles are to display "much repugnance" in thus maltreating "such kind seigniors," but they allege "imperative orders, having been advised that the king wished it."[5315] At Lyons, when the tapsters of the town and the peasants of the neighborhood trample the customs officials underfoot they believe that the king has suspended all customs dues for three days.[5316] The scope of their imagination is proportionate to their shortsightedness. "Bread, no more rents, no more taxes!" is the sole cry, the cry of want, while exasperated want plunges ahead like a famished bull. Down with the monopolist!--storehouses are forced open, convoys of grain are stopped, markets are pillaged, bakers are hung, and the price of bread is fixed so that none is to be had or is concealed.

Down with the octroi!--barriers are demolished, clerks are beaten, money is wanting in the towns for urgent expenses. Burn tax registries, account-books, munic.i.p.al archives, seigniors' charter-safes, convent parchments, every detestable doc.u.ment creative of debtors and sufferers!

The village itself is no longer able to preserve its parish property.

The rage against any written doc.u.ment, against public officers, against any man more or less connected with grain, is blind and determined.

The furious animal destroys all, although wounding himself, driving and roaring against the obstacle that ought to be outflanked.

III.

Destructive impulses.--The object of blind rage.--Distrust of natural leaders.--Suspicion of them changed into hatred.

--Disposition of the people in 1789.

This owing to the absence of leaders and in the absence of organization, a mob is simply a herd. Its mistrust of its natural leaders, of the great, of the wealthy, of persons in office and clothed with authority, is inveterate and incurable. Vainly do these wish it well and do it good; it has no faith in their humanity or disinterestedness. It has been too down-trodden; it entertains prejudices against every measure proceeding from them, even the most liberal and the most beneficial. "At the mere mention of the new a.s.semblies," says a provincial commission in 1787,[5317] "we heard a workman exclaim, 'What, more new extortioners!'"

Superiors of every kind are suspected, and from suspicion to hostility the road is not long. In 1788[5318] Mercier declares that "insubordination has been manifest for some years, especially among the trades. . . . Formerly, on entering a printing-office the men took off their hats. Now they content themselves with staring and leering at you; scarcely have you crossed threshold when you yourself more lightly spoken of than if you were one of them." The same att.i.tude is taken by the peasants in the environment of Paris; Madame Vigee-Lebrun,[5319] on going to Romainville to visit Marshal de Segur, remarks: "Not only do they not remove their hats but they regard us insolently; some of them even threatened us with clubs." In March and April following this, her guests arrive at her concert in consternation. "In the morning, at the promenade of Longchamps, the populace, a.s.sembled at the barrier of l'Etoile, insulted the people pa.s.sing by in carriages in the grossest manner; some of the wretches on the footsteps exclaiming: 'Next year you shall be behind the carriage and we inside.'" At the close of the year 1788, the stream becomes a torrent and the torrent a cataract.

An intendant[5320] writes that, in his province, the government must decide, and in the popular sense, to separate from privileged cla.s.ses, abandon old forms and give the Third-Estate a double vote. The clergy and the n.o.bles are detested, and their supremacy is a yoke. "Last July,"

he says, "the old States-General would have been received with pleasure and there would have been few obstacles to its formation. During the past five months minds have become enlightened; respective interests have been discussed, and leagues formed. You have been kept in ignorance of the fermentation which is at its height among all cla.s.ses of the Third-Estate, and a spark will kindle the conflagration. If the king's decision should be favorable to the first two orders a general insurrection will occur throughout the provinces, 600,000 men in arms and the horrors of the Jacquerie." The word is spoken and the reality is coming. An insurrectionary mult.i.tude rejecting its natural leaders must elect or submit to others. It is like an army which, entering on a campaign, finding itself without officers; the vacancies are for the boldest, most violent, those most oppressed by the previous rule, and who, leading the advance, shouting "forward" and thus form the leading groups. In 1789, the bands are ready; for, below the suffering people there is yet another people which suffers yet more, whose insurrection is permanent, and which, repressed, persecuted, and obscure, only awaits an opportunity to come out of its hiding-place and openly give their pa.s.sions free vent.

IV.

Insurrectionary leaders and recruits.--Poachers.--Smugglers and dealers in contraband salt.--Bandits.--Beggars and vagabonds.--Advent of brigands.--The people of Paris.

Vagrants, recalcitrants of all kinds, fugitives of the law or the police, beggars, cripples, foul, filthy, haggard and savage, they are bred by the social injustice of the system, and around every one of the social wounds these swarm like vermin.--Four hundred captaincies protects vast quant.i.ties of game feeding on the crops under the eyes of owners of the land, transforming these into thousands of poachers, the more dangerous since they are armed, and defy the most terrible laws.

