III. Absentee Seigniors.
Vast extent of their fortunes and rights.—Possessing
greater advantages they owe greater services.-Reasons for
their absenteeism.—Effect of it.—Apathy of the provinces.—
Condition of their estates.—They give no alms.—Misery of
their tenants.—Exactions of their agents.—Exigencies of
their debts.—State of their justiciary.—Effects of their
hunting rights.—Sentiments of the peasantry towards them.
The spectacle becomes still gloomier, on passing from the estates on which the seigniors reside to those on which they are non-residents. Noble or ennobled, lay and ecclesiastic, the latter are privileged among the privileged, and form an aristocracy inside of an aristocracy. Almost all the powerful and accredited families belong to it whatever may be their origin and their date.1323 Through their habitual or frequent residence near the court, through their alliances or mutual visits, through their habits and their luxuries, through the influence which they exercise and the enmities which they provoke, they form a group apart, and are those who possess the most extensive estates, the leading suzerainties, and the most complete and comprehensive jurisdictions. Of the court nobility and of the higher clergy, they number perhaps, a thousand in each order, while their small number only brings out in higher relief the enormity of their advantages. We have seen that the appanages of the princes of the blood comprise a seventh of the territory; Necker estimates the revenue of the estates enjoyed by the king's two brothers at two millions.1324 The domains of the Ducs de Bouillon, d'Aiguillon, and some others cover entire leagues, and, in immensity and continuity, remind one of those, which the Duke of Sutherland and the Duke of Bedford now possess in England. With nothing else than his forests and his canal, the Duke of Orleans, before marrying his wife, as rich as himself, obtains an income of a million. A certain seigniory, le Clermontois, belonging to the Prince de Condé, contains forty thousand inhabitants, which is the extent of a German principality; "moreover all the taxes or subsidies occurring in le Clermontois are imposed for the benefit of His Serene Highness, the king receiving absolutely nothing."1325 Naturally authority and wealth go together, and, the more an estate yields, the more its owner resembles a sovereign. The archbishop of Cambray, Duc de Cambray, Comte de Cambrésis, possesses the suzerainty over all the fiefs of a region which numbers over seventy-five thousand inhabitants. He appoints one-half of the aldermen of Cambray and the whole of the administrators of Cateau. He nominates the abbots to two great abbeys, and presides over the provincial assemblies and the permanent bureau, which succeeds them. In short, under the intendant, or at his side, he maintains a pre-eminence and better still, an influence somewhat like that to day maintained over his domain by grand duke incorporated into the new German empire. Near him, in Hainaut, the abbé of Saint-Armand possesses seven-eighths of the territory of the provostship while levying on the other eighth the seigniorial taxes of the corvées and the dime. He nominates the provost of the aldermen, so that, in the words of the grievances, "he composes the entire State, or rather he is himself the State."1326 I should never end if I were to specify all these big prizes. Let us select only those of the prelacy, and but one particular side, that of money. In the "Almanach Royal," and in "La France Ecclésiastique" for 1788, we may read their admitted revenues. The veritable revenue, however, is one-half more for the bishoprics, an double and triple for the abbeys; and we must again double the veritable revenue in order to estimate its value in the money of to day.1327. The one hundred and thirty-one bishops and arch-bishops possess in the aggregate 5, 600, 000 livres of episcopal income and 1,200,000 livres in abbeys, averaging 50,000 livres per head as in the printed record, and in reality 100,000. A bishop thus, in the eyes of his contemporaries, according to the statement of spectators cognizant of the actual truth, was "a grand seignior, with an income of 100,000 livres."1328 Some of the most important sees are magnificently endowed. That of Sens brings in 70,000 livres; Verdun, 74,000; Tours, 82,000; Beauvais, Toulouse and Bayeux, 90,000; Rouen, 100,000; Auch, Metz and Albi, 120,000; Narbonne, 160,000; Paris and Cambray, 200,000 according to official reports, and probably half as much more in sums actually collected. Other sees, less lucrative, are, proportionately, still better provided. Imagine a small provincial town, oftentimes not even a petty sub-prefecture of our times,—Conserans, Mirepoix, Lavaur, Rieux, Lombez, Saint-Papoul, Comminges, Luçon, Sarlat, Mende, Fréjus, Lescar, Belley, Saint-Malo, Tréguier, Embrun, Saint-Claude,—and, in the neighborhood, less than two hundred, one hundred, and sometimes even less than fifty parishes, and, as recompense for this slight ecclesiastical surveillance, a prelate receiving from 25,000 to 70,000 livres, according to official statements; from 37,000 to 105,000 livres in actual receipts; and from 74,000 to 210,000 livres in the money of to day. As to the abbeys, I count thirty-three of them producing to the abbé from 25,000 to 120,000 livres, and twenty-seven which bring from 20,000 to 100,000 livres to the abbess. Weigh these sums taken from the Almanach, and bear in mind that they must be doubled, and more, to obtain the real revenue, and be quadrupled, and more, to obtain the actual value. It is evident, that, with such revenues, coupled with the feudal rights, police, justiciary and administrative, which accompany them, an ecclesiastic or lay grand seignior is, in fact, a sort of prince in his district. He bears too close a resemblance to the ancient sovereign to be entitled to live as an ordinary individual. His private advantages impose on him a public character. His rank, and his enormous profits, makes it incumbent on him to perform proportionate services, and that, even under the sway of the intendant, he owes to his vassals, to his tenants, to his feudatories the support of his mediation, of his patronage and of his gains.
