The French Revolution | Page 7

republican hero. But
from the sixties matters changed rapidly. Audiences show great enthusiasm over rivalries
of art, of actors, of authors, of opinions, and every once in a while applaud or boo a
sentiment that touches the sacred foundations of the social and political order. At last an
author appears on the scene, keen, witty, unscrupulous, resourceful, to seize on this
growing mood of the public and to play 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.

{25}
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 régime 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