France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 9

than go to the court of the first two kings of the
Hanoverian line; just as the dependence of these two sovereigns of
revolutionary title upon the revolution families is one reason why
English liberties had time to root themselves thoroughly before the
monarchical reaction, under George III. In France, for reasons which
we have no room to expatiate upon, the experiments both of Sully and
of Colbert failed. The result may be read with graphic effect in the
pages of Arthur Young, both before the Revolution broke out and again
after Burke's superb rhetoric had biassed English opinion against it.
[4] Turgot, Philosophe et Economiste. Par A. Batbie, p. 380.
M. Léonce de Lavergne, it is true, in his most interesting book upon the
Provincial Assemblies under Lewis XVI., has endeavoured to show
that in the great work of administrative reform all classes between 1778
and 1787 had shown themselves full of a liberal and practical spirit.
But even in his pages we see enough of apprehensions and dissensions
to perceive how deep was the intestine disorganisation; and the attitude
of the nobles in 1789 demonstrated how incurable it was by any merely
constitutional modifications. Sir Philip Francis, to whom Burke
submitted the proof-sheets of the Reflections, at once with his usual
rapid penetration discerned the weakness of the anti-revolutionary
position. 'The French of this day,' he told Burke, 'could not act as we
did in 1688. They had no constitution as we had to recur to. They had
no foundation to build upon. They had no walls to repair. Much less
had they "the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be
wished." A proposition so extraordinary as this last ought to have been

made out in limine, since the most important deductions are drawn
from it.'[5] But, though Burke insisted on drawing his deductions from
it with sweeping impetuosity, neither he nor any one else has yet
succeeded in establishing that all-important proposition.
[5] Burke's Correspondence, iii. 157.
What we desire to say, then, comes, in short, to this, that M. Taine has
given an exaggerated importance to the literary and speculative activity
of the last half century of the old monarchy. In measuring the force of
the various antecedents of the Revolution, he has assigned to books and
philosophical ideas a place in the scale of dissolvent conditions that
belongs more rightly to decayed institutions, to incompetent and
incorrigible castes, to economic incongruities that could only be dealt
with trenchantly. Books and ideas acquired a certain importance after
other things had finally broken up the crumbling system. They supplied
a formula for the accomplished fact. 'It was after the Revolution had
fairly begun,' as a contemporary says, 'that they sought in Mably and
Rousseau for arms to sustain the system towards which the
effervescence of some hardy spirits was dragging affairs. It was not the
above-named authors who set people's heads aflame. M. Necker alone
produced this effect, and determined the explosion.'[6]
[6] Sénac de Meilhan, Du Gouvernement en France, 129, etc. (1795).
The predominance of a historic, instead of an abstract, school of
political thought could have saved nothing. It could have saved nothing,
because the historic or conservative organs and elements of society
were incompetent to realise those progressive ideas which were quite as
essential to social continuity as the historic ideas. The historic method
in political action is only practicable on condition that some, at any rate,
of the great established bodies have the sap of life in their members. In
France not even the judiciary, usually the last to part from its ancient
roots, was sound and quick. 'The administration of justice,' says Arthur
Young, 'was partial, venal, infamous. The conduct of the parliament
was profligate and atrocious. The bigotry, ignorance, false principles,
and tyranny of these bodies were generally conspicuous.'[7] We know
what the court was, we know what the noblesse was, and this is what

the third great leading order in the realm was. We repeat, then, that the
historic doctrine could get no fulcrum or leverage, and that only the
revolutionary doctrine, which the eighteenth century had got ready for
the crisis, was adequate to the task of social renovation.
[7] Travels in France, i. 603.
Again, we venture to put to M. Taine the following question. If the
convulsions of 1789-1794 were due to the revolutionary doctrine, if
that doctrine was the poison of the movement, how would he explain
the firm, manly, steadfast, unhysterical quality of the American
Revolution thirteen years before? It was theoretically based on exactly
the same doctrine. Jefferson and Franklin were as well disciplined in
the French philosophy of the eighteenth century as Mirabeau or
Robespierre. The Declaration of Independence recites the same abstract
and unhistoric propositions as the Declaration of the