The Ancien Régime

A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble as themselves—that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward, though it has not reached, the highest ideal of all.

But suppose that the very opposite tendency—inherent in the heart of every child of man—should conquer.  Suppose the ruling caste no longer the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their equals.  Suppose them—shameful, but not without example—actually sunk to be their inferiors.  And that such a fall did come—nay, that it must have come—is matter of history.  And its cause, like all social causes, was not a political nor a physical, but a moral cause.  The profligacy of the French and Italian aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged itself on them by a curse (derived from the newly-discovered America) from which they never recovered.  The Spanish aristocracy suffered, I doubt not very severely.  The English and German, owing to the superior homeliness and purity of ruling their lives, hardly at all.  But the continental caste, instead of recruiting their tainted blood by healthy blood from below, did all, under pretence of keeping it pure, to keep it tainted by continual intermarriage; and paid, in increasing weakness of body and mind, the penalty of their exclusive pride.  It is impossible for anyone who reads the French memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the aristocracy therein depicted was ripe for ruin—yea, already ruined—under any form of government whatsoever, independent of all political changes.  Indeed, many of the political changes were not the causes but the effects of the demoralisation of the noblesse.  Historians will tell you how, as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV. complained that the nobles were quitting their country districts; how succeeding kings and statesmen, notably Richelieu and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up to Paris, that they might become mere courtiers, instead of powerful country gentlemen; how those who remained behind were only the poor hobereaux, little hobby-hawks among the gentry, who considered it degradation to help in governing the parish, as their forefathers had governed it, and lived shabbily in their chateaux, grinding the last farthing out of their tenants, that they might spend it in town during the winter.  No wonder that with such an aristocracy, who had renounced that very duty of governing the country, for which alone they and their forefathers had existed, there arose government by intendants and sub-delegates, and all the other evils of administrative centralisation, which M. de Tocqueville anatomises and deplores.  But what was the cause of the curse?  Their moral degradation.  What drew them up to Paris save vanity and profligacy?  What kept them from intermarrying with the middle class save pride?  What made them give up the office of governors save idleness?  And if vanity, profligacy, pride, and idleness be not injustices and moral vices, what are?

The race of heroic knights and nobles who fought under the walls of Jerusalem—who wrestled, and not in vain, for centuries with the equally heroic English, in defence of their native soil—who had set to all Europe the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this; their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, being—a perfect readiness to fight duels.

Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller-General out of the lower-born members of the Council of State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his greed, ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man—abler, more energetic, and often, to judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry—than was the count or marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and let him nevertheless become first his deputy, and then his master.

Understand me—I am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the Ancien Régime, but against its caste principle—two widely different elements, continually confounded nowadays.

The hereditary principle is good, because it is founded on fact and nature.  If men’s minds come into the world blank sheets of paper—which I much doubt—every other part and faculty of them comes in stamped with hereditary tendencies and peculiarities.  There are such things as transmitted capabilities for good and for evil; and as surely as the offspring of a good horse or dog is likely to be good, so is the offspring of a good man, and still more of a good woman.  If the parents have any special ability, their children will probably inherit it, at least in part; and over and above, will have it developed in them by an education worthy of their parents and themselves.  If man were—what he is not—a healthy and normal species, a permanent hereditary caste might go on intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself.  But the same moral reason which would make such a caste dangerous—indeed, fatal to the liberty and development of mankind, makes it happily impossible.  Crimes and follies are certain, after a few generations, to weaken the powers of any human caste; and unless it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with the common stock of humanity, it must sink under that weakness, as the ancient noblesse sank by its own vice.  Of course there were exceptions.  The French Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and like every day of judgment, divided between the good and the evil.  But it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few Richelieus, Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayettes were but the storks among the cranes involved in the wholesale doom due not to each individual, but to a system and a class.

Profligacy, pride, idleness—these are the vices which we have to lay to the charge of the Teutonic Nobility of the Ancien Régime in France especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole continent of Europe.  But below them, and perhaps the cause of them all, lay another and deeper vice—godlessness—atheism.

