The Ancien Régime

The term, I believe, was invented during the Ancien Régime.  Whether it was or not, it expresses very accurately the life of the many in those days.  No one would speak, if he wished to speak exactly, of the masses of the United States; for there every man is, or is presumed to be, a personage; with his own independence, his own activities, his own rights and duties.  No one, I believe, would have talked of the masses in the old feudal times; for then each individual was someone’s man, bound to his master by ties of mutual service, just or unjust, honourable or base, but still giving him a personality of duties and rights, and dividing him from his class.

Dividing, I say.  The poor of the Middle Age had little sense of a common humanity.  Those who owned allegiance to the lord in the next valley were not their brothers; and at their own lord’s bidding, they buckled on sword and slew the next lord’s men, with joyful heart and good conscience.  Only now and then misery compressed them into masses; and they ran together, as sheep run together to face a dog.  Some wholesale wrong made them aware that they were brothers, at least in the power of starving; and they joined in the cry which was heard, I believe, in Mecklenburg as late as 1790: “Den Edelman wille wi dodschlagen.”  Then, in Wat Tyler’s insurrections, in Munster Anabaptisms, in Jacqueries, they proved themselves to be masses, if nothing better, striking for awhile, by the mere weight of numbers, blows terrible, though aimless—soon to be dispersed and slain in their turn by a disciplined and compact aristocracy.  Yet not always dispersed, if they could find a leader; as the Polish nobles discovered to their cost in the middle of the seventeenth century.  Then Bogdan the Cossack, a wild warrior, not without his sins, but having deserved well of James Sobieski and the Poles, found that the neighbouring noble’s steward had taken a fancy to his windmill and his farm upon the Dnieper.  He was thrown into prison on a frivolous charge, and escaped to the Tatars, leaving his wife dishonoured, his house burnt, his infant lost in the flames, his eldest son scourged for protesting against the wrong.  And he returned, at the head of an army of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or what not, to set free the serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and nobles, throughout Podolia, Volhynia, Red Russia; to desecrate the altars of God, and slay his servants; to destroy the nobles by lingering tortures; to strip noble ladies and maidens, and hunt them to death with the whips of his Cossacks; and after defeating the nobles in battle after battle, to inaugurate an era of misery and anarchy from which Poland never recovered.

Thus did the masses of Southern Poland discover, for one generation at least, that they were not many things, but one thing; a class, capable of brotherhood and unity, though, alas! only of such as belongs to a pack of wolves.  But such outbursts as this were rare exceptions.  In general, feudalism kept the people divided, and therefore helpless.  And as feudalism died out, and with it the personal self-respect and loyalty which were engendered by the old relations of master and servant, the division still remained; and the people, in France especially, became merely masses, a swarm of incoherent and disorganised things intent on the necessaries of daily bread, like mites crawling over each other in a cheese.

Out of this mass were struggling upwards perpetually, all who had a little ambition, a little scholarship, or a little money, endeavouring to become members of the middle class by obtaining a Government appointment.  “A man,” says M. de Tocqueville, “endowed with some education and small means, thought it not decorous to die without having been a Government officer.”  “Every man, according to his condition,” says a contemporary writer, “wants to be something by command of the king.”

It was not merely the “natural vanity” of which M. de Tocqueville accuses his countrymen, which stirred up in them this eagerness after place; for we see the same eagerness in other nations of the Continent, who cannot be accused (as wholes) of that weakness.  The fact is, a Government place, or a Government decoration, cross, ribbon, or what not, is, in a country where self-government is unknown or dead, the only method, save literary fame, which is left to men in order to assert themselves either to themselves or their fellow-men.

