The French Revolution | Page 4

guide the States-General, a vast undertaking that sheds a
flood of light on the economic condition of France in 1789. The historians have, in fact,
reached a moment of more impartiality, more detachment, more strict setting out of facts;
and with the general result that the specialist benefits and the public loses.
What has been 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 curé
and its seigneur. The curé 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