I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief.  I mean want of belief in duty, in responsibility.  Want of belief that there was a living God governing the universe, who had set them their work, and would judge them according to their work.  And therefore, want of belief, yea, utter unconsciousness, that they were set in their places to make the masses below them better men; to impart to them their own civilisation, to raise them to their own level.  They would have shrunk from that which I just now defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because it would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves.  But the process of abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from within.  So it must always be, in such a case.  If a ruling class will not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to drag them down to theirs.  That sense of justice which allowed privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges as the salary of a judge, or the immunity of a member of the House of Commons; when they were earned, as in the Middle Age, by severe education, earnest labour, and life and death responsibility in peace and war, will demand the abolition of those privileges, when no work is done in return for them, with a voice which must be heard, for it is the voice of truth and justice.

But with that righteous voice will mingle another, most wicked, and yet, alas! most flattering to poor humanity—the voice of envy, simple and undisguised; of envy, which moralists hold to be one of the basest of human passions; which can never be justified, however hateful or unworthy be the envied man.  And when a whole people, or even a majority thereof, shall be possessed by that, what is there that they will not do?

Some are surprised and puzzled when they find, in the French Revolution of 1793, the noblest and the foulest characters labouring in concert, and side by side—often, too, paradoxical as it may seem, united in the same personage.  The explanation is simple.  Justice inspired the one; the other was the child of simple envy.  But this passion of envy, if it becomes permanent and popular, may avenge itself, like all other sins.  A nation may say to itself, “Provided we have no superiors to fall our pride, we are content.  Liberty is a slight matter, provided we have equality.  Let us be slaves, provided we are all slaves alike.”  It may destroy every standard of humanity above its own mean average; it may forget that the old ruling class, in spite of all its defects and crimes, did at least pretend to represent something higher than man’s necessary wants, plus the greed of amassing money; never meeting (at least in the country districts) any one wiser or more refined than an official or a priest drawn from the peasant class, it may lose the belief that any standard higher than that is needed; and, all but forgetting the very existence of civilisation, sink contented into a dead level of intellectual mediocrity and moral barbarism, crying, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”

A nation in such a temper will surely be taken at its word.  Where the carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered together; and there will not be wanting to such nations—as there were not wanting in old Greece and Rome—despots who will give them all they want, and more, and say to them: “Yes, you shall eat and drink; and yet you shall not die.  For I, while I take care of your mortal bodies, will see that care is taken of your immortal souls.”

For there are those who have discovered, with the kings of the Holy Alliance, that infidelity and scepticism are political mistakes, not so much because they promote vice, as because they promote (or are supposed to promote) free thought; who see that religion (no matter of what quality) is a most valuable assistant to the duties of a minister of police.  They will quote in their own behalf Montesquieu’s opinion that religion is a column necessary to sustain the social edifice; they will quote, too, that sound and true saying of De Tocqueville’s:1 “If the first American who might be met, either in his own country, or abroad, were to be stopped and asked whether he considered religion useful to the stability of the laws and the good order of society, he would answer, without hesitation, that no civilised society, but more especially none in a state of freedom, can exist without religion.  Respect for religion is, in his eyes, the greatest guarantee of the stability of the State, and of the safety of the community.  Those who are ignorant of the science of government, know that fact at least.”

M. de Tocqueville, when he wrote these words, was lamenting that in France, “freedom was forsaken;” “a thing for which it is said that no one any longer cares in France.”  He did not, it seems to me, perceive that, as in America the best guarantee of freedom is the reverence for a religion or religions, which are free themselves, and which teach men to be free; so in other countries the best guarantee of slavery is, reverence for religions which are not free, and which teach men to be slaves.

But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there are others who will see; who will say: “If religion be the pillar of political and social order, there is an order which is best supported by a religion which is adverse to free thought, free speech, free conscience, free communion between man and God.  The more enervating the superstition, the more exacting and tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, if we help it to do its own.  If it permit us to enslave the body, we will permit it to enslave the soul.”

And so may be inaugurated a period of that organised anarchy of which the poet says:

It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs.

LECTURE II—CENTRALISATION

The degradation of the European nobility caused, of course, the increase of the kingly power, and opened the way to central despotisms.  The bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class, whatever were its virtues, its value, its real courage, were never able to stand alone against the kings.  Their capital, being invested in trade, was necessarily subject to such sudden dangers from war, political change, bad seasons, and so forth, that its holders, however individually brave, were timid as a class.  They could never hold out on strike against the governments, and had to submit to the powers that were, whatever they were, under penalty of ruin.

But on the Continent, and especially in France and Germany, unable to strengthen itself by intermarriage with the noblesse, they retained that timidity which is the fruit of the insecurity of trade; and had to submit to a more and more centralised despotism, and grow up as they could, in the face of exasperating hindrances to wealth, to education, to the possession, in many parts of France, of large landed estates; leaving the noblesse to decay in isolated uselessness and weakness, and in many cases debt and poverty.

