The very power that the king was putting into the hands of the middle class to serve as a foil against the ambitions of the princes and nobles, while it served his day, built up a re sistance on the part of the masses against which royal autocracy was pitiably powerless when the great test came in 1789; for the mid dle classes had got rich and ambitious and were strongly imbued with the idea of protecting themselves and their own interests and property from exactions on the part of the nobles and the sovereign. The sum of the national intelligence had risen enormously during the reign of Louis XIV and with it the power of national resist ance had increased proportionately. The very organization that the king had given to liter ature, with Colbert as Minister, in order to control it, gave it a dignity and influence that it had never before possessed and enabled it to reach the great and growing middle class. The boldness of the writers and thinkers of the age presaged the coming revolution. Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine, Voltaire were names that were on every one's tongue. They attacked the vices and follies of their age and respected only what their royal patron wished respected. Thus, in the reign of the most absolute of all French monarchs, the leaven of democracy was industriously working; and the independence of thought shown by the great writers of the court was interpreted by each community and each separate interest in its own way and from its own point of view; so that, when the climax of the great drama came, the French intelli gence had been quickened to a point perhaps greater than that of any other nation in Europe. This explains the sudden and ceaseless activity of the French people following the fall of the Bastile and the brilliant organization, innova tions in government and sociology and masterly strategy in war with which they astonished the whole civilized world. • All this was the legitimate result of that spirit of inquiry which began early in the reign of Louis XIV and continued with increasing impetus throughout the reigns of his successors. It was during this long period that was born the eager, earnest, venturesome, serious, witty, sympathetic France such as we know her to-day; for the autocratic sovereigns of the French people were working better than they knew or suspected.
The Struggle with Autocracy.— The death of Louis XIV left as heir to the French throne a boy of only five years of age, and the regen cies and ministers of his minority worked to gether unconsciously to discredit the system of autocracy which the late sovereign had built up during his long reign. The dignity and regal splendor of the court gradually disap peared and cynicism, debauchery, frivolity and reckless extravagance took their place. Pleas ure of the worst kind became the great god of the French court and of the nobility;, and this evil permeated the body of the ever-increas ing wealthy middle class. The debt of the court and the nation increased by bounds. The autocratic judicial system which Louis XIV had attempted to force upon the nation had worked as all artificial systems are apt to work; but in this case the effects were especially bad be cause the system was disorganized, disjointed and ineffective owing to a bewildering diversity of laws and customs which still held sway over France. In fact autocracy in the i administra tion of the law was only a name in so far as any intelligent sovereign direction or adminis tration was concerned. None of the officers of the law were paid by the sovereign and they were forced to help themselves as best they could. The French courts, as a result, became known as the °halls of robbery." Over 300 different customs or series of local law codes were in use in France at this time. Hence the whole nation, with the exception of the sovereign and the nobility, groaned under this burden of legal injustice and oppression, which had made the securing of justice the most ex pensive thing in France. Corruption became so great in every branch of the royal and court service that only a comparatively small part of the money extorted from the public in the way of taxes, fees and fines ever reached the royal treasury, though the odium of the system rested upon the Crown which had farmed out the collection of its revenue. The revenue farm
ers got their concessions through favorite cour tiers and powerful nobles. Thus courtiers, nobles and revenue farmers grew rich at the expense of the taxpayers, who consisted of the middle class, since the lower class was too poor to pay anything and the nobility and the clergy found means to avoid contributing to the purse of the nation and the court.
The Church itself was in a position which tended to divide it against itself ; for the upper clergy alone profited by the exemption from taxes, the control of a large part of the land of the country and special privileges extended to the Church by the court. The lower clergy were miserably poor, all the lucrative and hon orable offices in the Church being almost alto gether in the hands of the nobility or sons of rich middle class families who had wealth enough to pay for special privileges and digni ties.. Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, France was in reality divided into two nations which had nothing in common with one an other, the possessors and the dispossessed. So great had become the gulf dividing these two classes; so heavy the burden and so grievous the condition of the dispossessed, that it was only a question of time when the slumbering fires that burned in the subterranean depths of the nation should burst forth into volcanic passion. This discontent of the masses was increased on account of the burdens and inter ference under which industry and commerce groaned and the restrictions placed upon the right to work at whatever trade or occupation one wished to. The possession of nearly all the land of the country by the Crown, the nobles and the clergy and the excessive taxes on all rented land had led to the rapid de cline of agriculture and to the consequently increased poverty of the agricultural popula tion and the control of agricultural products by a few unprincipled jobbers working in the interests of a handful of nobles with special privileges from the court, ruined the peasant farmers and frequently brought on want in a land of plenty. This general misery of the masses and exploitation of the industrious middle classes soon began to have its influence upon the court and the government which were unable to obtain money enough to meet the growing expenses of the administration of the affairs of the nation and the increasing robbery of the public treasury. Finally, in 1787, the court, to avoid calling together the States General, through which alone the national purse could be reached, finally compromised matters by calling an Assembly of the Notables, who were more inclined to look after their own interests than to help the court out of its financial troubles. Brienne, the Minister of the Crown, won over the Parliament to his ends by promising to call together the States-General (1788) ; and this was actually done the follow ing year by his successor, Necker, because of the financial troubles of the government. But, in the meantime, the whole interest of the nation had become centred in the meeting of this the only representative body of the whole French people. The States-General met in 1789, under very different conditions from what it had assembled in the past; for now the Third Estate, as the representative body of the non nobles was called, had become the representative of a rich and powerful section of the country which had been paying the bills of the nation for many years. The interest of the masses in their representatives, as the members of the Third Estate were called, increased from hour to hour. Clubs of many kinds were formed in Paris and all the more important towns of the country to further the interests of the middle classes. These were the forerunners of the democratic and revolutionary clubs that became so notable after the fall of the Bastile. The public unrest found a leader in Mirabeau, a brilliant orator and man of initiative, force of will and character, who was trusted by the people, notwithstanding his noble birth, because of the determined stand he had taken in their behalf. He went about the country stirring the people, by his fervid eloquence, to action in defense of their rights.