To do this he must be in residence, but, generally, he is an absentee. For a hundred and fifty years a kind of all-powerful attraction diverts the grandees from the provinces and impels them towards the capital. The movement is irresistible, for it is the effect of two forces, the greatest and most universal that influence mankind, one, a social position, and the other the national character. A tree is not to be severed from its roots with impunity. Appointed to govern, an aristocracy frees itself from the land when it no longer rules. It ceases to rule the moment when, through increasing and constant encroachments, almost the entire justiciary, the entire administration, the entire police, each detail of the local or general government, the power of initiating, of collaboration, of control regarding taxation, elections, roads, public works and charities, passes over into the hands of the intendant or of the sub-delegate, under the supreme direction of the comptroller-general or of the king's council.1329 Civil servants, men "of the robe and the quill," colorless commoners, perform the administrative work; there is no way to prevent it. Even with the king's delegates, a provincial governor, were he hereditary, a prince of the blood, like the Condés in Burgundy, must efface himself before the intendant; he holds no effective office; his public duties consist of showing off and providing entertainment. Besides he would badly perform any others. The administrative machine, with its thousands of hard, creaking and dirty wheels, as Richelieu and Louis XIV, fashioned it, can work only in the hands of workmen who may be dismissed at any time therefore unscrupulous and prompt to give way to the judgment of the State. It is impossible to allow oneself to get mixed up with rogues of that description. He accordingly abstains, and abandons public affairs to them. Unemployed, bored, what could he now do on his domain, where he no longer reigns, and where dullness overpowers him? He betakes himself to the city, and especially to the court. Moreover, only here can he pursue a career; to be successful he has to become a courtier. It is the will of the king, one must frequent his apartments to obtain his favors; otherwise, on the first application for them the answer will be, "Who is he? He is a man that I never see." In the king's eyes there is no excuse for absence, even should the cause is a conversion, with penitence for a motive. In preferring God to the king, he has deserted. The ministers write to the intendants to ascertain if the gentlemen of their province "like to stay at home," and if they "refuse to appear and perform their duties to the king." Imagine the grandeur of such attractions available at the court, governments, commands, bishoprics, benefices, court-offices, survivor-ships, pensions, credit, favors of every kind and degree for self and family. All that a country of 25 millions men can offer that is desirable to ambition, to vanity, to interest, is found here collected as in a reservoir. They rush to it and draw from it.—And the more readily because it is an agreeable place, arranged just as they would have it, and purposely to suit the social aptitudes of the French character. The court is a vast permanent drawing room to which "access is easy and free to the king's subjects;" where they live with him, "in gentle and virtuous society in spite of the almost infinite distance of rank and power;" where the monarch prides himself on being the perfect master of a household.1330 In fact, no drawing room was ever so well kept up, nor so well calculated to retain its guests by every kind of enjoyment, by the beauty, the dignity and the charm of its decoration, by the selection of its company and by the interest of the spectacle. Versailles is the only place to show oneself off; to make a figure, to push one's way, to be amused, to converse or gossip at the head-quarters of news, of activity and of public matters, with the élite of the kingdom and the arbiters of fashion, elegance and taste. "Sire," said M. de Vardes to Louis XIV, "away from Your Majesty one not only feels miserable but ridiculous." None remain in the provinces except the poor rural nobility; to live there one must be behind the age, disheartened or in exile. The king's banishment of a seignior to his estates is the highest disgrace; to the humiliation of this fall is added the insupportable weight of boredom. The finest chateau on the most beautiful site is a frightful "desert"; nobody is seen there save the grotesques of a small town or the village peasants.1331
"Exile alone," says Arthur Young, "can force the French nobility to do what the English prefer to do, and that is to live on their estates and embellish them."
Saint-Simon and other court historians, on mentioning a ceremony, repeatedly state that "all France was there"; in fact, every one of consequence in France is there, and each recognizes the other by this sign. Paris and the court become, accordingly, the necessary sojourn of all fine people. In such a situation departure begets departure; the more a province is forsaken the more they forsake it. "There is not in the kingdom," says the Marquis de Mirabeau, "a single estate of any size of which the proprietor is not in Paris and who, consequently, neglects his buildings and chateaux."1332 The lay grand seigniors have their hotels in the capital, their entresol at Versailles, and their pleasure-house within a circuit of twenty leagues; if they visit their estates at long intervals, it is to hunt. The fifteen hundred commendatory abbés and priors enjoy their benefices as if they were so many remote farms. The two thousand seven hundred vicars and canons visit each other and dine out. With the exception of a few apostolic characters the one hundred and thirty-one bishops stay at home as little as they can; nearly all of them being nobles, all of them men of society, what could they do out of the world, confined to a provincial town? Can we imagine a grand seignior, once a gay and gallant abbé and now a bishop with a hundred thousand livres income, voluntarily burying himself for the entire year at Mende, at Comminges, in a paltry cloister? The interval has become too great between the refined, varied and literary life of the great center, and the monotonous, inert, practical life of the provinces. Hence it is that the grand seignior who withdraws from the former cannot enter into the latter, and he remains an absentee, at least in feeling.
A country in which the heart ceases to impel the blood through its veins
presents a somber aspect. Arthur Young, who traveled over France between
1787 and 1789, is surprised to find at once such a vital center and
such dead extremities. Between Paris and Versailles the double file of
vehicles going and coming extends uninterruptedly for five leagues from
morning till night.1333 The contrast on other roads is very great.