Already in 1752[5321] are seen around Paris "gatherings of fifty or sixty, all fully armed and acting as if on regular foraging campaigns, with the infantry at the center and the cavalry on the wings. . . . They live in the forests where they have created a fortified and guarded area and paying exactly for what they take to live on." In 1777[5322], at Sens in Burgundy, the public attorney, M. Terray, hunting on his own property with two officers, meets a gang of poachers who fire on the game under their eyes, and soon afterwards fire on them. Terray is wounded and one of the officers has his coat pierced; guards arrive, but the poachers stand firm and repel them; dragoons are sent for and the poachers kill of these, along with three horses, and are attacked with sabers; four of them are brought to the ground and seven are captured.-Reports of the States-General show that every year, in each extensive forest, murders occur, sometimes at the hands of a poacher, and again, and the most frequently, by the shot of a gamekeeper.--It is a continuous warfare at home; every vast domain thus harbors its rebels, provided with powder and ball and knowing how to use them.

Other recruits for rioting are found among smugglers and in dealers in contraband salt[5323]. A tax, as soon as it becomes exorbitant, invites fraud, and raises up a population of delinquents against its army of clerks. The number of such defrauders may be seen when we consider the number of custom officers: twelve hundred leagues of interior custom districts are guarded by 50,000 men, of which 23,000 are soldiers in civilian dress[5324]. "In the princ.i.p.al provinces of the salt-tax and in the provinces of the five great tax leasing administrations (fermes), for four leagues (ten miles) on either side of the prohibited line,"

cultivation is abandoned; everybody is either a customs official or a smuggler[5325]. The more excessive the tax the higher the premium offered to the violators of the law; at every place on the boundaries of Brittany with Normandy, Maine and Anjou, four pence per pound added to the salt-tax multiplies beyond any conception the already enormous number of contraband dealers. "Numerous bands of men,[5326] armed with frettes, or long sticks pointed with iron, and often with pistols or guns, attempt to force a pa.s.sage. "A mult.i.tude of women and of children, quite young, cross the brigades boundaries or, on the other side, troops of dogs are brought there, kept closed up for a certain time without food or drink, then loaded with salt and now turned loose so that they, driven by hunger, immediately bring their cargo back to their masters."--Vagabonds, outlaws, the famished, sniff this lucrative occupation from afar and run to it like so many packs of hounds. "The outskirts of Brittany are filled with a population of emigrants, mostly outcast from their own districts, who, after a year's registered stay, may enjoy the privileges of the Bretons: their occupation is limited to collecting piles of salt to re-sell to the contraband dealers." We might imagine them, as in a flash of lightening, as a long line of restless nomads, nocturnal and pursued, an entire tribe, male and female, of unsociable prowlers, familiar with to underhand tricks, toughened by hard weather, ragged, "nearly all infected by persistent scabies," and I find similar bodies in the vicinity of Morlaix, Lorient, and other ports on the frontiers of other provinces and on the frontiers of the kingdom.

From 1783 to 1787, in Quercy, two allied bands of smugglers, sixty and eighty each, defraud the revenue of 40,000 of tobacco, kill two customs officers, and, with their guns, defend their stores in the mountains; to suppress them soldiers are needed, which their military commander will not furnish. In 1789,[5327] a large troop of smugglers carry on operations permanently on the frontiers of Maine and Anjou; the military commander writes that "their chief is an intelligent and formidable bandit, who already has under him fifty-five men, he will, due to misery and rebellion soon have a corps;" it would, as we are unable to take him by force, be best, if some of his men could be turned and made to hand him over to us. These are the means resorted to in regions where brigandage is endemic.--Here, indeed, as in Calabria, the people are on the side of the brigands against the gendarmes. The exploits of Mandrin in 1754,[5328] may be remembered: his company of sixty men who bring in contraband goods and ransom only the clerks, his expedition, lasting nearly a year, across Franche-Comte, Lyonnais, Bourbonnais, Auvergne and Burgundy, the twenty-seven towns he enters making no resistance, delivering prisoners and making sale of his merchandise. To overcome him a camp had to be formed at Valance and 2,000 men sent against him; he was taken through treachery, and still at the present day certain families are proud of their relations.h.i.+p to him, declaring him a liberator.--No symptom is more alarming: on the enemies of the law being preferred by the people to its defenders, society disintegrates and the worms begin to work.--Add to these the veritable brigands, a.s.sa.s.sins and robbers. "In 1782,[5329] the provost's court of Montargis is engaged on the trial of Hulin and two hundred of his accomplices who, for ten years, by means of joint enterprises, have desolated a portion of the kingdom."--Mercier enumerates in France "an army of more than 10,000 brigands and vagabonds" against which the police, composed of 3,756 men, is always on the march. "Complaints are daily made," says the provincial a.s.sembly of Haute-Guyenne, "that there is no police in the country."

