WITH the deposition of Louis XVI. and the rise to power of the Commune, the revolutionary movement entered on a new phase. The royal authority had been overthrown, but the “ counter-revolutionaries ” yet remained to be dealt with ; thus it is now less against the unhappy prisoners in the Temple than against the “ gangrened portion of the nation ” that the invectives of the revolutionary leaders are henceforth directed. What is the truth about this gangrene ? Did it exist ? In a sense, yes. But to understand how it came into being we must cast our eyes back over the history of the last twenty years.
When Louis XV., looking around him at the end of his reign, said, “ Things will last my time, but after me the deluge ! ” he diagnosed with remarkable accuracy the disease that afflicted the State. France, as she existed at this date, could not last, because no state in which one class is oppressed can maintain its vigour. Under Louis XV. the peasants, if less wretched than is popularly supposed—for feudal benevolence did more than history tells us to counteract the oppression of the Old Régime—were, nevertheless, cyphers in the state ; their wishes did not count, their voice was not heard, their needs were not officially recognized, and thus, by constriction, they became like a mortifying limb spreading germs of death throughout the body.
Louis XVI., as we have seen, from the first moment of his accession, resolved to remedy this state of affairs, to loose the bonds that bound the people down, to give the constricted limb free play. It was not too late to do this, as certain writers would have us believe ; the limb responded admirably to the treatment ; never had the people of France displayed greater vigour than on the eve of the Revolution. The body of the State, as M. Dauban points out, was at this moment “ anything but inert and passive.
Everywhere thought, passion, and blood circulate. The almost unanimous wish of the cahiers testifies to the force of cohesion in opinion and the power of the public mind… .
Paris has no greater share in the spirit that animates it than Marseilles, Bordeaux, and the other parts of France. In the three years that follow what enthusiasm, what ardour, what vitality in the provinces ! ”[1]
But, at the very moment that the people were released from bondage, the Revolution intervened and reversed the process by seizing on two other limbs of the State, the nobility and clergy, and binding them down relentlessly. It was not even as if the http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/webster/frenchrev/fr_rev_06.html (1 of 61)5.4.2006 10:40:30
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revolutionaries had said to the “ privileged orders ”: “ You have enjoyed too long exclusively the good things of life, now you shall share them with your fellow-men.
Come, give up your châteaux and your rolling acres, and till the ground with the rest.” Nothing of this kind was suggested, not the faintest glimmer of Socialist ideals seems to have illumined the minds of the earlier revolutionary extremists ; their only idea was to subject the hitherto privileged orders to a far worse oppression than that from which the people had been delivered. For if under the Old Régime the people had been neglected, ignored, crushed by taxation, under the revolutionary regime the nobles and clergy were actively ill-treated—insulted, spat upon, assaulted, robbed of all their goods, driven from the country, or massacred. The people had been left to struggle for existence ; the nobles and clergy were denied the very right to live.
They were also, as a class, denied any virtues. No distinction was drawn between the Liberal nobles who had marched in the vanguard of reform and the reactionaries who mustered around the Comte d’Artois, between the courtiers who for purely selfish reasons clung to the Old Régime and the provincial seigneurs who devoted themselves to the welfare of the peasants on their estates. [2] The generous enthusiasm with which,
on the 4th of August, the nobles in a body had voluntarily relinquished their privileges was rewarded by the revolutionary leaders only with insults and abuse. “ All Royalists,” said Camille Desmoulins at the Jacobin Club, “ live on the sweat of the people ; they have neither wits nor virtue but for intrigue and villainy.” [3]
Under these circumstances what wonder that the nobles became irreconcilable, and that many who had sympathized with the Revolution turned against the whole movement, reviled the Constitution, and used all their efforts to restore the Old Order in its entirety ? “ Damn liberty, I abhor its very name !” an indignant Frenchman exclaimed to Dr. Moore, and the sentiment was doubtless echoed by thousands of his fellow-countrymen who, embittered by persecution, now desired a return to prerevolutionary conditions. Nor was this resentment confined only to the nobles and clergy, for since, as I have shown, the Revolution had resulted in the ruin and misery of great numbers of the bourgeois and the people, discontent prevailed in all classes. Thus, by a process precisely identical with that employed by Louis XV., but applied to a different portion of the nation, a fresh centre of mortification was set up, and the new order became as moribund as the old. Each revolutionary faction had worked only for momentary popularity, each demagogue in turn had proceeded on the principle, “ Things will last my term of power, but after me the deluge,” and, in order to prolong that spell of power, had striven not for the welfare of the nation as a whole, but to obtain the favour of one portion only—the mob of Paris.
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Nesta Webster, The French Revolution, ch 6