The Years of Endurance (10 page)

Thus, though the greater part of Europe was at one time or another governed by innovating royal despots or their Ministers, the age of gold tarried in coming. Peasants still died of hunger in ditches, beggars exhibited their sores in cathedral squares and State treasuries remained empty. And the useless nobles and priests, condemned in theory by every rational being, including their-own more enlightened members, continued to enjoy indefensible privilege. Nor was it only their opposition which defeated the hopes of the philosopher kings. There seemed, for all their high and unquestionable intentions, to be something wrong with the kings themselves. They were logical and enlightened and clear-headed, but they were also greedy, vain and arrogant. In other words they were men and women. Frederick the Great might correspond with Voltaire, but he left his subjects cowed and stupid—" one cane to every seven men "—and his neighbours, who had suffered from his enlightened aggressions, fearful and suspicious. Kings with the power of reason were not uncommon, but they lacked morality. Moreover they were too often succeeded by half-wits and weaklings. Reason was not hereditary.

When the dream of regenerating society by a few " wise reigns " died, the greater part of Europe sank back into apathy. Courtiers and prelates continued to fritter away their time and rentals on good music and amoral conduct, burghers to stagnate and the " swinish multitude " to suffer. Only in France did hope survive. Here in the most brilliant Court and capital in the world the philosphers and their innumerable aristocratic and middle-class disciples continued to maintain that society could be regenerated and that man was not only perfectible but inherently good. He was merely corrupted by unreasonable laws, customs, and superstitions. If kings could not unloose these rusty chains, man by combining could cast them off himself. The nation had only to resume control of its own destiny, the people to renew with one another the natural contract of a just and rational society. The millennium was round the corner.

France was the most powerful nation in Europe, with a population three times as big as that of England and nearly double that of the British Isles, and boasting a record of splendid achievement in arms, learning and the arts. Under Louis XIV she had threatened to establish a suzerainty over the whole Continent. Her advance had only been checked by the resolution of William III, who had marshalled the Powers of Europe and the genius of Marlborough against her. From those twenty years of aggression her finances had never recovered. Though her trade
since
1713 had multiplied fivefold, she had never been able
to shake off the burden
of debt. The usurer's stranglehold frustrated instead of stimulating economic activity. A great nation was reduced to chronic impotence. A titanic exercise of energy was needed to break the vicious circle of bankruptcy and stagnation.

Though, with her virile, ingenious people, France's capacity to recover financial equilibrium seemed self-evident, her every effort to do so failed. The blame was laid at the door of the aristocrats whose irrational privileges alone appeared to stand between the nation and a happier future. Theoretically all power was centred in the throne, and the once-turbulent nobles of France had been reduced to an idle concourse of spineless courtiers, living lives of graceful dissipation around the palace of Versailles. Yet a weak King—and both the successors of Louis XIV were nonentities— exercised authority through those who surrounded him. These were the men of birth—the representatives of an exclusive hereditary corporation of about a quarter of a million persons—with a leaven of financiers, wits and adventurers who were admitted, on terms, into the charmed circle.

Increased privilege was the price which the sovereigns of France had paid the nobility for the loss of ancient powers—privilege not to do but to receive. The aristocrats who monopolised the first-fruits of French agriculture were exempted by perpetual Court attendance both from the local duties for which those first-fruits were paid and the taxes which maintained the public services. Every attempt, to rationalise taxation—the only way in which bankruptcy could be averted—was opposed by their interest. Many nobles— for eighteenth-century France sparkled with enlightenment— sympathised with reform. But with swarms of needy and idle relations to support, few were in a position to waive their rights to fiscal immunity. Every Minister who tried to modify them was met by a dead-weight of obstruction. And in a Court where the lightest word of an irresolute King had power and where petticoat influence—legitimate and illegitimate—flourished, intrigues could wreck the plans of the most capable Minister. In theory the Government of France was despotic: in practice it had become almost the weakest in Europe. The dead hand of the past lay heavy on all: on the aristocrat who was the slave of his upbringing, on the government which was helpless in the face of feudal and local privilege, on the King who was only the chief slave of a nation enslaved to venerable inertia. Everything was discussed: nothing constructive ever done.

The aristocracy, debarred from activity and common contacts in the artificial air of Versailles, became, for all its wit and graceful breeding, anaemic and effete. It was a society that within its narrow range had much that was exquisite and lovely. Talleyrand in after years used to say that those who had not known it had not lived. But its members had lost the sense of social responsibility. A habit of all taking and no giving had made them inconsequent. As patrons of the philosophers they were the first to join in the fashionable intellectual derision of their own illogical privileges. Yet they did nothing to forgo or modify them. They scorned to unbend to the eager, middle-class
arrivistes
who pressed at their crimson heels. A little timely sacrifice of vanity m
ight have saved them, their count
ry and the world from untold suffering. They remained incurably frivolous.

