II. the terrors of the words RENT and TAXES do not now CHAP. equal those of the whole catalogue of feudal obligations.* 82. tration of XV. The administration of justice, as in all countries where public opinion has not its due weight, or the judges Adminisare exempted from its control, was liable to many abuses in France. In some places it was partial, and said to be venal. Fortune, liberal presents, court favour, the smiles of a handsome wife, or promises of advancement to relations, sometimes swayed the decisions of the judges in the inferior tribunals. This evil was felt in many parts of the country. The common opinion, though often unfounded, was, that to obtain justice in any of the provincial courts was out of the question. Nor were the decisions of the parliaments or supreme courts, whether of the capital or provinces, altogether unsullied. These numerous and public-spirited bodies, notwithstanding their loud professions of patriotism, were not always immaculate; and the diversity of their customs introduced a degree of variance into their determinations, which rendered all attempt at uniformity impracticable.1 But although, like the other Monthion, institutions of the monarchy, the provincial parliaments i.35. Young, stood much in need of amendment, yet they had several i. 598, 602. particulars in their constitution deserving of the highest approbation, and which had rendered them the cradles of freedom during the corruptions and oppression of preceding reigns. They possessed one fundamental excellencethey were independent. The most doubtful circumstance connected with their mode of appointment, that of its being by purchase, contributed to this independence of character. The members of these courts held for life, indeed many may be said to have held by inheritance. Though appointed in the first instance by the monarch, they were nearly beyond his power, for he could not remove them; and for long they had enjoyed the power of The land-tax in France is now twenty per cent on an average, at the very lowest, on the gross agricultural profits; often forty or fifty per cent on the landowners' gains. 154. Thiers, II. CHAP. electing the members of their body, subject to his approval; so that they were practically independent. The more determined the exertions of that authority against them became, the more their spirit of freedom and independence became manifest. They composed permanent bodies politic, and from that corporate and lasting constitution were well calculated to afford both certainty and stability to the laws. They had been a safe asylum to these laws in all the revolutions of opinion, and under all the frowns of power. They had saved that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions. They were the great safeguard to private property: their decisions, though varying with the customs of the different provinces, were, generally speaking, honest and upright: they had furnished no inconsiderable corrective to the vices and excesses of the monarchy. The independent spirit which terminated in the Revolution began in the free and courageous conduct of these assemblies, during a contest of nearly half a century with the crown; and it is one of the strongest proofs of the insanity which ultimately got possession of the public mind, that one of the first acts of the democratic party, upon attaining supreme authority, was to sweep away those venerable bulwarks by which the people had so long been sheltered from the invasion of despotic power.1 1 Michelet's Hist. de France, iv. 221. Ordon. 1388, 1400, 1413. Burke's Considerations, Works, vi. 367. 83. rogative. For XVI. The royal prerogative, by a series of successful Royal pre- usurpations, had reached a height inconsistent with any thing like real freedom. The most important right of a citizen, that of deliberating on the passing of laws, and the granting of supplies, had fallen into desuetude. nearly two centuries, the kings, of their own authority, had published ordinances possessing all the authority of laws, and which originally could not be sanctioned but by the representatives of the people. The right of approving or registering, as it was called, these ordinances, was transferred from the States-general, which were rarely convoked, to the parliaments and courts of justice; but their deliber CHAP. II. ations were liable to be suspended by lits de justice, or personal interventions of the sovereign, and infringed by arbitrary imprisonments. The regulations, which could legally be made only by the king in council, were frequently adopted without the intervention of that body; and so common had this abuse become, that in many departments of government it was habitual. Taxes were imposed without the consent of the nation, or of its representatives: those originally laid on by legal authority continued after the stipulated period of their endurance had ceased, or were augmented far beyond the amount agreed to by the people. Criminal commissions, composed of persons nominated solely by the crown, were frequently appointed; and rendered both personal liberty and real property insecure. Warrants of imprisonment, without either accusation or trial, might deprive any subjects of their freedom, and consign them to dungeons for the remainder of their lives. Debts to an enormous amount, and of which the annual charge absorbed more than half the revenue of the state, had been contracted without national authority, or increased without its knowledge. The public creditors, kept in the dark as to the state of the finances, or of the security which existed for their payment, were daily becoming more apprehensive as to the ultimate solvency of the state. The personal expenses of the kings had risen under the reigns of Louis XIV. and XV. to a very great height, and they were not distin- De Stael, guished from the ordinary expenditure of of government, Monthion, except in a secret record, no part of which was divulged Etat de la to the people. The salaries of all the civil servants of the lique, 1790, crown, and of the higher officers in the army, were deemed 154. excessive; while the duties of their several offices were too often either neglected or performed by deputy.1 What rendered this tremendous power of imprisoning any person at the mere whim of the king, or any of his ministers or mistresses, the more obnoxious, was the extreme inconsistency with which it had been exercised, and 1 i. 130, 151. 