The system—or rather anarchy—according to which France was governed during this transitional period, may be read in that work of M. de Tocqueville’s which I have already quoted, and which is accessible to all classes, through Mr. H. Reeve’s excellent translation.  Every student of history is, of course, well acquainted with that book.  But as there is reason to fear, from language which is becoming once more too common, both in speech and writing, that the general public either do not know it, or have not understood it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from it somewhat largely.  I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de Tocqueville’s book is founded on researches into the French Archives, which have been made (as far as I am aware) only by him; and contains innumerable significant facts, which are to be found (as far as I am aware) in no other accessible work.

The French people—says M. de Tocqueville—made, in 1789, the greatest effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to speak, their destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had heretofore been, from that which they sought to become hereafter.  But he had long thought that they had succeeded in this singular attempt much less than was supposed abroad; and less than they had at first supposed themselves.  He was convinced that they had unconsciously retained, from the former state of society, most of the sentiments, the habits, and even the opinions, by means of which they had effected the destruction of that state of things; and that, without intending it, they had used its remains to rebuild the edifice of modern society.  This is his thesis, and this he proves, it seems to me, incontestably by documentary evidence.  Not only does he find habits which we suppose—or supposed till lately—to have died with the eighteenth century, still living and working, at least in France, in the nineteenth, but the new opinions which we look on usually as the special children of the nineteenth century, he shows to have been born in the eighteenth.  France, he considers, is still at heart what the Ancien Régime made her.

He shows that the hatred of the ruling caste, the intense determination to gain and keep equality, even at the expense of liberty, had been long growing up, under those influences of which I spoke in my first lecture.

He shows, moreover, that the acquiescence in a centralised administration; the expectation that the government should do everything for the people, and nothing for themselves; the consequent loss of local liberties, local peculiarities; the helplessness of the towns and the parishes: and all which issued in making Paris France, and subjecting the whole of a vast country to the arbitrary dictates of a knot of despots in the capital, was not the fruit of the Revolution, but of the Ancien Régime which preceded it; and that Robespierre and his “Comité de Salut Public,” and commissioners sent forth to the four winds of heaven in bonnet rouge and carmagnole complete, to build up and pull down, according to their wicked will, were only handling, somewhat more roughly, the same wires which had been handled for several generations by the Comptroller-General and Council of State, with their provincial intendants.

“Do you know,” said Law to the Marquis d’Argenson, “that this kingdom of France is governed by thirty intendants?  You have neither parliament, nor estates, nor governors.  It is upon thirty masters of request, despatched into the provinces, that their evil or their good, their fertility or their sterility, entirely depend.”

To do everything for the people, and let them do nothing for themselves—this was the Ancien Régime.  To be more wise and more loving than Almighty God, who certainly does not do everything for the sons of men, but forces them to labour for themselves by bitter need, and after a most Spartan mode of education; who allows them to burn their hands as often as they are foolish enough to put them into the fire; and to be filled with the fruits of their own folly, even though the folly be one of necessary ignorance; treating them with that seeming neglect which is after all the most provident care, because by it alone can men be trained to experience, self-help, science, true humanity; and so become not tolerably harmless dolls, but men and women worthy of the name; with

The reason firm, the temperate will,Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;The perfect spirit, nobly plannedTo cheer, to counsel, and command.