A British or American shopkeeper or farmer asks nothing of his Government.  He can, if he chooses, be elected to some local office (generally unsalaried) by the votes of his fellow-citizens.  But that is his right, and adds nothing to his respectability.  The test of that latter, in a country where all honest callings are equally honourable, is the amount of money he can make; and a very sound practical test that is, in a country where intellect and capital are free.  Beyond that, he is what he is, and wishes to be no more, save what he can make himself.  He has his rights, guaranteed by law and public opinion; and as long as he stands within them, and (as he well phrases it) behaves like a gentleman, he considers himself as good as any man; and so he is.  But under the bureaucratic Régime of the Continent, if a man had not “something by command of the king,” he was nothing; and something he naturally wished to be, even by means of a Government which he disliked and despised.  So in France, where innumerable petty posts were regular articles of sale, anyone, it seems, who had saved a little money, found it most profitable to invest it in a beadledom of some kind—to the great detriment of the country, for he thus withdrew his capital from trade; but to his own clear gain, for he thereby purchased some immunity from public burdens, and, as it were, compounded once and for all for his taxes.  The petty German princes, it seems, followed the example of France, and sold their little beadledoms likewise; but even where offices were not sold, they must be obtained by any and every means, by everyone who desired not to be as other men were, and to become Notables, as they were called in France; so he migrated from the country into the nearest town, and became a member of some small body-guild, town council, or what not, bodies which were infinite in number.  In one small town M. de Tocqueville discovers thirty-six such bodies, “separated from each other by diminutive privileges, the least honourable of which was still a mark of honour.”  Quarrelling perpetually with each other for precedence, despising and oppressing the very menu peuple from whom they had for the most part sprung, these innumerable small bodies, instead of uniting their class, only served to split it up more and more; and when the Revolution broke them up, once and for all, with all other privileges whatsoever, no bond of union was left; and each man stood alone, proud of his “individuality”—his complete social isolation; till he discovered that, in ridding himself of superiors, he had rid himself also of fellows; fulfilling, every man in his own person, the old fable of the bundle of sticks; and had to submit, under the Consulate and the Empire, to a tyranny to which the Ancien Régime was freedom itself.

For, in France at least, the Ancien Régime was no tyranny.  The middle and upper classes had individual liberty—it may be, only too much; the liberty of disobeying a Government which they did not respect.  “However submissive the French may have been before the Revolution to the will of the king, one sort of obedience was altogether unknown to them.  They knew not what it was to bow before an illegitimate and contested power—a power but little honoured, frequently despised, but willingly endured because it may be serviceable, or because it may hurt.  To that degrading form of servitude they were ever strangers.  The king inspired them with feelings . . . which have become incomprehensible to this generation . . . They loved him with the affection due to a father; they revered him with the respect due to God.  In submitting to the most arbitrary of his commands, they yielded less to compulsion than to loyalty; and thus they frequently preserved great freedom of mind, even in the most complete dependence.  This liberty, irregular, intermittent,” says M. de Tocqueville, “helped to form those vigorous characters, those proud and daring spirits, which were to make the French Revolution at once the object of the admiration and the terror of succeeding generations.”

This liberty—too much akin to anarchy, in which indeed it issued for awhile—seems to have asserted itself in continual petty resistance to officials whom they did not respect, and who, in their turn, were more than a little afraid of the very men out of whose ranks they had sprung.

The French Government—one may say, every Government on the Continent in those days—had the special weakness of all bureaucracies; namely, that want of moral force which compels them to fall back at last on physical force, and transforms the ruler into a bully, and the soldier into a policeman and a gaoler.  A Government of parvenus, uncertain of its own position, will be continually trying to assert itself to itself, by vexatious intermeddling and intruding pretensions; and then, when it meets with the resistance of free and rational spirits, will either recoil in awkward cowardice, or fly into a passion, and appeal to the halter and the sword.  Such a Government can never take itself for granted, because it knows that it is not taken for granted by the people.  It never can possess the quiet assurance, the courteous dignity, without swagger, yet without hesitation, which belongs to hereditary legislators; by which term is to be understood, not merely kings, not merely noblemen, but every citizen of a free nation, however democratic, who has received from his forefathers the right, the duty, and the example of self-government.

Such was the political and social state of the Ancien Régime, not only in France, but if we are to trust (as we must trust) M. de Tocqueville, in almost every nation in Europe, except Britain.