Leaving Paris by the Orleans road, says Arthur Young, "we met not one
stage or diligence for ten miles; only two messageries and very few
chaises, not a tenth of what would have been met had we been leaving
London at the same hour." On the highroad near Narbonne, "for thirty-six
miles," he says, "I came across but one cabriolet, half a dozen carts
and a few women leading asses." Elsewhere, near St. Girons, he notices
that in two hundred and fifty miles he encountered in all, "two
cabriolets and three miserable things similar to our old one-horse post
chaise, and not one gentleman." Throughout this country the inns are
execrable; it is impossible to hire a wagon, while in England, even in
a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, there are
comfortable hotels and every means of transport. This proves that in
France "there is no circulation." It is only in very large towns that
there is any civilization and comfort. At Nantes there is a superb
theater "twice as large as Drury-Lane and five times as magnificent. Mon
Dieu! I cried to myself, do all these wastes, moors, and deserts, that I
have passed for 300 miles lead to this spectacle?. . . In a single leap
you pass from misery to extravagance,...the country deserted, or if a
gentleman in it, you find him in some wretched hole to save that money
which is lavished with profusion in the luxuries of a capital." "A
coach," says M. de Montlosier, "set out weekly from the principal towns
in the provinces for Paris and was not always full, which tells us about
the activity in business. There was a single journal called the Gazette
de France, appearing twice a week, which represents the activity of
minds."1334 Some magistrates of Paris in exile at Bourges in 1753 and
1754 give the following picture of that place:
"A town in which no one can be found with whom you can talk at
your ease on any topic whatever, reasonably or sensibly. The nobles,
three-fourths of them dying of hunger, rotting with pride of birth,
keeping apart from men of the robe and of finance, and finding it
strange that the daughter of a tax-collector, married to a counselor of
the parliament of Paris, should presume to be intelligent and entertain
company. The citizens are of the grossest ignorance, the sole support of
this species of lethargy in which the minds of most of the inhabitants
are plunged. Women, bigoted and pretentious, and much given to play and
to gallantry."1335
In this impoverished and benumbed society, among these Messieurs Thibaudeau, the counselor, and Harpin, the tax-collector, among these vicomtes de Sotenville and Countesses d'Escarbagnas, lives the Archbishop, Cardinal de Larochefoucauld, grand almoner to the king, provided with four great abbeys, possessing five hundred thousand livres income, a man of the world, generally an absentee, and when at home, finding amusement in the embellishing of his gardens and palace, in short, the golden pheasant of an aviary in a poultry yard of geese.1336 Naturally there is an entire absence of political thought. "You cannot imagine," says the manuscript, "a person more indifferent to all public matters." At a later period, in the very midst of events of the gravest character, and which most nearly concern them, there is the same apathy. At Chateau-Thierry on the 4th of July, 1789,1337 there is not a café in which a new paper can be found; there is but one at Dijon; at Moulins, the 7th of August, "in the best café in the town, where I found near twenty tables set for company, but as for a newspaper I might as well have demanded an elephant." Between Strasbourg and Besançon there is not a gazette. At Besançon there is "nothing but the Gazette de France, for which, this period, a man of common sense would not give one sol,. . . and the Courier de l'Europe a fortnight old; and well-dressed people are now talking of the news of two or three weeks past, and plainly by their discourse know nothing of what is passing. At Clermont "I dined, or supped, five times at the table d'hôte with from twenty to thirty merchants, trade men, officers, etc., and it is not easy for me to express the insignificance,—the inanity of their conversation. Scarcely any politics are mentioned at a moment when every bosom ought to beat with none but political sensations. The ignorance or the stupidity of these people must be absolutely incredible; not a week passes without their country abounding with events1338 that are analyzed an debated by the carpenters and blacksmiths of England." The cause of this inertia is manifest; interrogated on their opinions, all reply: "We are of the provinces and we must wait to know what is going on in Paris." Never having acted, they do no know how to act. But, thanks to this inertia, they let themselves be driven. The provinces form an immense stagnant pond, which, by a terrible inundation, may be emptied exclusively on one side, and suddenly; the fault lies with the engineers who failed to provide it with either dikes or outlets.
Such is the languor or, rather, the prostration, into which local life falls when the local chiefs deprive it of their presence, action or sympathy. I find only three or four grand seigniors taking a part in it, practical philanthropists following the example of English noblemen; the Duc d'Harcourt, who settles the lawsuits of his peasants; the Duc de Larochefoucauld-Liancourt who establishes a model farm on his domain, and a school of industrial pursuits for the children of poor soldiers; and the Comte de Brienne, whose thirty villages are to demand liberty of the Convention.1339 The rest, for the most part liberals, content themselves with discussions on public affairs and on political economy. In fact, the difference in manners, the separation of interests, the remoteness of ideas are so great that contact between those most exempt from haughtiness and their immediate tenantry is rare, and at long intervals. Arthur Young, needing some information at the house of the Duc de Larochefoucauld himself, the steward is sent for. "At an English nobleman's, there would have been three or four farmers asked to meet me, who would have dined with the family amongst the ladies of the first rank. I do not exaggerate when I say that I have had this at least an hundred times in the first houses of our islands. It is, however, a thing that in the present style of manners in France would not be met with from Calais to Bayonne except, by chance, in the house of some great lord that had been much in England, and then not unless it was asked for. The nobility in France have no more idea of practicing agriculture, and making it a subject of conversation, except on the mere theory, as they would speak of a loom or a bowsprit, than of any other object the most remote from their habits and pursuits." Through tradition, fashion and deliberation, they are, and wish only to be, people of society; their sole concern is to talk and to hunt. Never have the leaders of men so unlearned the art of leading men; the art which consists of marching along the same pathway with them, but at the head, and directing their labor by sharing in it.—Our Englishman, an eye-witness and competent, again writes: "Thus it is whenever you stumble on a grand seignior, even one that was worth millions, you are sure to find his property desert. Those of the Duc de Bouillon and of the Prince de Soubise are two of the greatest properties in France; and all the signs I have yet seen of their greatness are heaths, moors, deserts, and brackens. Go to their residence, wherever it may be, and you would probably find them in the midst of a forest very well peopled with deer, wild boars and wolves." "The great proprietors," says another contemporary,1340 "attracted to and kept in our cities by luxurious enjoyments know nothing of their estates," save "of their agents whom they harass for the support of a ruinous ostentation. How can ameliorations be looked for from those who even refuse to keep things up and make indispensable repairs?" A sure proof that their absence is the cause of the evil is found in the visible difference between the domain worked under absent abbé-commendatory and a domain superintended by monks living on the spot "The intelligent traveler recognizes it" at first sight by the state of cultivation. "If he finds fields well enclosed by ditches, carefully planted, and covered with rich crops, these fields, he says to himself; belong to the monks. Almost always, alongside of these fertile plains, is an area of ground badly tilled and almost barren, presenting a painful contrast; and yet the soil is the same, being two portions of the same domain; he sees that the latter is the portion of the abbé-commendatory." "The abbatial manse." said Lefranc de Pompignan, "frequently looks like the property of a spendthrift; the monastic manse is like a patrimony whereon nothing is neglected for its amelioration," to such an extent that "the two-thirds" which the abbé enjoys bring him less than the third reserved by his monks.—The ruin or impoverishment of agriculture is, again, one of the effects of absenteeism. There was, perhaps, one-third of the soil in France, which, deserted as in Ireland, was as badly tilled, as little productive as in Ireland in the hands of the rich absentees, the English bishops, deans and nobles.
