The Press. — London, England, 1856-08-02 00:00:00

736 fittraturt. Ott the State of Society in France before the Re volution of 1789. By Alexis de Toequeville. Translated by Henry Reeve. Loudon : Murray. WE are satisfied that no one can read atten tively this volume without acknowledging that he never fully understood the French Revolu• tion before. M. de Tocqueville has applied him self to the investigation of the causes of that great event with an industry rarely equalled, and a sagacity never surpassed. With the admirable method which seems instinctive in the French mind, and which in his case is restrained from excess by well-balanced judgment, he searches for the originating powers of the revolution as acute physicists search for the motive powers of the convulsions which have buried cities in ashes, or, by shocks of the earth, have pro strated them in ruins. In such cases of phy sical convulsion the causes of the outbreak have been long accumulating: what appears like accident brings the elements of explosion together when they are ripe for combination. M. de Tocqueville shows that it was just thus with the greatest social convulsion recorded in history. The French Revolution was not the work of chance ; it was not a mere letting loose of popular frenzy : it was the product of natural social causes ; and those causes are detailed by the author with a grasp of intel lect, a range of learning, and a lucidity of arrangement, which it is impossible to admire too highly. Astonishing ignorance prevails among our intelligent classes as to the state of French society previous to the revolution. We have heard people ordinarily well informed assert that the French peasantry were in the lowest state of serfdom ; that their lords made tar gets of their bodies for shooting practice; and that Beaumont and Fletcher's Custom of the Country was universal in the rural districts. All such fables are dissipated by the account given by M. de Tocqueville of the rural state of France ; that account being composed from authentic and unquestionable documents. One principal cause of the revolution was that political.progress in France had not kept pace with social progress. The people grew beyond the measure of their political fetters, and, as the fetters would not expand, they were burst with a convulsive effort. No mistake can be greater than that one into which mere economists are apt to fall— that insurrections and revolutions are born solely from physical distress. The contrary is more commonly the case. when the govern. ment of a people is less pliable and less elastic than their physical condition. If the govern ment,—by which we mean not only the supreme central administration, but all the various forms of administration which rule or repress a people,—is unable to adapt itself to changes in society, and to rise with the force which upheaves society itself, then physical prosperity produces, not political quiet, as some economists believe, but political con• vulsion. One of the most instructive passages in this masterly and eloquent argument is that which establishes the social progress and prosperity of France immediately previous to the revo lution. That minute division of land in France which is now generally referred to the action of the revolution is shown by M. de Tocque ville to have obtained previous to the revolu tion, and to have been one of its causes : The French peasant had not only ceased to be a serf; he had become an owner of land. This fact is still at the present time so imperfectly established, and its conse quences, as will presently be seen, have been so remark. able, that Y must be permitted to pause for a moment to examine it. has long been believed that the subdivision of landed property in France dates from the revolution of 1789, and wits only the result of that revolution. The contrary is de. monstrable by every species of evidence. Twenty years, at least, before that revolution agricnl• tural societies were in existence which already deplored the excessive subdivision of the soil. " The division of inheritances," said M. de Turgot, about the same time, "is such that, what sufficed for a single family, is shared between five or six children. These children and their THE PRESS. families can therefore no longer subsist exclusively by the land." Necker said a few years later that there were in France an immensity of small rural properties. 1 have met with the following expressions in a secret report made to one of the provincial intendants a few years before the revolution :—" Inheritances are divided in an equal and alarming manner, and, as every one wishes to have something of everything and everywhere, the plots of land are infinitely divided and perpetually subdivided." Might not this sentence have been written in our days? I have myself taken infinite pains to reconstruct, as it were, the survey of landed property as it existed in France before the revolution, and I have in some cases effected my object. In pursuance of the law of 1790, which estab lished the land tax, each parish had to frame a return of the landed properties then existing within its boundaries. These returns have for the most part disappeared ; never thelesq, I have found them in a few villages, and, by com paring them with the rllls of the present holders, I have found that, in these villages, the number of landed pro prietors at that time amounted to one half, frequently to two thirds, of their present number, a fact which is the more remarkable if it be remembered that the total popu lation of France has augmented by more than one fourth since that period. Already;as at the present time, the love of the peasant for property in land was intense, and all the passions which the possession of the soil has engendered in his nature were already inflamed. " Land is always sold above its value," said an excellent contemporary observer, " which arises from the passion of all the inhabitants to become owners of the soil. All the savings of the lower orders which elsewhere are placed out at private interest, or in the public securities, are intended in France for the purchase of land." Amongst the novelties which Arthur Young observed in France, when he visited that country for the first time, none struck him more than the great division of the soil among the peasantry. He averred that half the soil of France belonged to them in fee. " I had no idea," he often says, "of such a state of things ;" and it is true that such a state of things existed at that time nowhere but in France, or in the immediate neighbourhood of France. But the political status of the peasant had not risen with his social status. The natural rights and privileges of property did not accompany its possession. We cannot state in detail all the vexations to which the peasant landholder was subjected, but they can be comprehended by the eloquent sum mary of the author : Picture to yourself a French peasant of the eighteenth century, or, I might rather say, the peasant now before your eyes, for the man is the same ; his cond:tion is altered, but not his character. Take him as he is described in the documents I have quoted—so passionately enamoured of the soil, that he will spend all his savings to purchase it, and to purchase it at any price. To complete this par• chase he must first pay a tax, not to the Government, but to other landowners of the neighbourhood, as unconnected as himself with the administration of public affairs, and hardly more influential than he is. He possesses it at last; his heart is buried in it with the seed he sows. This little nook of ground, which