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HISTORY] and had gained the upper hand. Thenceforward poverty, disorders, and consequently murmurs increased. The financial reform attempted by Machault d’Arnouville between 1745 and 1749—a reduction of the debt through the impost of the twentieth and the edict of 1749 against the extensive property held in mortmain by the Church—after his disgrace only resulted in failure. The army, which D’Argenson (likewise dismissed by Madame de Pompadour) had been from 1743 to 1747 trying to restore by useful reforms, was riddled by cabals. Half the people in the kingdom were dying of hunger, while the court was insulting poverty by its luxury and waste; and from 1750 onwards political ferment was everywhere manifest. It found all the more favourable foothold in that the Church, the State’s best ally, had made herself more and more unpopular. Her refusal of the sacraments to those who would not accept the bull Unigenitus (1746) was exploited in the eyes of the masses, as in those of more enlightened people was her selfish and short-sighted resistance to the financial plans of Machault. The general discontent was expressed by the parlements in their attempt to establish a political supremacy amid universal confusion, and by the popular voice in pamphlets recalling by their violence those of the League. Every one expected and desired a speedy revolution that should put an end to a policy which alternated between overheated effervescence, abnormal activity and lethargy. Nothing can better show the point to which things had descended than the attempted assassination of Louis the Well-beloved by Damiens in 1757.

Choiseul was the means of accelerating this revolution, not only by his abandonment of diplomatic traditions, but still more by his improvidence and violence. He reversed the policy of his predecessors in regard to the parlement. Supported by public opinion, which clamoured for guarantees

against arbitrary power, the parlements had dared not only to insist on being consulted as to the budget of the state in 1763, but to enter upon a confederation throughout the whole of France, and on repeated occasions to ordain a general strike of the judicial authorities. Choiseul did not hesitate to attack through lits de justice or by exile a judiciary oligarchy which doubtless rested its pretensions merely on wealth, high birth, or that encroaching spirit that was the only counteracting agency to the monarchy. Louis XV., wearied with their clamour, called them to order. Choiseul’s religious policy was no less venturesome; after the condemnation in 1759 of the Jesuits who were involved in the bankruptcy of Father de la Valette, their general, in the Antilles, he had the order dissolved for refusing to modify its constitution (1761–1764). Thus, not content with encouraging writers with innovating ideas to the prejudice of traditional institutions, he attacked, in the order of the Jesuits, the strongest defender of these latter, and delivered over the new generation to revolutionary doctrines.

A woman had elevated him into power; a woman brought him to the ground. He succumbed to a coalition of the chancellor Maupeou, the duc d’Aiguillon and the Abbé Terray, which depended on the favour of the king’s latest mistress, Madame du Barry (December 1770); and

the Jesuits were avenged by a stroke of authority similar to that by which they themselves had suffered. Following on an edict registered by the lit de justice, which forbade any remonstrance in political matters, the parlement had resigned, and had been imitated by the provincial parlements; whereupon Maupeou, an energetic chancellor, suppressed the parlements and substituted superior councils of magistrates appointed by the king (1771). This reform was justified by the religious intolerance of the parlements; by their scandalous trials of Calas, Pierre Paul Sirven (1709–1777), the chevalier de la Barre and the comte de Lally; by the retrograde spirit that had made them suppress the Encyclopaedia in 1759 and condemn Émile in 1762; and by their selfishness in perpetuating abuses by which they profited. But this reform, being made by the minister of a hated sovereign, only aided in exasperating public opinion, which was grateful to the parlements in that their remonstrances had not always been fruitless.

Thus all the buttresses of the monarchical institution began to fall to pieces: the Church, undermined by the heresy of Jansenism, weakened by the inroads of philosophy, discredited by evil-livers among the priesthood, and divided against itself, like all losing parties; the

nobility of the court, still brave at heart, though incapable of exertion and reduced to beggary, having lost all respect for discipline and authority, not only in the camp, but in civilian society; and the upper-class officials, narrow-minded and egotistical, unsettling by their opposition the royal authority which they pretended to safeguard. Even the “liberties,” among the few representative institutions which the ancien régime had left intact in some provinces, turned against the people. The estates opposed most of the intelligent and humane measures proposed by such intendants as Tourny and Turgot to relieve the peasants, whose distress was very great; they did their utmost to render the selfishness of the privileged classes more oppressive and vexatious.

Thus the terrible prevalence of poverty and want; the successive famines; the mistakes of the government; the scandals of the Parc aux Cerfs; and the parlements playing the Roman senate: all these causes, added together and multiplied, assisted in setting a general

fermentation to work. The philosophers only helped to precipitate a movement which they had not created; without pointing to absolute power as the cause of the trouble, and without pretending to upset the traditional system, they attempted to instil into princes the feeling of new and more precise obligations towards their subjects. Voltaire, Montesquieu, the Encyclopaedists and the Physiocrats (recurring to the tradition of Bayle and Fontenelle), by dissolving in their analytical crucible all consecrated beliefs and all fixed institutions, brought back into the human society of the 18th century that humanity which had been so rudely eliminated. They demanded freedom of thought and belief with passionate insistence; they ardently discussed institutions and conduct; and they imported into polemics the idea of natural rights superior to all political arrangements. Whilst some, like Voltaire and the Physiocrats, representatives of the privileged classes and careless of political rights, wished to make use of the omnipotence of the prince to accomplish desirable reforms, or, like Montesquieu, adversely criticized despotism and extolled moderate governments, other, plebeians like Rousseau, proclaimed the theory of the social contract and the sovereignty of the people. So that during this reign of frivolity and passion, so bold in conception and so poor in execution, the thinkers contributed still further to mark the contrast between grandeur of plan and mediocrity of result.

The preaching of all this generous philosophy, not only in France, but throughout the whole of Europe, would have been in vain had there not existed at the time a social class interested in these great changes, and capable of compassing them. Neither the witty and lucid form in which the philosophers clothed their ideas in their satires, romances, stage-plays and treatises, nor the salons of Madame du Deffand, Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, could possibly have been sufficiently far-reaching or active centres of political propaganda. The former touched only the more highly educated classes; while to the latter, where privileged individuals alone had entry, novelties were but an undiluted stimulant for the jaded appetites of persons whose ideas of good-breeding, moreover, would have drawn the line at martyrdom.

The class which gave the Revolution its chiefs, its outward and visible forms, and the irresistible energy of its hopes, was the bourgeoisie, intelligent, ambitious and rich; in the forefront the capitalists and financiers of the haute bourgeoisie, farmers-general and army contractors,

who had supplanted or swamped the old landed and military aristocracy, had insensibly reconstructed the interior of the ancient social edifice with the gilded and incongruous materials of wealth, and in order to consolidate or increase their monopolies, needed to secure themselves against the arbitrary action of royalty and the bureaucracy.