Doing nothing for the soil, how could they do anything for men? Now and then, undoubtedly, especially with farms that pay no rent, the steward writes a letter, alleging the misery of the farmer. There is no doubt, also, that, especially for thirty years back, they desire to be humane; they descant among themselves about the rights of man; the sight of the pale face of a hungry peasant would give them pain. But they never see him; does it ever occur to them to fancy what it is like under the awkward and complimentary phrases of their agent? Moreover, do they know what hunger is? Who amongst them has had any rural experiences? And how could they picture to themselves the misery of this forlorn being? They are too remote from him to that, too ignorant of his mode of life. The portrait they conceive of him is imaginary; never was there a falser representation of the peasant; accordingly the awakening is to be terrible. They view him as the amiable swain, gentle, humble and grateful, simple-hearted and right-minded, easily led, being conceived according to Rousseau and the idylls performed at this very epoch in all private drawing rooms.1341 Lacking a knowledge him they overlook him; they read the steward's letter and immediately the whirl of high life again seizes them and, after a sigh bestowed on the distress of the poor, they make up their minds that their income for the year will be short. A disposition of this kind is not favorable to charity. Accordingly, complaints arise, not against the residents but against the absentees.1342 "The possessions of the Church, says a letter, serve only to nourish the passions of their holders." "According to the canons, says another memorandum, every beneficiary must give a quarter of his income to the poor; nevertheless in our parish there is a revenue of more than twelve thousand livres, and none of it is given to the poor unless it is some small matter at the hands of the curate." "The abbé de Conches gets one-half of the tithes and contributes nothing to the relief of the parish." Elsewhere, "the chapter of Ecouis, which owns the benefice of the tithes is of no advantage to the poor, and only seeks to augment its income." Nearby, the abbé of Croix-Leufroy, "a heavy tithe-owner, and the abbé de Bernay, who gets fifty-seven thousand livres from his benefice, and who is a non-resident, keep all and scarcely give enough to their officiating curates to keep them alive." "I have in my parish, says a curate of Berry,1343 six simple benefices of which the titularies are always absent. They enjoy together an income of nine thousand livres; I sent them in writing the most urgent entreaties during the calamity of the past year; I received from one them two louis only, and most of them did not even answer me." Stronger is the reason for a conviction that in ordinary times they will make no remission of their dues. Moreover, these dues, the censives, the lods et ventes, tithes, and the like, are in the hands of a steward, and he is a good steward who returns a large amount of money. He has no right to be generous at his master's expense, and he is tempted to turn the subjects of his master to his own profit. In vain might the soft seignorial hand be disposed to be easy or paternal; the hard hand of the proxy bears down on the peasants with all its weight, and the caution of a chief gives place to the exactions of a clerk.—How is it then when, instead of a clerk on the domain, a fermier is found, an adjudicator who, for an annual sum, purchases of seignior the management and product of his dues? In election of Mayenne,1344 and certainly also in many others, the principal domains are rented in this way. Moreover there are a number of dues, like the tolls, the market-place tax, that on the flock apart, the monopoly of the oven and of the mill which can scarcely be managed otherwise; the seignior must necessarily employ an adjudicator who spares him the disputes and trouble of collecting.1345 This happens often and the demands and the greed of the contractor, who is determined to gain or, at least, not to lose, falls on the peasantry:
"He is a ravenous wolf," says Renauldon, "let loose on the estate. He draws upon it to the last sou, he crushes the subjects, reduces them to beggary, forces the cultivators to desert. The owner, thus rendered odious, finds himself obliged to tolerate his exactions to able to profit by them."
Imagine, if you can, the evil which a country usurer exercises, armed against them with such burdensome rights; it is the feudal seigniory in the hands of Harpagon, or rather of old Grandet. When, indeed, a tax becomes insupportable we see, by the local complaints, that it is nearly always a fermier who enforces it.1346 It is one of these, acting for a body of canons, who claims Jeanne Mermet's paternal inheritance on the pretense that she had passed her wedding night at her husband's house. One can barely find similar exactions in the Ireland of 1830, on those estates where, the farmer-general renting to sub-farmers and the latter to others still below them. The poor tenant at the foot of the ladder himself bore the full weight of it, so much the more crushed because his creditor, crushed himself measured the requirements he exacted by those he had to submit to.