And as for its moral state.  We must look for that—if we have need, which happily all have not—in its lighter literature.

I shall not trouble you with criticisms on French memoirs—of which those of Madame de Sévigné are on the whole, the most painful (as witness her comments on the Marquise de Brinvilliers’s execution), because written by a woman better and more human than ordinary.  Nor with “Menagiana,” or other ‘ana’s—as vain and artificial as they are often foul; nor with novels and poems, long since deservedly forgotten.  On the first perusal of this lighter literature, you will be charmed with the ease, grace, lightness with which everything is said.  On the second, you will be somewhat cured of your admiration, as you perceive how little there is to say.  The head proves to be nothing but a cunning mask, with no brains inside.  Especially is this true of a book, which I must beg those who have read it already, to recollect.  To read it I recommend no human being.  We may consider it, as it was considered in its time, the typical novel of the Ancien Régime.  A picture of Spanish society, written by a Frenchman, it was held to be—and doubtless with reason—a picture of the whole European world.  Its French editor (of 1836) calls it a grande épopée; “one of the most prodigious efforts of intelligence, exhausting all forms of humanity”—in fact, a second Shakespeare, according to the lights of the year 1715.  I mean, of course, “Gil Blas.”  So picturesque is the book, that it has furnished inexhaustible motifs to the draughtsman.  So excellent is its workmanship, that the enthusiastic editor of 1836 tells us—and doubtless he knows best—that it is the classic model of the French tongue; and that, as Le Sage “had embraced all that belonged to man in his composition, he dared to prescribe to himself to embrace the whole French language in his work.”  It has been the parent of a whole school of literature—the Bible of tens of thousands, with admiring commentators in plenty; on whose souls may God have mercy!

And no wonder.  The book has a solid value, and will always have, not merely from its perfect art (according to its own measure and intention), but from its perfect truthfulness.  It is the Ancien Régime itself.  It set forth to the men thereof, themselves, without veil or cowardly reticence of any kind; and inasmuch as every man loves himself, the Ancien Régime loved “Gil Blas,” and said, “The problem of humanity is solved at last.”  But, ye long-suffering powers of heaven, what a solution!  It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly, immoral, base.  Le Sage would have answered: “Of course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture.”  No; the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the human heart, want of any human interest.  If it be an epos, the actors in it are not men and women, but ferrets—with here and there, of course, a stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed.  It is the inhuman mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human heart can find no more interest than in a pathological museum.

That last, indeed, “Gil Blas” is; a collection of diseased specimens.  No man or woman in the book, lay or clerical, gentle or simple, as far as I can remember, do their duty in any wise, even if they recollect that they have any duty to do.  Greed, chicane, hypocrisy, uselessness are the ruling laws of human society.  A new book of Ecclesiastes, crying, “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity;” the “conclusion of the whole matter” being left out, and the new Ecclesiastes rendered thereby diabolic, instead of like that old one, divine.  For, instead of “Fear God and keep his commandments, for that is the whole duty of main,” Le Sage sends forth the new conclusion, “Take care of thyself, and feed on thy neighbours, for that is the whole duty of man.”  And very faithfully was his advice (easy enough to obey at all times) obeyed for nearly a century after “Gil Blas” appeared.