The middle-class of France—alert and intelligent—was not frivolous. Debarred from all responsibil
ity by its lack of quarter
ings, it was politically both ambitious and inexperienced. It devoured the work of the philosophers and longed for the day when its own natural intelligence and virtue would be employed to regenerate society. Because the aristocracy whose manners it aped stood in the way, because the aristocracy patronised, laughed at and ignored it, because the aristocracy had not a tenth of its talent and pent-up energy, it hated the aristocracy. It asked, in Figaro's rhetorical challenge, what the aristocrats had done to deserve so many good things and answered with embittered irony
9
" You have given yourselves the trouble of being born." It bowed enviously to, but sneered at, their titles, stars and sacred genealogical tables. Bankers and rich merchants and lawyers and their aspiring sons chafed at the elegant, haughty, insouciant creatures whose ancestors had been "
qentilhommes”
in the reign of Philip II and who treated them, when they called on business, in the steward's room. In their impotent wrath they turned not only against the aristocracy but against Church and King who supported the useless encumbrance with their authority. Holbach, the banker, in his salon said many witty, bitter things, "
a f
aire tomber la tonnere sur sa maison"
Diderot, the philosopher, wished to see " the last king strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

The embittered bourgeois had urgent allies. The dumb millions, who did not read the Encyclopaedists or mind whether their wives were received by
the
great ladies of the Court, were also growing restless. The unreason of France's administrative anarchy did not offend their pride or their intellect but something more serious— their stomach.

For the frugal and hard-working peasants wanted their land freed from the seignorial dues, tolls and services which kept the noble in ribbons and stars, gold louis for the faro table and jewels for his wife and mistresses. By incredible frugality they had acquired ownership of a third of the soil of France. And on this third, owing to the fiscal exemption of the nobility, the whole burden of taxation fell. The land which they had tilled so industriously and saved up
with
such fierce self-denial to buy was starved by the absentee landlords who should have been its custodians. The Court and the cities drained the countryside dry.

In bad years the French people went hungry. When there was no bread in the hovels of the wintry villages, the poorer peasants flocked to the towns where they joined the workless journeymen and the mob that lived on the middens and refuse-bins. In these seasons rumblings of the storm which was soon to break reached the ears of the rich. The nobility who had lost contact with reality paid little heed. The bourgeois, waiting his chance and the dawn of a golden future for humanity, saw in those pallid, drawn faces a challenge and an opportunity.

Such a season of hunger came with the winter of 1788-9. The financial impasse had been growing steadily worse since the war to help Britain's revolted colonies. Every fiscal device had been tried in turn to save the State's credit except the one fateful expedient: equalisation of taxation. But on that rock every reformer had broken.

It was the paradox of France on the eve of storm that while her people's minds were full of fear, their hearts were full of hope. From the contemplation of the abyss that opened at their feet they looked across to a radiant vision of human perfection and happiness conjured up for them by the philosophers. Voltaire once observed that Rousseau's picture of the golden age was such that it made one want to walk on all fours. To the great Swiss writer who had inflamed the minds of educated France, the problems of the universe—so complex and daunting to the statesman—were clad in a divine simplicity. There was a key to the universe and its secrets that, used aright, would restore mankind to its primitive heritage of innocent peace and joy. That key was the human reason.

For on the elemental truth that reason was sacred and that every man, possessing reason, partook of the divine, Rousseau had erected an airy superstructure so flattering to human nature that its appeal to those conscious of the misgovernment of eighteenth-century France was irresistible. Since all men enjoyed reason and reason was divine, all men—in their exercise of reason—were equal in potential wisdom. To substitute Utopia for chaos and frustration it was only necessary to frame a constitution in which the dictates of individual reason and the laws of the State were the same. Somewhere, discoverable by the statesman, was
la Volonte Generale
—a General Will expressing the aggregate reason of everyman. It was the same as the will of God. Every antiquated, irrational law of King, Priest or Noble that stood in its way was blasphemy.

Such a doctrine was as heartening as it was flattering. It offered an immediate hope that the weight could be lifted from all shoulders. It told everyman that he was what he believed himself to be: a creature of godlike reason, virtuous instinct and generous intention; if not perfect, easily perfectible. It was only bad, outworn law, custom and superstition that had made him less than himself: abolish them and he would discard like a disused skin the meanness, greed and cruelty that disfigured his nature. He need no longer grovel before the priests and precepts of an abstract morality, for true religion was in his own heart. God and man were synonymous. All that was wanted to build heaven on earth was to ascertain the General Will: to assemble the representatives of the People and give them power.

That was why the first of January, 1789, seemed to France like the first streak of dawn after a long, dark night. For on that day the King, confronted by a ruined harvest, an empty Treasury and streets full of hungry, shivering wretches, took a step that promised to fulfil the dreams of the philosophers. Advised by Necker, the Swiss banker, he summoned the States General to meet at Versailles. After two centuries of absolute monarchy, the nation was to devise the
means of its own regeneration. The godlike power of reason was to be allowed free play.

France went mad with delight. In every pulpit " the divine rescript" was read " bathed in the tears of the people." Even the aristocracy rejoiced. Only those who watch
ed the hungry, ignorant, brutali
sed poor in the squalid faubourgs and snowy fields and knew something of the ambitions of politicians and the greed of speculators and monopolists, had their doubts.
¹
For human nature might be perfectible, but it had still to be perfected.

It revealed itself at once in the character of the States General. For the deputies lacking political experience were impractical and irresponsible. To show its good faith the Crown had doubled the representation of the popular or Third Estate, making the number of its delegates equal to those elected both by Priests and Nobles, the two other traditional Estates of the realm. But it left the decision whether they should vote together or sit in separate assemblies to their own judgment. On this elementary point no agreement could be reached. The opening weeks of the session which was to have seen the formulation of a new social contract—a lucid, rational, written constitution enthroning reason and the national will—were spent in a long, unseemly wrangle between the three Estates. It was only ended by the Third Estate, under the lead of a renegade nobleman, the Comte de Mirabeau, declaring itself the sole constituent Assembly and defying both the Crown to dissolve it or its fellow Estates to act apart from it. " We are met together by the National Will," Mirabeau declared, " force shall alone disperse us."