is his own in this vast uni verse, fills him with pride and independence. But again these neighbours call him from his furrow, and compel him to come to work for them without wages. He tries to defend his young crops from their game; again they prevent him. As he crosses the river they wait for his passage to levy a toll. He finds them at the market, where they sell him the right of selling his own produce ; and when, on his return home, he wants to use the re• mainder of his wheat for his own sustenance•—of that wheat which was planted by his hands, and has grown under his eyes—he cannot touch it till he has ground it at the mill and baked it at the bakehouse of these same men. A portion of the income of his little property is paid away in quitrents to them also, and these dues can neither be extinguished nor redeemed. _ _ Whatever he does, these troublesome neighbours are everywhere on his path, to disturb his happiness, to in terfere with his labour, to consume his profits ; and when these are dismissed, others in the black garb of the Church present themselves to carry of the clearest profit of his harvest. Picture to yourself the condition, the wants, the character, the passions of this man, and com pute, if you are able, the stores of hatred and of envy which are accumulated in his heart. The aristocracy had for a long course of years become poorer and more feeble, but retained all their privileges ; the peasantry had become wealthier and stronger, but groaned under all their burdens. The ruin of the aristocracy resulted from their living on the privileges which had formerly been attached to pro perty, but had gradually been dissevered from it : The middle classes, with which they had been so relnc• taut to mingle, grew in wealth and in intelligence beside them, without them, and against them; they had rejected the middle classes as associates and as fellow•citizens ; but they were about to find in those classes their rivals, soon to be their enemies, at length their masters. A superior power had relieved them from the care of directing, of protecting, of assisting their vassals ; but as that power had left them in the full enjoyment of their pecuniary rights and their honorary privileges, they conceived that nothing was lost to them. As they still marched first, they still thought they were leading; and, indeed, they had still about them men whom, in the language of the law, they named their subjects—others were called their vassals, their tenants, their farmers. But, in reality, none fol., SATURDAY, lowed them; they were alone, and when those very classes rose against them flight was their only resource. The author shows how different was the course of affairs in England. An aristocracy becomes stronger as it forfeits privileges which sepa rate it from the commonalty, or as it volun tarily incurs burdens from which the com monalty is exempt. In this view the tax on successions, recently established in this coup, try, though introduced in an ungracious spirit, may be considered a truly conservative mea sure. Another potent cause of the revolution was the spirit of caste which prevailed among the orders of French society. These orders were so essentially distinct that they refused to mingle. They might be shaken together, yet still the oil rose to the surface of the water. They would not blend, and when the bonds of power were removed they warred against each other with inextinguishable hatred. Yet these and other elements of convulsion might long have existed without outbreak but for the administrative tutelage to which France had been brought. This administra tive subjection gave all power into the hands of the capital, and made the country the ready instrument of the despotism which gained the ascendancy in Paris. The destruc tion of political liberty by this administrative centralisation, and the separation of classes, are enumerated by the author as the two great causes of almost all the disorders which led to the dissolution of old society in France. On the evils of centralisation the views of M. de Tocqueville are identical with the views of M. de Montalembert. This centralisation, which has been the ruin of all rational liberty in France, is shown by M. de Tocqueville to be anterior to the revolution, and to be one prin cipal source of its excesses, and of the failure which since has constantly befallen every attempt to found a really constitutional sys tem. The economists of the revolution re. joiced that the great instrument of adminis trative despotism was ready formed to their hand : That peculiar form of tyranny which is called Demo cratic Despotism, and which was utterly unknown to the Middle Ages, was already familiar to these writers. No gradations in society, no distinctions of classes, no fixed ranks—a people composed of individuals nearly alike and entirely equal—this confused mass being recognised as the only legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the faculties which could enable it either to direct or even to superintend its own government. Above this mass a single delegate, charged to do everything in its name with out consulting it. To control this delegate, public opinion, deprived of its organs; to arrest him, revolutions, but no laws. In principle a subordinate agent ; in fact, a master. As nothing was as yet to be found about them which came up to this ideal, they sought it in the depths of Asia. affirm, without exaggeration, that there is not one of these writers who has not, in some of his produc tions, passed an emphatic eulogy on China. That, at least, is always to be found in their books ; and, as China is still very imperfectly known, there is no trash they have not written about that empire. That wretched and barbarous Government, which a handful of Europeans can overpower when they please, appeared to them the most perfect model to be copied by all the nations of the earth. China was to them what England, and subse• quently the United States, became for all Frenchmen. They expressed their emotion and enchantment at the aspect of a country, whose sovereign, absolute but unpre judiced, drives a furrow once a year with his own hands in honour of the useful arts ; where all public employ ments are obtained by competitive examinations, and which has a system of philosophy for its religion and men of letters for its aristocracy. The whole of this chapter (the XVth) is preg nant with instruction. The elements of the revolution being ready, Louis XVI. himself contributed the spark which caused them to explode : During the whole course of his reign Lone XIV. did nothing but talk of reforms to be accomplished. There are few institutions of which he did not foreshadow the approaching ruin, before the revolution came to effect it. After removing from the statute• book some of the worst of these institutions he very soon replaced them ; it seemed as if he wanted only to loosen their roots, leaving to others the task of striking them down. By some of the reforms which he effected himself, ancient and venerable customs were suddenly changed without sufli cient preparation, and established rights were occasionally violated. These reforms prepared the way for the revo lution, not so much by overthrowing the obstacles in its way, as by showing the people how to set about making it. The evil was increased by the very purity and dis interestedness of the intentions which actuated the King and his Ministers; for no example is more dangerous than that of violence exerted for a good purpose by honest and well-meaning men. Every word in the next extract should be well weighed