The French Revolution | Page 4

said should explain why it is that the Revolution appears even more difficult to treat as a whole at the present day than it did at the time of Thiers and Mignet. The event was so great, the shock was so severe, that from that day to this France has continued to reel and rock from the blow. It is only within the most recent years that we can see going on under our eyes the last oscillations, the slow attainment of the new democratic equilibrium. The end is not yet, but what that end must eventually be now seems clear beyond a doubt. The gradual political education and coming to power of the masses is a process that is the logical outcome of the Revolution; and the joining of hands of a wing of the intellectuals with the most radical section of the working men, is a sign of our times not lightly to be passed over. From Voltaire before the Revolution to Anatole France, at {10} the present day, the tradition and development is continuous and logical.
It now remains to be said that if this is the line along which the perspective of the Revolution is to be sought, this is not the place in which the details of that perspective can be adequately set out. That must be reserved for a history of far larger dimensions, and of much slower achievement, of which a number of pages are already written. In this volume nothing more can be attempted than a sketch in brief form, affording a general view of the Revolution down to the year 1799, when Bonaparte seized power.

{11}
CHAPTER II
VERSAILLES
At the close of the 18th century France had more nearly reached her growth than any of her great European rivals; she was far more like the France of to-day, than might at first be supposed by an Englishman, American or German, thinking of what his own country accomplished during the 19th century. Her population of about 25,000,000 was three times more numerous than that of England. Paris, with 600,000 inhabitants or more, was much nearer the present-day city in size than any other capital of Europe, except Naples. Socially, economically, politically, notwithstanding gross abuses, there was great development; and the reformer who remodelled the institutions of France in 1800 declared that the administrative machine erected by the Bourbons was the best yet devised by human ingenuity. Large manufacturing cities and a number of active ports indicated the advent of a great economic period.
{12} All this reposed, however, on a very incongruous foundation. Feudalism, mediaevalism, autocracy, had built up a structure of caste distinction and class privilege to which custom, age, stagnation and ignorance, lent an air of preordained and indispensable stability. The Church, most privileged of all corporations, turned her miracles and her terrors, both present and future, into the most powerful buttress of the fabric. The noblesse, supreme as a caste, almost divided influence with the Church. The two, hand in hand, dominated France outside the larger towns. Each village had its cur�� and its seigneur. The cur�� collected his tithes and inculcated the precepts of religion, precepts which at the close of the 18th century, preached Bourbonism as one of the essential manifestations of Providence on earth. The seigneur, generally owning the greater part of all freehold property, not only weighed as a landlord but exercised many exclusive privileges, and applied the most drastic of sanctions to the whole as the local administrator of justice. There were hundreds of devout priests and of humane seigneurs, but a proportion, conspicuous if small, were otherwise; and the system gave such an opportunity for evil doing, that opinion naturally, but unjustly, {13} converted the ill deeds of the few into the characteristic of the whole class.
The culmination of this system, its visible and emphatic symbol, fastened on Paris like a great bloated tumour eating into the heart of France, was Versailles. But compared with class privilege, the Church, and the seigneur, Versailles was a recent phenomenon, invented by Louis XIV little more than one hundred years before the outbreak of the Revolution. At the beginning of the 17th century the French monarchy had somewhat suddenly emerged from the wars of religion immensely strengthened. Able statesmen, Henry IV, Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV, had brought it out of its struggle with the feudal aristocracy triumphant. Before the wars of religion began the French noble was still mediaeval in that he belonged to a caste of military specialists and that his provincial castle was both his residence and his stronghold. The struggle itself was maintained largely by his efforts, by the military and political power of great nobles, Guises, Montmorencys and others. But when the struggle closes, both religion, its cause, and the great noble its supporter, sink somewhat