CHAP. LII.]

ROUSSEAU'S SENSIBILITY AND GOODNESS. 325

ardent imagination with extraordinary dialectic subtlety, he was enabled to support his extravagant hypotheses with a display of reasoning which to some minds made them appear truths. But we do not believe that he was the dupe of his own paradoxes. He threw them out as baits for the vulgar and unreflecting. He would perhaps have been filled with regret could he have foreseen their consequences, for he had the greatest aversion to violence. In one of his letters he observes: "In my opinion, the blood of one man alone is more precious than the liberty of the whole human race;" where, however, his temperament led him to a wrong conclusion.

A morbid sensibility, like that of Rousseau, is, however, so far from being incompatible with the most atrocious cruelty that their union forms one of the strangest and most striking features of the French Revolution. M. Michelet has remarked that many of the terrorists 66 were men of an exalted and morbid sensibility;" and he goes on to observe that artists-not, we suspect, of the highest order—and women were particularly subject to it. Thus Panis and Sergent, the bloodthirsty miscreants who took so active a part in the massacres of September, burst into tears because a Marseillese to whom they had refused ball-cartridges on August 10th, threatened to shoot himself.3 Jourdan Coup-tête, who cut off the heads of the governors of the Bastille and of the gardes du corps at Versailles, and afterwards took a leading part in the atrocities at Avignon, was easily moved to tears, and would sometimes cry like a child.* The perpetrators of the September massacres were occasionally seized with a fit of frantic joy when one of their intended victims was acquitted, and, by "a strange reaction of sensibility," would shed tears and throw themselves into the arms of those whom a moment before they were about to slay." The same sort of "sensibility" appears to have characterized Danton. It has been remarked that the novels and other publications of the bloodiest period of the Revolution are full of the word sensibility. Fabre d'Eglantine even talked about "the sensibility of Marat." But this expression, as M. Michelet observes, will surprise nobody but those who confound sensibility with goodness. In fact this sort of feeling is so little connected

326

CENSORSHIP OF THE PRESS.

[CHAP. LII. either with the head or heart that it might almost be displayed by a galvanized corpse.

ment.

In the absence of all public debate, literature was, under the old régime, the only channel of political discussion. The growing audacity of its tone had not escaped the attention of the GovernA Royal Declaration of 1757, in the very zenith of Voltaire's ascendant, condemns to death those who should write or print or disseminate anything hostile to religion or the established Government. The censorship of the Press, however, which was in the hands of the clergy, was on the whole exercised with tolerable leniency, though often capriciously. Thus Rousseau's prize essay was left unnoticed, while his harmless Emile was condemned to be burnt by the executioner. In like manner the Sorbonne refused their imprimatur to Marmontel's innocuous Bélisaire, and extracted from it thirty-two propositions, which they published with their anathema as heretical, under the title of Indiculus; to which Turgot subjoined the epithet ridiculus. One of the propositions denounced was: "It is not by the light of the flaming pile that souls are to be enlightened;" whence Turgot drew the legitimate conclusion that, in the opinion of the Sorbonne, souls were to be so enlightened! Such were the clerical censors of those days.

A living French writer somewhat paradoxically maintains that the restrictions on literature were really effective, and that the philosophers had thus little or no influence in producing the Revolution. In corroboration of this view he asserts, on the authority of the Introduction to the Moniteur, that their works were to be found only in the libraries of the educated and rich." But what more could be required? It is notorious that the Revolution was begun by the higher classes. Thus Marmontel tells us that among the nobles, a considerable number of enthusiasts (têtes exaltées), some from a spirit of liberty, others from calculating and ambitious views, were inclined towards the popular party. Madame de Staël says that not only all the men, but also all the women, who had any influence upon opinion among the higher classes, were warm in favour of the national cause; that fashion, all powerful in France, ran in this direction; and that this state of things was the result of the whole century.* The privileged classes adopted the same language as the Tiers

3

1 Tocqueville, Anc. Régime, p. 100.

2 Granier de Cassagnac, Hist. des Causes de la Révol. Fr. t. i. p. 51 sq.

3 Mémoires, t. iv. p. 104.

Considérations sur la Révol. Fr. Euvres, t. xii. p. 179.

CHAP. LII.]

DEGRADATION OF THE MONARCHY.

327

état, and were disciples of the same philosophers. As early as 1762, women of fashion had taken from Rousseau the ominous name of citoyenne, as a pet appellation. In like manner, among the clergy, the most pronounced scepticism was found in the hierarchy. The Grand Vicar would smile at a little blasphemous talk, the Bishop laughed outright, the Cardinal would contribute something of his own. We need hardly advert to the rapidity with which, in a country like France, opinion spreads from class to class. This circumstance had not escaped the notice of Voltaire, who had remarked the rapid diffusion of the new principles. A traveller who had been long absent from France being asked on his return at the commencement of Louis XVI.'s reign what change he observed in the nation? replied: "None, except that what used to be the talk of the drawing-rooms is now repeated in the streets."

