II. men of these families were ignorant, idle, and dissolute, CHAP. lounging away an ignoble existence in provincial theatres, coffee-houses, or billiard-rooms; the young women, for the most part, were consigned to the hopeless seclusion of the convent. All public respect was lost for a body, the great majority of which was composed of such characters, while it rigidly excluded all persons of inferior birth from the principal situations in the country. Although, too, the old families of historic names and extensive possessions still enjoyed great influence, and some of the greatest men in France had sprung from their ranks, yet the highest nobles, as a body, were far from possessing the talent, information, or habits, requisite to have enabled them to take a decided or beneficial lead in public affairs. Trained in the antechambers of a palace, perfect in the elegances of a court, pre-eminent in the graces of a drawing-room, they were but little qualified to struggle in public debate with the aspiring leaders, accustomed to legal contest, who were rising out of a robust democracy. They had never been habituated to the habits of business, the ready elocution, the coolness in argument, which is acquired in England by the aristocracy on the hustings, in conducting county business as grand-jurors, in either house of parliament, or in the public meetings which characterise a free country. Hence their marked inferiority in the hour of 1 Necker, i. trial to a similar class in this country, and the extraordi- 161, 163. nary facility with which the French monarchy was over-poleon, i. turned, when contrasted with the protracted, and in the De Stael, end successful struggle, which, during so many ages, the i. 81. aristocracy of Great Britain have maintained with the enemies of the throne.1 Nor was this all: the aristocracy itself was divided in France to a most calamitous degree, by the jealousy between the old families and the new noblesse, who had obtained patents of nobility by holding certain official employments, or had purchased them, during the necessities of former reigns, from the crown. Such had been the Scott's Na 39, 41. Rév. Franc. II. 96. Fatal divi sion in France, between the old families and the nouveaux anoblis. CHAP. distressed state of the royal treasury on many occasions, particularly during the War of the Succession, that patents of nobility were openly sold to the richer bankers and merchants for two thousand crowns (£500) each.* Although these nouveaux anoblis, as they were called, were far from enjoying the consideration or influence of the descendants of the great historic houses, yet they were their equals in privileges of every kind; and their great number, amounting as it did to a half of the whole noble families, as well as the riches which some of them possessed, rendered them too important to be passed over by the old families with silent contempt. Hence an implacable feud, an inextinguishable jealousy, between these two classes of the nobility, which permanently prevented them from adopting any measures for their common defence, and which not even the prospect of dangers that threatened both with destruction was able to allay. The old families regarded with aversion the upstart nobles, some of them descended from the stewards and factors of their ancestors, who now equalled them in privilege and often eclipsed them in fortune; the nouveaux anoblis were jealous of the lustre of historic descent, and envied a consideration which all their modern riches were unable to acquire. The latter were so numerous, in consequence of the great number of channels by which nobility had during the last two centuries been reached,+ that the King * Nobility was for the first time attached to the holders of the higher situations in the magistracy, and of course to their descendants, in 1644, by a royal edict, passed under the direction of Cardinal Mazarine. The same prerogatives were successively granted in subsequent reigns, under certain restrictions, to public offices of lesser importance, and the descendants of those who held them. NECKER, Sur la Révolution Française, i. 165. "Près de la moitié de l'ordre de la noblesse, tel qu'il existait à l'approche des derniers Etats-Généraux, était composée de familles anoblies depuis deux siècles, par des charges de conseillers aux parlements, de conseillers à la cour des aides, d'auditeurs, de correcteurs, et de maîtres des comptes, de conseillers au châtelet, de maîtres des requêtes, trésoriers de France, de secrétaires du Roi, du grand et du petit collège, et par d'autres charges encore, comme aussi par des places de capitouls, d'échevins, et par des brevets émanés de la faveur des rois, des ministres, et des premiers commis."- NECKER, Sur la Révolution Française, i. 164, 165. II. 1 Necker, 16, 166. Bouillé, 51, was obliged, out of regard to the great families, to establish CHAP. regulations at court, making a distinction between them and the old noblesse. This again led to another evil of a still more serious kind. Though these rules related only to the matter of presentation at levees, entries, admission in carriages, and the like, yet they gave rise to incessant Stael, Rév. heartburnings, and alienated those from each other whose 217, 219. united strength was hardly able to contend with the increasing weight of the Tiers Etat.1 XXI. While such was the divided state of the noblesse 54. De Franc. i. 97. state of the on the approach of the national crisis, the clergy were, if Distracted possible, still more alienated from each other; and the clergy. effects of that ruinous system which threw all the labour upon the plebeian, and reserved all the honours for the aristocratic portion of the church, became fatally conspicuous. A large number of the prelates, all persons