Suppose that, seeing this abuse of his name, the seignior is desirous of withdrawing the administration of his domains from these mercenary hands. In most cases he is unable to do it: he too deeply in debt, having appropriated to his creditors a certain portion of his land, a certain branch of his income. For centuries, the nobles are involved through their luxury, their prodigality, their carelessness, and through that false sense of honor, which consists in looking upon attention to accounts as the occupation of an accountant. They take pride in their negligence, regarding it, as they say, living nobly.1347 "Monsieur the archbishop," said Louis XVI. to M. de Dillon, "they say that you are in debt, and even largely." "Sire," replied the prelate, with the irony of a grand seignior, "I will ask my intendant and inform Your Majesty." Marshal de Soubise has five hundred thousand livres income, which is not sufficient for him. We know the debts of the Cardinal de Rohan and of the Comte Artois;1348 their millions of income were vainly thrown into this gulf. The Prince de Guémenée happens to become bankrupt on thirty-five millions. The Duke of Orleans, the richest proprietor in the kingdom, owed at his death seventy-four millions. When became necessary to pay the creditors of the emigrants out of the proceeds of their possessions, it was proved that most of the large fortunes were eaten up with mortgages.1349 Readers of the various memoirs know that, for two hundred years, the deficiencies had to be supplied by marriages for money and by the favors of the king.—This explains why, following the king's example, the nobles converted everything into money, and especially the places at their disposition, and, in relaxing authority for profit, why they alienated the last fragment of government remaining in their hands. Everywhere they thus laid aside the venerated character of a chief to put on the odious character of a trafficker. "Not only," says a contemporary,1350 "do they give no pay to their officers of justice, or take them at a discount, but, what is worse, the greater portion of them make a sale of these offices." In spite of the edict of 1693, the judges thus appointed take no steps to be admitted into the royal courts and they take no oaths. "What is the result? Justice, too often administered by knaves, degenerates into brigandage or into a frightful impunity."—Ordinarily the seignior who sells the office on a financial basis, deducts, in addition, the hundredth, the fiftieth, the tenth of the price, when it passes into other hands; and at other times he disposes of the survivorship. He creates these offices and survivorships purposely to sell them. "All the seigniorial courts, say the registers, are infested with a crowd of officials of every description, seigniorial sergeants, mounted and unmounted officers, keepers of the provostship of the funds, guards of the constabulary. It is by no means rare to find as many as ten in an arrondissement which could hardly maintain two if they confined themselves within the limits of their duties." Also "they are at the same time judges, attorneys, fiscal-attorneys, registrars, notaries," each in a different place, each practicing in several seigniories under various titles, all perambulating, all in league like thieves at a fair, and assembling together in the taverns to plan, prosecute and decide. Sometimes the seignior, to economize, confers the title on one of his own dependents: "At Hautemont, in Hainaut, the fiscal-attorney is a domestic." More frequently he nominates some starveling advocate of a petty village in the neighborhood on wages which would not suffice to keep him alive a week." He indemnifies himself out of the peasants. Processes of chicanery, delays and willful complications in the proceedings, sittings at three livres the hour for the advocate and three livres the hour for the bailiff. The black brood of judicial leeches suck so much the more eagerly, because the more numerous, a still more scrawny prey, having paid for the privilege of sucking it.1351 The arbitrariness, the corruption, the laxity of such a régime can be divined. "Impunity," says Renauldon, "is nowhere greater than in the seigniorial tribunals. . . . The foulest crimes obtain no consideration there," for the seignior dreads supplying the means for a criminal trial, while his judges or prosecuting attorneys fear that they will not be paid for their proceedings. Moreover, his jail is often a cellar under the chateau; "there is not one tribunal out of a hundred in conformity with the law in respect of prisons;" their keepers shut their eyes or stretch out their hands. Hence it is that "his estates become the refuge of all the scoundrels in the canton." The effect of his indifference is terrible and it is to react against him: to-morrow, at the club, the attorneys whom he has multiplied will demand his head, and the bandits whom he has tolerated will place it on the end of a pike.
One-point remains, the chase, wherein the noble's jurisdiction is still active and severe, and it is just the point which is found the most offensive. Formerly, when one-half of the canton consisted of forest, or waste land, while the other half was being ravaged by wild beasts, he was justified in reserving the right to hunt them; it entered into his function as local captain. He was the hereditary gendarme, always armed, always on horseback, as well against wild boars and wolves as against rovers and brigands. Now that nothing is left to him of the gendarme but the title and the epaulettes he maintains his privilege through tradition, thus converting a service into an annoyance. Hunt he must, and he alone must hunt; it is a physical necessity and, it the same time, a sign of his blood. A Rohan, a Dillon, chases the stag although belonging to the church, in spite of edicts and in spite of the canons. "You hunt too much," said Louis XV.1352 to the latter; "I know something about it. How can you prohibit your curates from hunting if you pass your life in setting them such an example?—Sire, for my curates the chase is a fault, for myself it is the fault of my ancestors." When the vanity and arrogance of caste thus mounts guard over a right it is with obstinate vigilance. Accordingly, their captains of the chase, their game-keepers, their wood-rangers, their forest-wardens protect brutes as if they were men, and hunt men as if they were brutes. In the bailiwick of Pont-l'Evèque in 1789 four instances are cited "of recent assassinations committed by the game-keepers of Mme. d'A——,—Mme. N——, a prelate and a marshal of France, on commoners caught breaking the game laws or carrying guns. All four publicly escape punishment." In Artois, a parish makes declaration that "on the lands of the Chattellany the game devours all the avêtis (pine saplings) and that the growers of them will be obliged to abandon their business." Not far off; at Rumancourt, at Bellone, "the hares, rabbits and partridges entirely devour them, Count d'Oisy never hunting nor having hunts." In twenty villages in the neighborhood around Oisy where he hunts it is on horseback and across the crops. "His game-keepers, always armed, have killed several persons under the pretense of watching over their master's rights. . . . The game, which greatly exceeds that of the royal captaincies, consumes annually all prospects of a crop, twenty thousand razières of wheat and as many of other grains." In the bailiwick of Evreux "the game has just destroyed everything up to the very houses. . . . On account of the game the citizen is not free to pull up the weeds in summer which clog the grain and injure the seed sown. . . . How many women are there without husbands, and children without fathers, on account of a poor hare or rabbit!" The game-keepers of the forest of Gouffray in Normandy "are so terrible that they maltreat, insult and kill men. . . . I know of farmers who, having pleaded against the lady to be indemnified for the loss of their wheat, not only lost their time but their crops and the expenses of the trial. . . . Stags and deer are seen roving