Such seems to be the education and government appointed for man by the voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatum, and the education, therefore, which the man of science will accept and carry out.  But the men of the Ancien Régime—in as far as it was a Régime at all—tried to be wiser than the Almighty.  Why not?  They were not the first, nor will be the last, by many who have made the same attempt.  So this Council of State settled arbitrarily, not only taxes, and militia, and roads, but anything and everything.  Its members meddled, with their whole hearts and minds.  They tried to teach agriculture by schools and pamphlets and prizes; they sent out plans for every public work.  A town could not establish an octroi, levy a rate, mortgage, sell, sue, farm, or administer their property, without an order in council.  The Government ordered public rejoicings, saw to the firing of salutes, and illuminating of houses—in one case mentioned by M. de Tocqueville, they fined a member of the burgher guard for absenting himself from a Te Deum.  All self-government was gone.  A country parish was, says Turgot, nothing but “an assemblage of cabins, and of inhabitants as passive as the cabins they dwelt in.”  Without an order of council, the parish could not mend the steeple after a storm, or repair the parsonage gable.  If they grumbled at the intendant, he threw some of the chief persons into prison, and made the parish pay the expenses of the horse patrol, which formed the arbitrary police of France.  Everywhere was meddling.  There were reports on statistics—circumstantial, inaccurate, and useless—as statistics are too often wont to be.  Sometimes, when the people were starving, the Government sent down charitable donations to certain parishes, on condition that the inhabitants should raise a sum on their part.  When the sum offered was sufficient, the Comptroller-General wrote on the margin, when he returned the report to the intendant, “Good—express satisfaction.”  If it was more than sufficient, he wrote, “Good—express satisfaction and sensibility.”  There is nothing new under the sun.  In 1761, the Government, jealous enough of newspapers, determined to start one for itself, and for that purpose took under its tutelage the Gazette de France.  So the public newsmongers were of course to be the provincial intendants, and their sub-newsmongers, of course, the sub-delegates.

But alas! the poor sub-delegates seem to have found either very little news, or very little which it was politic to publish.  One reports that a smuggler of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; another that a woman in his district has had three girls at a birth; another that a dreadful storm has happened, but—has done no mischief; a fourth—living in some specially favoured Utopia—declares that in spite of all his efforts he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will subscribe to so useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal seems to have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his minister, who had of course expected to secure fine weather by nailing, like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weather-glass.

Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped there.  But, by a process of evocation (as it was called), more and more causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular tribunals, to those of the intendants and the Council.  Before the intendant all the lower order of people were generally sent for trial.  Bread-riots were a common cause of such trials, and M. de Tocqueville asserts that he has found sentences, delivered by the intendant, and a local council chosen by himself, by which men were condemned to the galleys, and even to death.  Under such a system, under which an intendant must have felt it his interest to pretend at all risks, that all was going right, and to regard any disturbance as a dangerous exposure of himself and his chiefs—one can understand easily enough that scene which Mr. Carlyle has dramatised from Lacretelle, concerning the canaille, the masses, as we used to call them a generation since:

“A dumb generation—their voice only an inarticulate cry.  Spokesman, in the king’s council, in the world’s forum, they have none that finds credence.  At rare intervals (as now, in 1775) they will fling down their hoes, and hammers; and, to the astonishment of mankind, flock hither and thither, dangerous, aimless, get the length even of Versailles.  Turgot is altering the corn trade, abrogating the absurdest corn laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even factitious, an indubitable scarcity of broad.  And so, on the 2nd day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances.  The chateau-gates must be shut; but the king will appear on the balcony and speak to them.  They have seen the king’s face; their petition of grievances has been, if not read, looked at.  In answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows forty feet high, and the rest driven back to their dens for a time.”

Of course.  What more exasperating and inexpiable insult to the ruling powers was possible than this?  To persist in being needy and wretched, when a whole bureaucracy is toiling day and night to make them prosperous and happy?  An insult only to be avenged in blood.  Remark meanwhile, that this centralised bureaucracy was a failure; that after all the trouble taken to govern these masses, they were not governed, in the sense of being made better, and not worse.  The truth is, that no centralised bureaucracy, or so-called “paternal government,” yet invented on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything else: because it is founded on an error; because it regards and treats men as that which they are not, as things; and not as that which they are, as persons.  If the bureaucracy were a mere Briareus giant, with a hundred hands, helping the weak throughout the length and breadth of the empire, the system might be at least tolerable.  But what if the Government were not a Briareus with a hundred hands, but a Hydra with a hundred heads and mouths, each far more intent on helping itself than on helping the people?  What if sub-delegates and other officials, holding office at the will of the intendant, had to live, and even provide against a rainy day?  What if intendants, holding office at the will of the Comptroller-General, had to do more than live, and found it prudent to realise as large a fortune as possible, not only against disgrace, but against success, and the dignity fit for a new member of the Noblesse de la Robe?  Would not the system, then, soon become intolerable?  Would there not be evil times for the masses, till they became something more than masses?

It is an ugly name, that of “The Masses,” for the great majority of human beings in a nation.  He who uses it speaks of them not as human beings, but as things; and as things not bound together in one living body, but lying in a fortuitous heap.  A swarm of ants is not a mass.  It has a polity and a unity.  Not the ants but the fir-needles and sticks, of which the ants have piled their nest, are a mass.