About the same time there appeared, by a remarkable coincidence, another work, like it the child of the Ancien Régime, and yet as opposite to it as light to darkness.  If Le Sage drew men as they were, Fénelon tried at least to draw them as they might have been and still might be, were they governed by sages and by saints, according to the laws of God.  “Télémaque” is an ideal—imperfect, doubtless, as all ideals must be in a world in which God’s ways and thoughts are for ever higher than man’s; but an ideal nevertheless.  If its construction is less complete than that of “Gil Blas,” it is because its aim is infinitely higher; because the form has to be subordinated, here and there, to the matter.  If its political economy be imperfect, often chimerical, it is because the mind of one man must needs have been too weak to bring into shape and order the chaos, social and economic, which he saw around him.  M. de Lamartine, in his brilliant little life of Fénelon, does not hesitate to trace to the influence of “Télémaque,” the Utopias which produced the revolutions of 1793 and 1848.  “The saintly poet was,” he says, “without knowing it, the first Radical and the first communist of his century.”  But it is something to have preached to princes doctrines till then unknown, or at least forgotten for many a generation—free trade, peace, international arbitration, and the “carrière ouverte aux talents” for all ranks.  It is something to have warned his generation of the dangerous overgrowth of the metropolis; to have prophesied, as an old Hebrew might have done, that the despotism which he saw around him would end in a violent revolution.  It is something to have combined the highest Christian morality with a hearty appreciation of old Greek life; of its reverence for bodily health and prowess; its joyous and simple country society; its sacrificial feasts, dances, games; its respect for the gods; its belief that they helped, guided, inspired the sons of men.  It is something to have himself believed in God; in a living God, who, both in this life and in all lives to come, rewarded the good and punished the evil by inevitable laws.  It is something to have warned a young prince, in an age of doctrinal bigotry and practical atheism, that a living God still existed, and that his laws were still in force; to have shown him Tartarus crowded with the souls of wicked monarchs, while a few of kingly race rested in Elysium, and among them old pagans—Inachus, Cecrops, Erichthon, Triptolemus, and Sesostris—rewarded for ever for having done their duty, each according to his light, to the flocks which the gods had committed to their care.  It is something to have spoken to a prince, in such an age, without servility, and without etiquette, of the frailties and the dangers which beset arbitrary rulers; to have told him that royalty, “when assumed to content oneself, is a monstrous tyranny; when assumed to fulfil its duties, and to conduct an innumerable people as a father conducts his children, a crushing slavery, which demands an heroic courage and patience.”

Let us honour the courtier who dared speak such truths; and still more the saintly celibate who had sufficient catholicity of mind to envelop them in old Grecian dress, and, without playing false for a moment to his own Christianity, seek in the writings of heathen sages a wider and a healthier view of humanity than was afforded by an ascetic creed.

No wonder that the appearance of “Télémaque,” published in Holland without the permission of Fénelon, delighted throughout Europe that public which is always delighted with new truths, as long as it is not required to practise them.  To read “Télémaque” was the right and the enjoyment of everyone.  To obey it, the duty only of princes.  No wonder that, on the other hand, this “Vengeance de peuples, leçon des rois,” as M. de Lamartine calls it, was taken for the bitterest satire by Louis XIV., and completed the disgrace of one who had dared to teach the future king of France that he must show himself, in all things, the opposite of his grandfather.  No wonder if Madame de Maintenon and the court looked on its portraits of wicked ministers and courtiers as caricatures of themselves; portraits too, which, “composed thus in the palace of Versailles, under the auspices of that confidence which the king had placed in the preceptor of his heir, seemed a domestic treason.”  No wonder, also, if the foolish and envious world outside was of the same opinion; and after enjoying for awhile this exposure of the great ones of the earth, left “Télémaque” as an Utopia with which private folks had no concern; and betook themselves to the easier and more practical model of “Gil Blas.”

But there are solid defects in “Télémaque”—indicating corresponding defects in the author’s mind—which would have, in any case, prevented its doing the good work which Fénelon desired; defects which are natural, as it seems to me, to his position as a Roman Catholic priest, however saintly and pure, however humane and liberal.  The king, with him, is to be always the father of his people; which is tantamount to saying, that the people are to be always children, and in a condition of tutelage; voluntary, if possible: if not, of tutelage still.  Of self-government, and education of human beings into free manhood by the exercise of self-government, free will, free thought—of this Fénelon had surely not a glimpse.  A generation or two passed by, and then the peoples of Europe began to suspect that they were no longer children, but come to manhood; and determined (after the example of Britain and America) to assume the rights and duties of manhood, at whatever risk of excesses or mistakes: and then “Télémaque” was relegated—half unjustly—as the slavish and childish dream of a past age, into the schoolroom, where it still remains.