around our houses in open daylight." In the bailiwick of Domfront, "the inhabitants of more than ten parishes are obliged to watch all night for more than six months of the year to secure their crops.1353—This is the effect of the right of the chase in the provinces. It is, however, in the Ile-de-France, where captaincies abound, and become more extensive, that the spectacle is most lamentable. A procés-verbal shows that in the single parish of Vaux, near Meulan, the rabbits of warrens in the vicinity ravage eight hundred cultivated arpents (acres) of ground and destroy the crops of two thousand four hundred setiers (three acres each), that is to say, the annual supplies of eight hundred persons. Near that place, at la Rochette, herds of deer and of stags devour everything in the fields during the day, and, at night, they even invade the small gardens of the inhabitants to consume vegetables and to break down young trees. It is found impossible in a territory subjected to a captaincy to retain vegetables safe in gardens, enclosed by high walls. At Farcy, of five hundred peach trees planted in a vineyard and browsed on by stags, only twenty remain at the end of three years. Over the whole territory of Fontainebleau, the communities, to save their vines, are obliged to maintain, with the assent always of the captaincy, a gang of watchmen who, with licensed dogs, keep watch and make a hubbub all night from the first of May to the middle of October. At Chartrettes the deer cross the Seine, approach the doors of the Comtesse de Larochefoucauld and destroy entire plantations of poplars. A domain rented for two thousand livres brings in only four hundred after the establishment of the captaincy of Versailles. In short, eleven regiments of an enemy's cavalry, quartered on the eleven captaincies near the capital, and starting out daily to forage, could not do more mischief.—We need not be surprised if, in the neighborhood of these lairs, the people become weary of cultivating.1354 Near Fontainebleau and Melun, at Bois-le-Roi, three-quarters of the ground remains waste. Almost all the houses in Brolle are in ruins, only half-crumbling gables being visible; at Coutilles and at Chapelle-Rablay, five farms are abandoned; at Arbonne, numerous fields are neglected. At Villiers, and at Dame-Marie, where there were four farming companies and a number of special cultures, eight hundred arpents remain untilled.—Strange to say, as the century becomes more easygoing the enforcement of the chase becomes increasingly harsh. The officers of the captaincy are zealous because they labor under the eye and for the "pleasures" of their master. In 1789, eight hundred preserves had just been planted in one single canton of the captaincy of Fontainebleau, and in spite of the proprietors of the soil. According to the regulations of 1762 every private individual domiciled on the reservation of a captaincy is forbidden from enclosing his homestead or any ground whatever with hedges or ditches, or walls without a special permit.1355 In case of a permit being given he must leave a wide, open and continuous space in order to let the huntsmen easily pass through. He is not allowed to keep any ferret, any fire-arm, any instrument adapted to the chase, nor to be followed by any dog even if not adapted to it, except the dog be held by a leash or clog fastened around its neck. And better still. He is forbidden to reap his meadow or his Lucerne before St. John's day, to enter his own field between the first of May and the twenty-fourth of June, to visit any island in the Seine, to cut grass on it or osiers, even if the grass and osiers belong to him. The reason is, that now the partridge is hatching and the legislator protects it; he would take less pains for a woman in confinement; the old chroniclers would say of him, as with William Rufus, that his bowels are paternal only for animals. Now, in France, four hundred square leagues of territory are subject to the control of the captaincies,1356 and, over all France, game, large or small, is the tyrant of the peasant. We may conclude, or rather listen to the people's conclusion. "Every time," says M. Montlosier, in 1789,1357 "that I chanced to encounter herds of deer or does on my road my guides immediately shouted: 'Make room for the gentry!' in this way alluding to the ravages committed by them on their land." Accordingly, in the eyes of their subjects, they are wild animals.—This shows to what privileges can lead when divorced from duties. In this manner an obligation to protect degenerates into a right of devastation. Thus do humane and rational beings act, unconsciously, like irrational and inhuman beings. Divorced from the people they misuse them; nominal chiefs, they have unlearned the function of an effective chief; having lost all public character they abate nothing of their private advantages. So much the worse for the canton, and so much worse for themselves. The thirty or forty poachers whom they prosecute to day on their estates will march to-morrow to attack their chateaux at the head of an insurrection. The absence of the masters, the apathy of the provinces, the bad state of cultivation, the exactions of agents, the corruption of the tribunals, the vexations of the captaincies, indolence, the indebtedness and exigencies of the seignior, desertion, misery, the brutality and hostility of vassals, all proceeds from the same cause and terminates in the same effect.
When sovereignty becomes transformed into a sinecure it becomes burdensome without being useful, and on becoming burdensome without being useful it is overthrown.
1301 (return)
[ Beugnot, "Mémoires," V. I. p.292.—De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution."]
1302 (return)
[ Arthur Young, "Travels in France," II. 456. In France, he says, it is from the eleventh to the thirty-second. "But nothing is known like the enormities committed in England where the tenth is really taken."]
1303 (return)
[ Saint-Simon, "Mémoires," ed. Chéruel, vol. I.—Lucas de Montigny, "Mémoires de Mirabeau," I. 53-182.—Marshal Marmont, "Mémoires," I. 9, 11.—Châteaubriand, "Mémoires," I. 17. De Montlosier, "Mémoires," 2 vol. passim.—Mme. de Larochejacquelein, "Souvenirs," passim. Many details concerning the types of the old nobility will be found in these passages. They are truly and forcibly depicted in two novels by Balzac in "Beatrix," (the Baron de Guénic) and in the "Cabinet des Antiques," (the Marquis d' Esgrignon).]
1304 (return)
[ A letter of the bailiff of Mirabeau, 1760, published by M. de Loménie in the "Correspondant," V. 49, p.132.]
1305 (return)
[ Mme. de Larochejacquelein, ibid. I. 84. "As M. de Marigny had some knowledge of the veterinary art the peasants of the canton came after him when they had sick animals."]
1306 (return)
[ Marquis de Mirabeau, "Traité de la Population," p. 57.]
1307 (return)
[ De Tocqueville, ibid. p.180. This is proved by the registers of the capitation-tax which was paid at the actual domicile.]
1308 (return)
[ Renauldon, ibid.., Preface p. 5.—Anne Plumptre, "A narrative of three years residence in France from 1802 to 1805." II. 357.—Baroness Oberkirk, "Mémoires," II. 389.—"De l'état religieux," by the abbés Bonnefoi and Bernard, 1784, p. 295.—Mme.Vigée-Lébrun, "Souvenirs," p.171.]
1309 (return)
[ Archives nationales, D, XIX. portfolios 14, 15, 25. Five bundles of papers are filled with these petitions.]
1310 (return)
[ Ibid. D, XIX. portfolio 11. An admirable letter by Joseph of Saintignon, abbé of Domiévre, general of the regular canons of Saint-Sauveur and a resident. He has 23,000 livres income, of which 6,066 livres is a pension from the government, in recompense for his services. His personal expenditure not being over 5,000 livres "he is in a situation to distribute among the poor and the workmen, in the space of eleven years, more than 250,000 livres."]
1311 (return)
[ On the conduct and sentiments of lay and ecclesiastical seigniors cf. Léonce de Lavergne, "Les Assemblées provinciales," I vol. Legrand, "L'intendance du Hainaut," I vol. Hippeau, "Le Gouvernement de Normandie," 9 vols.]