The persecution which authors experienced from the Censorship was more vexatious than terrible, and calculated rather to excite than to deter. Hume even expressed to Diderot his opinion that French intolerance was more favourable to intellectual progress than the unlimited liberty of the Press enjoyed in England.* However this may be, it is certain, and may serve as another refutation of M. Granier de Cassagnac's theory, before mentioned, that the progress of public opinion in France had led acute observers to predict a revolution even so early as the middle of the eighteenth century. Lord Chesterfield, in a letter dated April 13th, 1752, adverting to the quarrel between Louis XV. and the Parliament of Paris, observes: "This I see, that before the end of this century, the trade of both king and priest will not be half so good a one as it has been. Du Clos, in his Réflections, hath observed, and very truly, 'qu'il y a un germe de raison qui commence à se developper en France.' A development that must prove fatal to regal and papal pretensions.""

While such was the progress of public opinion, the Monarchy had been gradually sinking into unpopularity, we might almost say into contempt. The French people, till towards the close of

328

EFFECT OF THE AMERICAN REVOLT.

[CHAP. LII. Louis XIV.'s reign, had loved their kings with an affection bordering on idolatry. They looked up to them as their protectors against the aristocracy, and as the promoters of national glory, both in arms and letters. But this popularity began to wane with Louis XIV.'s good fortune, and the approach of that misery which his ambition had occasioned. The Regency of the Duke of Orleans was calculated to bring all government into contempt. Yet the loyalty of the French seemed to revive a little in the first part of Louis XV.'s reign, till his mean and abominable vices entirely extinguished it. The masses ordered by private individuals for the King's safety form a kind of barometer of his popularity. During his illness at Metz in 1744, they amounted to 6,000; after Damiens' attempt on his life in 1757 to 600; at his last illness in 1774 to 3. Such was the natural fate of the lover of Madame Du Barri, of the hoary voluptuary of the Parc aux Cerfs, of the mean and avaricious speculator in the distress of his people. The King and the corn-dealer were for ever confounded, and consigned to everlasting infamy. Frequent scarcities constantly recalled the Pacte de Famine, till at length it resounded as the death-knell of the French Monarchy, when on the 6th of October, 1789, the populace led the Royal Family captive to Paris, with shouts that they were bringing the baker, his wife, and the little apprentice! Thus Louis XVI. inherited a Crown sullied by the vices of his predecessors, and became the innocent victim of faults that were not his own. The feebleness of his character, nay, even his very virtues, assisted the Revolution. Had he possessed more energy and decision, had he felt less reluctance to shed the blood of his subjects, he might probably have averted the excesses which marked his own end and that of the Monarchy. "It is frightful to think," says Mounier," that with a less benevolent soul, another Prince might perhaps have found means to maintain his power."2

The aid which, against his better judgment, Louis XVI. was induced to lend to the American rebellion, must, no doubt, as we have had occasion to remark before, be reckoned among the causes of his fall; not only by aggravating the financial distress, but also, and more materially, from the support which the doctrines of the revolutionary philosophers derived from the establishment of the American Republic. While, as M. Tocqueville remarks, the American rebellion was only a new and astonishing 2 Recherches sur les Causes, &c.

3

Taine, p. 413.

Anc. Régime, p. 223.

CHAP. LII.]

THE DEFICIT.

329

fact to the rest of Europe, to the French people it rendered more sensible and striking things which they had meditated on already. The Americans seemed only to be executing what the French writers had conceived, and to be giving to their dreams all the substance of reality. The aid which the French Government lent to rebels appeared a sanction of revolt. Lafayette and other Frenchmen, who had taken a personal share in the American struggle, were among the foremost to promote the Revolution in France, and the enthusiastic feeling which the declaration of American Independence excited among the French, was perhaps heightened by the circumstance that it had been achieved at the expense of a rival nation. During the first tumults in Paris, the name of Washington was the principal watchword in the different sections.

Louis XVI. himself, in his speech on opening the StatesGeneral in 1789, attributed the financial pressure to the American

Its cost was estimated at 1,194 million livres, or about 48 millions sterling; and so bad was the state of credit in France, that this money was borrowed at an average of about 10 per cent.1 We cannot, however, regard the disordered state of the finances as much more than the occasion of the Revolution, by necessitating the convocation of the States-General. It was none of the essential causes of the outbreak. Preceding monarchs had triumphed over greater financial embarrassments; and had everything else in the State been sound, even a national bankruptcy might have been surmounted. In fact, though the deficit set the Revolution in motion, it occupied but little attention after the movement was once begun. The importance of the deficit as a revolutionary motive, arose not so much from its amount, as from the temper of the nation. The wide-spread discontent among the middling and lower classes forbade the imposition of any new taxes, while the higher orders were not inclined to relinquish their fiscal privileges. Calonne, though the Minister of the courtiers, was compelled to acknowledge that the only hope of safety lay in the reform of all that was vicious in the State. He proposed to abolish the exemption from taxation enjoyed by the clergy and nobles; to increase the product of the direct taxes by a more equal distribution of them, and that of the indirect taxes by releasing agriculture, commerce, and manufactures from their fetters by abolishing internal barriers and obsolete rights and privileges;

1 Granier de Cassagnac, Hist. des Causes, &c. t. i. p. 108 note.