But there is a defect in “Télémaque” which is perhaps deeper still.  No woman in it exercises influence over man, except for evil.  Minerva, the guiding and inspiring spirit, assumes of course, as Mentor, a male form; but her speech and thought is essentially masculine, and not feminine.  Antiope is a mere lay-figure, introduced at the end of the book because Telemachus must needs be allowed to have hope of marrying someone or other.  Venus plays but the same part as she does in the Tannenhäuser legends of the Middle Age.  Her hatred against Telemachus is an integral element of the plot.  She, with the other women or nymphs of the romance, in spite of all Fénelon’s mercy and courtesy towards human frailties, really rise no higher than the witches of the Malleus Maleficanum.  Woman—as the old monk held who derived femina from fe, faith, and minus, less, because women have less faith than men—is, in “Télémaque,” whenever she thinks or acts, the temptress, the enchantress; the victim (according to a very ancient calumny) of passions more violent, often more lawless, than man’s.

Such a conception of women must make “Télémaque,” to the end of time, useless as a wholesome book of education.  It must have crippled its influence, especially in France, in its own time.  For there, for good and for evil, woman was asserting more and more her power, and her right to power, over the mind and heart of man.  Rising from the long degradation of the Middle Ages, which had really respected her only when unsexed and celibate, the French woman had assumed, often lawlessly, always triumphantly, her just freedom; her true place as the equal, the coadjutor, the counsellor of man.  Of all problems connected with the education of a young prince, that of the influence of woman was, in the France of the Ancien Régime, the most important.  And it was just that which Fénelon did not, perhaps dared not, try to touch; and which he most certainly could not have solved.  Meanwhile, not only Madame de Maintenon, but women whose names it were a shame to couple with hers, must have smiled at, while they hated, the saint who attempted to dispense not only with them, but with the ideal queen who should have been the helpmeet of the ideal king.

To those who believe that the world is governed by a living God, it may seem strange, at first sight, that this moral anarchy was allowed to endure; that the avenging, and yet most purifying storm of the French Revolution, inevitable from Louis XIV.’s latter years, was not allowed to burst two generations sooner than it did.  Is not the answer—that the question always is not of destroying the world, but of amending it?  And that amendment must always come from within, and not from without?  That men must be taught to become men, and mend their world themselves?  To educate men into self-government—that is the purpose of the government of God; and some of the men of the eighteenth century did not learn that lesson.  As the century rolled on, the human mind arose out of the slough in which Le Sage found it, into manifold and beautiful activity, increasing hatred of shams and lies, increasing hunger after truth and usefulness.  With mistakes and confusions innumerable they worked: but still they worked; planting good seed; and when the fire of the French Revolution swept over the land, it burned up the rotten and the withered, only to let the fresh herbage spring up from underneath.

But that purifying fire was needed.  If we inquire why the many attempts to reform the Ancien Régime, which the eighteenth century witnessed, were failures one and all; why Pombal failed in Portugal, Aranda in Spain, Joseph II. in Austria, Ferdinand and Caroline in Naples—for these last, be it always remembered, began as humane and enlightened sovereigns, patronising liberal opinions, and labouring to ameliorate the condition of the poor, till they were driven by the murder of Marie Antoinette into a paroxysm of rage and terror—why, above all, Louis XVI., who attempted deeper and wiser reforms than any other sovereign, failed more disastrously than any—is not the answer this, that all these reforms would but have cleansed the outside of the cup and the platter, while they left the inside full of extortion and excess?  It was not merely institutions which required to be reformed, but men and women.  The spirit of “Gil Blas” had to be cast out.  The deadness, selfishness, isolation of men’s souls; their unbelief in great duties, great common causes, great self-sacrifices—in a word, their unbelief in God, and themselves, and mankind—all that had to be reformed; and till that was done all outward reform would but have left them, at best, in brute ease and peace, to that soulless degradation, which (as in the Byzantine empire of old, and seeming in the Chinese empire of to-day) hides the reality of barbarism under a varnish of civilisation.  Men had to be awakened; to be taught to think for themselves, act for themselves, to dare and suffer side by side for their country and for their children; in a word, to arise and become men once more.