The absentee seignior pays no attention to this matter; his judges and officials take good care not to operate gratuitously against an insolvent criminal, the result is that "his estates become the refuge of all the rascals of the area."[5330]--Every abuse thus carries with it a risk, both due to misplaced carelessness as well as excessive rigor, to relaxed feudalism as well as to harsh monarchy. All the inst.i.tutions appear to work together to breed and or tolerate the troublemakers, preparing, outside the social defenses, the men of action who will carry it by storm.

But the total effect of all this is yet more damaging, for, out of the vast numbers of workers it ruins it forms beggars unwilling to work, dangerous sluggards going about begging and extorting bread from peasants who have not too much for themselves. "The vagabonds about the country," says Letrosne,[5331] "are a terrible pest; they are like an enemy's force which, distributed over the territory, obtains a living as it pleases, levying veritable contributions. . . . They are constantly roving around the country, examining the approaches to houses, and informing themselves about their inmates and of their habits.--Woe to those supposed to have money!. . . What numbers of highway robberies and what burglaries! What numbers of travelers a.s.sa.s.sinated, and houses and doors broken into! What a.s.sa.s.sinations of curates, farmers and widows, tormented to discover money and afterwards killed! Twenty-five years anterior (page 384/284) to the Revolution it was not infrequent to see fifteen or twenty of these "invade a farm-house to sleep there, intimidating the farmers and exacting whatever they pleased." In 1764, the government takes measures against them which indicate the magnitude of the evil[5332].

"Are held to be vagabonds and vagrants, and condemned as such, those who, for a preceding term of six months, shall have exercised no trade or profession, and who, having no occupation or means of subsistence, can procure no persons worthy of confidence to attest and verify their habits and mode of life. . . . The intent of His Majesty is not merely to arrest vagabonds traversing the country but, again, all mendicants whatsoever who, without occupations, may be regarded as suspected of vagabondage."

The penalty for able-bodied men is three years in the galleys; in case of a second conviction, nine years; and for a third, imprisonment for life. Under the age of sixteen, they are put in an inst.i.tution. "A mendicant who has made himself liable to arrest by the police," says the circular, "is not to be released except under the most positive a.s.surance that he will no longer beg; this course will be followed only in case of persons worthy of confidence and solvent guaranteeing the mendicant, and engaging to provide him with employment or to support him, and they shall indicate the means by which they are to prevent him from begging." This being furnished, the special authorization of the intendant must be obtained in addition. By virtue of this law, 50,000 beggars are said to have been arrested at once, and, as the ordinary hospitals and prisons were not large enough to contain them, jails had to be constructed. Up to the end of the ancient regime this measure is carried out with occasional intermissions: in Languedoc, in 1768, arrests were still made of 433 in six months, and, in 1785, 205 in four months[5333]. A little before this time 300 were confined in the depot of Besancon, 500 in that of Rennes and 650 in that of Saint Denis. It cost the king a million a year to support them, and G.o.d knows how they were bedded and fed! Water, straw, bread, and two ounces of salted grease, the whole at an expense of five sous a day; and, as the price of provisions for twenty years back had increased more than a third, the keeper who had them in charge was obliged to make them fast or ruin himself.--With respect to the mode of filling the depots, the police are Turks in their treatment of the lower cla.s.s; they strike into the heap, their broom bruising as many as they sweep out. According to the ordinance of 1778, writes an intendant,[5334] "the police must arrest not only beggars and vagabonds whom they encounter but, again, those denounced as such or as suspected persons. The citizen, the most irreproachable in his conduct and the least open to suspicion of vagabondage, is not sure of not being shut up in the depot, as his freedom depends on a policeman who is constantly liable to be deceived by a false denunciation or corrupted by a bribe. I have seen in the depot at Rennes several husbands arrested solely through the denunciation of their wives, and as many women through that of their husbands; several children by the first wife at the solicitation of their step-mothers; many female domestics pregnant by the masters they served, shut up at their instigation, and girls in the same situation at the instance of their seducers; children denounced by their fathers, and fathers denounced by their children; all without the slightest evidence of vagabondage or mendicity. . . . No decision of the provost's court exists restoring the incarcerated to their liberty, notwithstanding the infinite number arrested unjustly."

Suppose that a human intendant, like this one, sets them at liberty: there they are in the streets, without a penny, beggars through the action of a law which proscribes mendicity and which adds to the wretched it prosecutes the wretched it creates, still more embittered and corrupt in body and in soul.