1312 (return)
[ "The most active sympathy filled their breasts; that which an opulent man most dreaded was to be regarded as insensible." (Lacretelle, vol. V. p. 2.)]
1313 (return)
[ Floquet, "Histoire du Parlement de Normandie," vol. VI. p.696. In 1772 twenty-five gentlemen and imprisoned or exiled for having signed a protest against the orders of the court.]
1314 (return)
[ De Tocqueville, ibid. pp. 39, 56, 75, 119, 184. He has developed this point with admirable force and insight.]
1315 (return)
[ De Tocqueville, ibid. p.376. Complaints of the provincial assembly of Haute-Guyenne. "People complain daily that there is no police in the rural districts. How could there be one? The nobles takes no interest in anything, excepting a few just and benevolent seigniors who take advantage of their influence with vassals to prevent affrays."]
1316 (return)
[ Records of the States-General of 1789. Many of the registers of the noblesse consist of the requests by nobles, men and women, of some honorary distinctive mark, for instance a cross or a ribbon which will make them recognizable.]
1317 (return)
[ De Boullé, "Mémoires," p.50.—De Toqueville, ibid.. pp. 118, 119.—De Loménie, "Les Mirabeau," p. 132. A letter of the bailiff of Mirabeau, 1760.—De Châteaubriand, Mémoires," I. 14, 15, 29, 76, 80, 125.—Lucas de Montigny, "Mémoires de Mirabeau," I. 160.—Reports of the Société du Berry. "Bourges en 1753 et 1754," according to a diary (in the national archives), written by one of the exiled parliamentarians, p. 273.]
1318 (return)
[ "La vie de mon père," by Rétif de la Bretonne, I. 146.]
1319 (return)
[ The rule is analogous with the other coutumes (common-law rules), of other places and especially in Paris. (Renauldon, ibid.. p. 134.)]
1320 (return)
[ A sort of dower right. TR.]
1321 (return)
[ Mme. d'Oberkirk, "Mémoires," I. 395.]
1322 (return)
[ De Bouillé, "Mémoires," p. 50. According to him, "all the noble old families, excepting two or three hundred, were ruined. A larger portion of the great titled estates had become the appanage of financiers, merchants and their descendants. The fiefs, for the most part, were in the hands of the bourgeoisie of the towns."—Léonce de Lavergne, "Economie rurale en France," p. 26. "The greatest number vegetated in poverty in small country fiefs often not worth more than 2,000 or 3,000 francs a year."—In the apportionment of the indemnity in 1825, many received less than 1,000 francs. The greater number of indemnities do not exceed 50,000 francs.—"The throne," says Mirabeau, "is surrounded only by ruined nobles."]
1323 (return)
[ De Bouillé, "Memoires," p. 50.—Cherin, "Abrégé chronologique des édits" (1788). "Of this innumerable multitude composing the privileged order scarcely a twentieth part of it can really pretend to nobility of an immemorial and ancient date."—4,070 financial, administrative, and judicial offices conferred nobility.—Turgot, "Collection des Economistes," II. 276. "Through the facilities for acquiring nobility by means of money there is no rich man who does not at once become noble."—D'Argenson, "Mémoires," III. 402.]
1324 (return)
[ Necker, "De l'Administration des Finances," II. 271. Legrand, "L'Intendance de Hainaut," pp. 104, 118, 152, 412.]
1325 (return)
[ Even after the exchange of 1784, the prince retains for himself "all personal impositions as well as subventions on the inhabitants," except a sum of 6,000 livres for roads. Archives Nationales, G, 192, a memorandum of April 14th, 1781, on the state of things in the Clermontois.—Report of the provincial assembly of the Three Bishoprics (1787), p. 380.]
1326 (return)
[ The town of St. Amand, alone, contains to day 10,210 inhabitants.]
1327 (return)
[ See note 3 at the end of the volume.]
1328 (return)
[ De Ferrières, "Mémoires," II. 57: "All had 100,000 some 200, 300, and even 800,000."]
1329 (return)
[ De Tocqueville, ibid.. book 2, Chap. 2. p.182.—Letter of the bailiff of Mirabau, August 23, 1770. "This feudal order was merely vigorous, even though they have pronounced it barbarous, because France, which once had the vices of strength, now has only those of feebleness, and because the flock which was formerly devoured by wolves is now eaten up with lice. . . . Three or four kicks or blows with a stick were not half so injurious to a poor man's family, nor to himself, as being devoured by six rolls of handwriting."—"The nobility," says St. Simon, in his day, "has become another people with no choice left it but to crouch down in mortal and ruinous indolence, which renders it a burden and contemptible, or to go and be killed in warfare; subject to the insults of clerks, secretaries of the state and the secretaries of intendants." Such are the complaints of feudal spirits.—The details which follow are all derived from Saint Simon, Dangeau, de Luynes, d'Argenson and other court historians.]
1330 (return)
[ Works of Louis XIV. and his own words.—Mme Vigée-Lebrun, "Souvenirs," I.71: "I have seen the queen (Marie Antoinette), obliging Madame to dine, then six years of age, with a little peasant girl whom she was taking care of, and insisting that this little one should be served first, saying to her daughter: 'You must do the honors.'" (Madame is the title given to the king's oldest daughter. SR.)]
1331 (return)
[ Molière, "Misanthrope." This is the "desert" in which Célimène refuses to be buried with Alceste. See also in "Tartuffe" the picture which Dorine draws of a small town.—Arthur Young," Voyages en France," I. 78.]
1332 (return)
[ 'Traité de la Population,' p. 108, (1756).]
1333 (return)
[ I have this from old people who witnessed it before 1789.]
1334 (return)
[ "Mémoires" de M. de Montlosier," I. p. 161,.]
1335 (return)
[ Reports of the Société de Berry, "Bourges en 1753 et 1754," p. 273.]
1336 (return)
[ Ibid.. p. 271. One day the cardinal, showing his guests over his palace just completed, led them to the bottom of a corridor where he had placed water closets, at that time a novelty. M. Boutin de la Coulommière, the son of a receiver-general of the finances, made an exclamation at the sight of the ingenious mechanism which it pleased him to see moving, and, turning towards the abbé de Canillac, he says: "That is really admirable, but what seems to me still more admirable is that His Eminence, being above all human weakness, should condescend to make use of it." This anecdote is valuable, as it serves to illustrate the rank and position of a grand-seignior prelate in the provinces.]
