Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/628

 592 FRANCE [HISTORY. 1763. short ; if, however, a long winter did set in, as in 1709, or again at the beginning of the Revolution, then the sufferings of the people were extreme, and multitudes perished of cold and hunger. The feudal aids and services the corvee, the &quot; pigeon-right,&quot; the game laws, the common winepress, and common mill, and a hundred other oppressive and even fantastic services left the peasant no rest, and forbade him ever to hope for comfort. As he gained in intelligence, and rose above the dead level of ignorance in which his masters had carefully kept him, he saw more and more to vex and anger him ; as the people gained, they became more ripe for revolution. The robber bands in central France, and the inability of the authorities to cope with them ; the growth of a large class of restless spirits, who dimly echoed some of the theories of the philosophers, and practised a new and lawless method of distribution of property, by robbing and destroying as they could ; the diminution of population in the country, and the tendency of the land in the less fruitful parts to relapse into a wilderness, these things all go to prove the wretchedness of the peasant life, and were all ominous of change. These conditions of the Tiic country, and the improvements of the burgher class, brought capital. on another change, which was little noticed at the time, though it afterwards forced itself on the attention of all Europe. For miles round Paris it became known that there was work to be had in the capita). In the 18th cen- tnry Paris changed her character ; no longer a mere court- seat or city of pleasure, she had gradually become a great manufacturing centre, and into her flowed crowds of dissatis fied or starving folk from all the country round. This immigration went on down to the great outbreak. It largely increased the city population, provided the rough material for the excesses of the Revolution, and helped to stamp the mark of Paris on the whole republican movement. It is hardly too much to say that the want of money at court, combined with the want of food in the cottage, brought about the explosion. These were the social and physical conditions of ferment, the intellectual movement which dignified the Revolution with great names and imbued it with grand ideas demands brief independent notice. Litera- The literature of the Great, Monarch s time is usually tare in assumed to be the golden age of letters in France. Yet if France. p OWer an( j effect on the destinies of men and states be taken as the test, the literature of the 18th century far sur passes that of the 17th. Moliere and Racine had been at the beck of the court. They never appealed to the people ; still less would the lofty muse of Corneille care to speak to common ears. But in the 18th century, by the side of the superstructure of society falling fast to pieces, and the oppressed substructure, growing daily more restless, the authors formed a third and an independent power, eager to push on the ideas of the age, as they found expression in sciences or practical matters, or as they formulated an easy philosophy or announced as startling novelties the earliest commonplaces of political rule. And the significant fact is that these simple rules of political life were really a re velation to France, and for the first time set her people thinking on such matters. So completely had the country ceased to be a political body, so completely had the per nicious principles of Louis XIV. destroyed liberty and con stitutional life, that all had to be begun again ; and the field seemed open, as well for what appear to us to be the most harmless commonplaces, as for the most startling speculations and theories. The difficulty was that to France the one was just as new and strange as the other. It must never be forgotten that the Revolution called on her not to amend a constitution, but to make a fresh start, from the very beginning. Moreover, this state of things necessarily placed literature in opposition to all existing powers; The ancient faith, the old traditions of noble 176. lordship, the learning of the lawyers, all alike were attacked with unsparing hand ; and literature built up for itself a strong public opinion of its own among the classes which had hitherto been as nothing in the government of the country. The 18th century literature of France received its first impulses from England. The age of Queen Anne, the advance of philosophy and natural sciences and of letters in England, the quickened connexion between the two countries in the days of the regency, had enormous in fluence on intelligent Frenchmen. Montesquieu, a noble man and a lawyer, with the temper of a constitutional statesman, was the advocate of political liberty, after the English pattern. Voltaire became the champion of tolera tion and freedom of conscience, and had learnt from Locke ; the Encyclopedists, following the English leaders in natural science, wrote their vast dictionary of human knowledge, in opposition to all established beliefs ; and lastly, Rousseau, the sentimentalist, addressed himself to the sympathies of the people, and was, in the end, the chief teacher of those who carried out the Revolution. Voltaire be^an his literary V life in 1718, with his (Edipus, an attack on priestcraft. He had been brought up by the Jesuits, and yearned to attack them; in 1725 his Henriade exalted Henry IV., afterwards the hero of all Frenchmen in the Revolution, at the cost of Louis XIV, ; then he was in England for three years, and came back full of English deism and English humanitarianism. Henceforth his life passed in alternate attacks on courts and adulation of them ; he withdrew at last into the Genevan territory, whence he directed the defence of the oppressed, if they fired his sympathies. Thence also he encouraged the progress of the Encyclopedic, which, more than anything, undermined the shaking fabric of society. Meanwhile Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois (1748), as well as in his previous work on The Great ness and Fall of the Romans (1734), appeared as a first master of modern French style, and as a champion of English constitutionalism in opposition to the despotism of France. Though his works have been perhaps more popular in England than in France, their effect on educated opinion was still very strong. His views did not prevail in the Re volution-period ; still, they had no small influence destruc tively, by pointing out to Frenchmen how indefensible was the government under which they were willing to live. &quot;The Esprit des Lois,&quot; said Count Grimm in 1756, &quot;has produced a complete revolution in the mind of the nation. The best heads in this country (France) for the last seven or eight years have been turned towards objects of import ance and utility. Government is becoming more and more a matter of philosophic treatment and discussion.&quot; The writers on political economy also deeply influenced the tone of the age ; their doctrines effectually disposed of the faulty maxims on which financial affairs had been conducted since the days of Colbert, and prepared men to see the importance of Turgot s plans, and the significance of Necker s Compte renchi. Lastly, Jean Jacques Rousssau, Roj the clockmaker s son from Geneva, began his seductive ^ strains. Musician and sentimentalist, he hit the right tone for the popular ear; between 1759 and 1762 he published the Nouvelle Heloise, the Gontrat Social, and the Emile; the Control was greedily devoured by society, high and low, as a revelation of a new code of politics, in which he boldly affirmed the sovereignty of the people, and the equality of all men, all being born free. His Emile was an attack on all existing ideas as to education : nature should take the place of the schoolmaster ; and the priest and philosopher should alike be kept aloof from the training-ground for men and women, for Rousseau was as little tolerant of the Encyclopedists and their science as of the Jesuits and their religion. Lastly, his lleloise dealt with the moral code of