CHAPTER IX.

THE DECAY OF FEUDAL PROPERTY IN FRANCE

AND ENGLAND.

CONSIDERING the immense space which the first French Revolution filled in the eyes of the generation which immediately succeeded it, it is surprising at first sight that the search after authentic materials for an opinion concerning its causes, course, and character was for a while but slackly prosecuted. A virtually inexhaustible store of such materials existed in the cahiers -the statements of grievances which, according to the ancient practice of the French States-General, were sent up from every administrative subdivision of France to the body which became the first Constituent Assembly. Yet it is only in comparatively recent days that this and other similar stores of historical wealth have been critically examined. The story runs (I do not know whether it has found its way into print) that a well-known German historian once expressed his amazement at having pointed out to him in Paris some dusty bundles of papers, with the remark that they had lain undisturbed since

they were deposited in the Archives on the reconstruction, after the close of the Reign of Terror, of the gloomily famous Committees of Public Salvation and General Security. 'But you have classical histories of the Revolution,' he said; have not these documents been examined by their writers?' 'No,' was the reply, 'that is the dust of 1794.'

There is, however, some account to be given of this neglect, especially as regards the cahiers. One cause of it has undoubtedly been that preference for general explanations of phenomena which has always been a heavy drawback on French genius; and the general explanations of the first French Revolution current in France are a multitude. But another, and probably the most powerful, cause is the nearness of the Revolution itself. De Tocqueville, who first dug deep into the cahiers, and showed what great results might be obtained by thoroughly exploring that mine, has left the striking remark that no foreigner can properly appreciate the state of sentiment in one section of French society, where there is scarcely a single family in which the guillotining of a parent or a near relative is not a recollection or a fresh tradition; and one of the fruits of this condition of feeling is a strong reluctance to connect the France of the Revolution with the France of the Monarchy. Another, and a much larger, portion of the nation traces its political and social rights to the period

during which all this blood was shed; and hence arises a manifest disposition to regard the Revolution as a historical catastrophe, terrible but inevitable, and to look on the society which succeeded it as no more closely related to that which preceded it than is the vegetation which has grown on the sides of Vesuvius after an eruption to the vegetation which the lava destroyed. Between unwillingness to find the parentage of the Revolution in the old régime before it, and unwillingness to have its crimes placed in full light, the first condition of scientific history, the critical examination of its sources was too much and too long overlooked. But of late, and mainly owing to the influence of that invaluable work on the relations between Old and New France, on which De Tocqueville was still engaged at his death, the business of correcting preconceived opinions by the aid of authentic historical materials has been rapidly proceeding. Two interesting books, one by M. Chassin ('Le Génie de la Révolution'), and the other

M. Doniol ('La Révolution Française et la Féodalité'), are among the first-fruits of renewed examination of the cahiers; and in the three volumes of his 'Origins of Contemporary France,' which M. Taine has lately published, he has given us instalments of a work which, apart from its great literary merits, is not unworthy to be compared with De Tocqueville's fragment in the originality and

carefulness of the research of which it gives proof. M. Doniol states that great quantities of the original cahiers are to be found in the French Archives; but, though some of them were separately printed in 1789, I am not acquainted with any collection of them fuller than that published, many years ago, by

Prudhomme and Laurent de Mézières.

But although the diligent prosecution of these inquiries is comparatively recent, it has already led to considerable results. Some new facts have been discovered, some already known have been brought into clearer light, and several errors have been detected. Among the passages in the Revolution hitherto obscure which may now be better understood, one or two deserve especial remark. The hostility of the cultivating peasantry to the territorial nobility in all provinces of France except Brittany and Anjou, has generally been recognised, not merely as one of the causes of the Revolution, but as the chief cause of the rapidity with which it gathered head and of the comparative stability which it manifested. The provincial cities and towns were slowly drawn into the movement through the action of Jacobin clubs, gradually established in them, and taking their instructions from the central body in Paris, which no doubt from the first was a furnace of revolutionary agitation. But the peasantry, always excepting those of the western provinces, were from

the very beginning enthusiasts for the destruction of the ancient institutions, and so they remained until they gained their objects. This universal hatred of the peasants had for one of its effects a condition of the country which, no doubt, has often perplexed the reader of the ordinary histories. After a while France became hermetically closed, and escape from the guillotine became almost impossible. Some writers, in explaining this, have attributed to Robespierre a special genius for police organisation; but the truth seems to be that the cultivating classes, who at first witnessed with pleasure the emigration of the nobility, constituted themselves a voluntary police as soon as they found that, by detaining the nobles in France, they would probably send them to the scaffold. This extremity of detestation is not sufficiently accounted for by assigning general reasons for it. The complicity of the peasants with the rulers of the Reign of Terror was undoubtedly connected with a wish to preserve certain advantages which they had obtained just at the very period when France became a republic; and similarly an earlier series of incidents, which testify to the same unqualified bitterness of feeling, are now shown to have had a special rather than a general cause. M. Taine has described in the subdivision of his work called 'L'Anarchie Spontanée' those terrible outbreaks of violence which occurred even as early as 1789, and which are