1337 (return)
[ Arthur Young, V.II. P.230 and the following pages.]
1338 (return)
[ Abolition of the tithe, the feudal rights, the permission to kill the game, etc.]
1339 (return)
[ De Loménie, "Les Mirabeau," p.134. A letter of the bailiff, September 25, 1760: "I am at Harcourt, where I admire the master's honest, benevolent greatness. You cannot imagine my pleasure on fête days at seeing the people everywhere around the château, and the good little peasant boys and girls looking right in the face of their good landlord and almost pulling his watch off to examine the trinkets on the chain, and all with a fraternal air; without familiarity. The good duke does not make his vassals to go to court; he listens to them and decides for them, humoring them with admirable patience." Lacretelle, "Dix ans d'épreuve," p. 58.]
1340 (return)
[ "De l'état religieux," by the abbés de Bonnefoi et Bernard, 1784, I. pp. 287, 291.]
1341 (return)
[ See on this subject "La partie de chasse de Henri IV" by Collé. Cf. Berquin, Florian, Marmontel, etc, and likewise the engravings of that day.]
1342 (return)
[ Boivin-Champeaux, "Notice historique sue la Révolution dans le département de l'Eure," p. 63, 61.]
1343 (return)
[ Archives nationales, Reports of the States-General of 1789, T, XXXIX., p. 111. Letter of the 6th March, 1789, from the curate of St. Pierre de Ponsigny, in Berry. D'Argenson, 6th July, 1756. "The late cardinal de Soubise had three millions in cash and he gave nothing to the poor."]
1344 (return)
[ De Tocqueville, ibid.. 405.—Renauldon, ibid.. 628.]
1345 (return)
[ The example is set by the king who sells to the farmer-generals, for an annual sum, the management and product of the principal indirect taxes.]
1346 (return)
[ Voltaire, "Politique et Législation, La voix du Curé," (in relation to the serfs of St. Claude).—A speech of the Duke d'Aiguillon, August 4th, 1789, in the National Assembly: "The proprietors of fiefs, of seigniorial estates, are rarely guilty of the excesses of which their vassals complain; but their agents are often pitiless."]
1347 (return)
[ Beugnot. "Mémoires," V. I. p.136.—Duc de Lévis, "Souvenirs et portraits," p. 156.—"Moniteur," the session of November 22, 1872, M. Bocher says: "According to the statement drawn up by order of the Convention the Duke of Orleans's fortune consisted of 74,000,000 of indebtedness and 140,000,000 of assets." On the 8th January, 1792, he had assigned to his creditors 38,000,000 to obtain his discharge.]
1348 (return)
[ King Louis the XVI's brother. (SR.)]
1349 (return)
[ In 1785, the Duke de Choiseul In his testament estimated his property at fourteen millions and his debts at ten millions. (Comte de Tilly, "Mémoires," II. 215.)]
1350 (return)
[ Renauldon, ibid.. 45, 52, 628.—Duvergier, "Collection des Lois," II. 391; law of August 31;—October 18, 1792.—Statements (cahier) of grievances of a magistrate of the Chatelet on seigniorial courts (1789), p. 29.—Legrand, "l'Intendance du Hainaut," p.119.]
1351 (return)
[ Archives Nationales, H, 654 ("Mémoire" by René de Hauteville, advocate to the Parliament, Saint-Brieuc, October 5, 1776.) In Brittany the number of seigniorial courts is immense, the pleaders being obliged to pass through four or five jurisdictions before reaching the Parliament. "Where is justice rendered? In the cabaret, in the tavern, where, amidst drunkards and riff-raff, the judge sells justice to whoever pays the most for it."]
1352 (return)
[ Beugnot, "Mémoires," vol. I. p. 35.]
1353 (return)
[ Boivin-Champeaux, ibid.. 48.—Renauldon, 26, 416.—Manuscript reports of the States-general (Archives nationales), t. CXXXII. pp. 896 and 901.—Hippeau, "Le Gouvernement de Normandie," VII. 61, 74.—Paris, "La Jeunesse de Robespierre," pp.314-324.—"Essai sur les capitaineries royales et autres," (1789) passim.—De Loménie, "Beaumarchais et son emps," I. 125. Beaumarchais having purchased the office of lieutenant-general of the chase in the bailiwicks of the Louvre warren (twelve to fifteen leagues in circumference. approx. 60 km. SR.) tries delinquents under this title. July 15th, 1766, he sentences Ragondet, a farmer to a fine of one hundred livres together with the demolition of the walls around an enclosure, also of his shed newly built without license, as tending to restrict the pleasures of the king.]
1354 (return)
[ Marquis D'Argenson, "Mémoires," ed. Rathery, January 27, 1757. "The sieur de Montmorin, captain of the game-preserves of Fontainebleau, derives from his office enormous sums, and behaves himself like a bandit. The population of more than a hundred villages around no longer sow their land, the fruits and grain being eaten by deer; stags and other game. They keep only a few vines, which they preserve six months of the year by mounting guard day and night with drums, making a general turmoil to frighten off the destructive animals." January 23, 1753.—"M. le Prince de Conti has established a captainry of eleven leagues around Ile-Adam and where everybody is vexed at it." September 23, 1753.—M. le Duc d'Orléans came to Villers-Cotterets, he has revived the captainry; there are more than sixty places for sale on account of these princely annoyances.]
1355 (return)
[ The old peasants with whom I once have talked still had a clear memory of these annoyances and damages.—They recounted how, in the country around Clermont, the gamekeepers of Prince de Condé in the springtime took litters of wolves and raised them in the dry moats of the chateau. They were freed in the beginning of the winter, and the wolf hunting team would then hunt them later. But they ate the sheep, and, here and there, a child.]
1356 (return)
[ The estates of the king encompassed in forest one million acres, not counting forests in the appanages set aside for his eldest son or for factories or salt works.]
1357 (return)
[ De Montlosier, "Mémoires," I. 175.]
