The French Revolution | Page 7

on it for his own glory and profit.
Beaumarchais, Mirabeau, Dumouriez, Bonaparte, these are the types of the adventurers of the Revolution, and the first only belongs {22} to the period of incubation and also to the domain of letters. Thrown into the war of American independence by his double vocation of secret diplomatic agent and speculator in war supplies, he had espoused the cause of the American people with an enthusiasm that always blazed most brightly when a personal interest was at stake. His enthusiasm for American liberty was easily converted into enthusiasm for the liberty of his own class, and to vindicate that, he put Figaro on the stage.
The first public performance of the Noces de Figaro, in 1784, was the culmination of a three years' struggle. Louis XVI had declared the play subversive, and the author had raised a storm of protest in its behalf. A special performance was conceded for the Court; and the Parisian public, irritated at being thus excluded, then raised for the first time the cry of tyranny and oppression. When at last the Government in its weakness made the final concession, and permitted a public performance, the demand for seats was greater than had ever previously been known. The theatre was packed. Great lords and ladies sat elbow to elbow with bourgeois and fashionable women; and when Figaro came on and declaimed against social injustice, the opposite parties in {23} the house stormed approval or disfavour. Figaro is Beaumarchais, is the lower or middle class man, with nothing but his wits with which to force his way through the barriers which privilege has erected across every path along which he attempts to advance. As the valet of Count Almaviva he has seen the man of privilege at close quarters and has sounded his rottenness and incapacity. Because you are a grand seigneur, he says, you think yourself a great genius; but, Monsieur le Comte, to what do you really owe your great privileges? To having put yourself to the inconvenience of being born, nothing more. I, with all my ability and force, I who can work for myself, for others, for my country, I am driven away from every occupation.
That was what the pushing adventurer and witty dramatist had to say, but all through the country thousands of plain, inconspicuous men, doctors, lawyers, merchants, farmers, even here and there a peasant or a noble, the best representatives of the deep-rooted civilization of France, of her keen intelligence, of her uprightness, of her humanity, revolted inwardly at the ineptitude and injustice of her government. As they saw it, the whole system seemed to revolve about Versailles, the abode {24} of the Bourbon King, the happy hunting ground of the privileged courtier, the glittering abode of vice and debauchery, the sink through which countless millions were constantly drained while the poor starved, the badge of dishonour and incapacity which had too frequently been attached to the conduct of France both in war and in peace. The twenty-five millions without the gates gazed at the hundred thousand within, and the more they gazed the louder and more bitter became their comment, the dimmer and the more tawdry did the glitter of it all appear to them, and the weaker and more half-hearted became the attitude of the one hundred thousand as they attempted by insolence and superciliousness to maintain the pose of their inherited superiority.

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CHAPTER III
ECONOMIC CRISIS
Even under such conditions the Bourbon monarchy might have survived much longer had it not failed badly at one specific point. Napoleon himself declared that it was in its financial management that the ancien r��gime had broken down; and although for a long period historians chose to accentuate the political and social aspects of the Revolution, of recent years the economic has been the point of emphasis. And it was to consider a financial problem that the States-General were summoned in 1789; while most of the riots that broke out in Paris that same year were due to scarcity of food.
The editors of the Encyclopaedia had not neglected economic questions, and had given much employment to a number of writers who ranked as Economists or as Physiocrats. Among the men most interested in such questions were Quesnay, the physician of Madame de Pompadour; Turgot, the ablest minister of {26} Louis XVI, and the Marquis de Mirabeau, father of a more famous son. They concerned themselves, among other things, with theories of agriculture largely based on the conditions of their country. With her large population France could with difficulty produce sufficient food for her people. The wheat which she did produce was brought to market under extremely bad conditions of distribution and of payment. The century witnessed what appeared to be an endless succession of short crops and consequent famine. Viewing