153, 154. Dette Pub 8. Th. i. II. the royal been exercised. power had the total impossibility of foreseeing what doctrines or measures might not, at no distant period, consign the 84. most eminent men in France to confinement in the Bastile Extreme inconsistency for years, perhaps for life. During the course of the with which long contest of the king with the parliaments, and the still more acrimonious disputes of the Jesuits with the Jansenists, the opposite parties had alternately been successful, and each had invariably applied, without mercy, the terrible engine of solitary imprisonment, to overawe or coerce its opponents. The ministers of the crown opened the gates of the Bastile with equal readiness to the enemies of whichever of the contending parties had, for the moment, got possession of the royal confidence. Nay, their mistresses were often ready, for a small gratuity, to procure lettres-de-cachet for any applicant, to further the purposes of intrigue or domestic jealousy. Seldom were they refused to the powerful or the affluent.* When M. de la Vrillière surrendered the seals of the home office, which he had held for half a century, to Malesherbes, in 1775, there was no party, religious or political, in France, the chiefs of which he had not, on some previous occasion, sent into exile, or immured in the Bastile. The Jesuits and the Jansenists, the partisans of the court and the leaders of the parliament, the leaders of the church and the philosophic atheists, had been indiscriminately visited with this terrible penalty. The numbers of lettres * "On m'a reconté la triste aventure d'une jeune bouquetière remarquable par sa beauté. Elle s'appelait Jeanneton. Un jour M. le Chevalier de Coigny la rencontre éblouissante de fraîcheur et brillante de gaîté. Il l'interroge sur la cause de cette vive satisfaction. Je suis heureuse,' dit-elle: 'mon mari est un grondeur, un brutal-il m'obsédait. J'ai été chez M. le Comte de Saint Florentin Madame -, qui jouit de ses bonnes grâces, m'a fort bien accueillie, et pour dix louis je viens d'obtenir une lettre-de-cachet qui me délivre de mon jaloux.' "Deux ans après, M. de Coigny rencontre la même Jeanneton, mais triste, maigre, pale, jaune, les yeux battus. Eh! ma pauvre Jeanneton,' lui dit-il, qu'êtes-vous donc devenue? On ne vous rencontre nulle part.' 'Hélas! monsieur, répondit-elle, 'j'étais bien sotte de me rejouir. Mon vilain mari, ayant eu la même idée que moi, était allé de son côté chez le Ministre, et le même jour, par la même entremise, avait acheté un ordre pour m'enfermer: en sorte qu'il en a coûté vingt louis à notre ménage pour nous faire réciproquement jeter en prison.'"-Souvenirs du Comte de Ségur, ii. 187; DE TOCQUEVILLE, Histoire de Louis XV. ii. 489. II. de-cachet he had signed was incalculable: he had im- CHAP. mured the Molinist friends of the Pope at the desire of the Regent Orleans, who depended on the parliaments; he had next sent to the Bastile the Jansenists in great numbers, to pay court to the Abbé Dubois, who was intriguing at Rome to obtain a cardinal's hat under Cardinal Fleury and M. Arguella, he had confined within the same walls the leaders of the parliament who opposed the court; and more recently had sent into exile the Abbé Terray, and M. de Maupeou, the very ministers who had directed the last arrests. Finally, he had im- d'Anglas, prisoned numbers of the philosophers, who ere long planted him in office; and M. de Malesherbes, to he surrendered the portfolio of the home office in had himself been confined in the Bastile, under his warrant, only four years before.1 sup Soulavie, 326, 327. Boissy Viede Male sherbes, ii. 23, 24. De Tocq. Vie whom de Louis torture still con XVII. Another frightful remnant of feudal cruelty 85. which existed in France down to the close of the reign of Terrible Louis XV., was the use of TORTURE-not only in order to which was extract confessions from prisoners previous to trial, but to tinued in increase the sufferings and aggravate the horror of their France. punishment. This dreadful barbarity, the bequest of ages of violence and anarchy, was continued in France with a blindness which appears incredible, not only after the long establishment of regular government had rendered it unnecessary, but when the increasing humanity and laxity of the age had made it insupportable. All Europe had shuddered at the atrocious and prolonged cruelty with which Damiens, who had attempted the life of Louis XV. in 1757, was executed-a cruelty which sets, if possible, in a brighter light the admirable clemency which induced George III. in England to save the life of every one of the numerous assassins who had tried to murder * It has been stated to have amounted to the enormous number of 50,000; but this estimate appears to be exaggerated; but 25,000, or 500 a-year, is probably within the mark; considerably less in half a century than, under the Convention, were sometimes imprisoned in a single month. See BOISSY D'ANGLAS, Vie de Malesherbes, ii. 23, 26. |