of high birth and aristocratic connexions, lived habitually in Paris, to the entire neglect of their dioceses, and too often spent their time and fortunes in the dissipation of the capital. The prestige of their situations, the respect due to their sacred character, was thus weakened, and the aristocracy of the church came to be considered as subject to the same weakness as the lay nobility. The dignities. in the cathedrals and elevated offices in the hierarchy were also entirely in the hands of the aristocratic clergy, who were chiefly to be found in Paris or the provincial capitals; while the immense body of curés, or country clergy, toiled in obscure usefulness among their flocks, hardly distinguishable in fortune or education from the burghers and peasants by whom they were surrounded. This numerous class, the representatives of which composed three-fourths of the clergy in the States-general, all sprung from the Tiers Etat, had no sympathy of feeling, and still less identity of interest, with the high and dignified clergy. On the contrary, they considered them as their bitterest enemies; because, belonging to the same profession, they monopolised alike its emoluments and its honours, without II. CHAP. discharging the heaviest parts of its duties. The bishops had no influence over them, because their plebeian birth precluded their rising to any of the dignities of the church. It will appear in the sequel with what fatal consequences this preponderance of the plebeian clergy was attended, on the opening of the States-general. But the evil was inherent in the state of the church, as it was constituted in France, and would not have been remedied by keeping its representatives in a separate chamber from the Tiers Etat; for the number of the curés was so considerable, that it greatly preponderated over the representatives of all the noble clergy put together. 1* 1 Necker, i. 156, 157. 98. Disastrous effect of the great influence of Paris. XXII. The extraordinary preponderance of the CAPITAL was another circumstance which contributed, in the most powerful manner, to endanger the government, and weaken the national strength which the King might summon to his support in defence of the monarchy. In every age, great cities have been found to be the centres and foci, as it were, of democracy; and, what would not a priori have been expected, this passion is generally strongest in those situations where the aristocracy or the court have had their habitual residence.+ The reason is, that the middle class are there brought into close, and to them vexatious, The universality of this tendency in a free community, is clearly demonstrated by the present state of the representation under the Reform constituency in Great Britain. London has seventeen democratic members out of twenty; in Brighton and Bath, solely supported by the aristocracy, the whole members are liberal; Windsor itself can with difficulty return one member in the interest of the crown. Edinburgh, long the seat of the landed and legal aristocracy of Scotland, returns two liberals by an overwhelming majority; in Glasgow, conservative principles are much more generally diffused among the working-class, because there, on the one hand, an aristocracy is unknown, and on the other, the evils of democratic ascendency are periodically brought home to the most prejudiced mind, in the shape of trades'-unions and strikes, which, in every season of distress, consign thousands and tens of thousands of industrious persons, anxious to work, to compulsory idleness for months together, at the dictation of an often unknown, and always despotic, committee. II. proximity with the higher, by whose pride they are CHAP. insulted, with whose weaknesses they are familiar, of whose superiority they are jealous. The advantages of their expenditure, and the profits of their custom, are unable to check this strong propensity: on the contrary, they rather increase it; because for one that obtains these benefits, many more are rendered envious by being refused them. If this is the general and well-known tendency of mankind in every age, when the minds of the people are set in a ferment by democratic passion, it may be conceived with what prodigious and unprecedented force it operated in Paris, during the anxious years which preceded, and the bloody times which followed, the Revolution; containing as it did the concentrated energy of all France drawn into a focus by the policy of preceding Necker, i. reigns, redundant in numbers, gorged with wealth, squalid De Stael, with want, abounding in talent, overflowing with profli- i. 80. gacy, fervent in ambition, dead to religion.1 1 160, 162. Rév. Franc. of rural very weak, When other countries have been convulsed by revolu- 99. tionary passions, it has been in the steadiness, loyalty, The element and tenacious adherence to custom of the country, that loyalty was government has ever found a counterpoise to the vehe- wanting, or mence of urban democracy. It was the counties of in France. England which maintained so long and gallant a struggle, in the time of Charles I., with the forces of the Parliament, which were all recruited in the great towns; it was in the mountains of Scotland that the exiled family, a century afterwards, found those heroic supporters, who fearlessly threw themselves into a contest to all appearance hopeless, and all but overturned, by the mere force of chivalrous devotion, the whole power of the Hanoverian family. But in France, this invaluable element in the social system was in a great measure wanting; and, where it did exist, its importance was unknown. An absent nobility had little influence over their vassals; an oppressed and squalid peasantry no inducement to take up arms in defence of their government. Thus the VOL. I. Р |