A.D. 1789.]

'The very earliest even of these states-general took place only in 1302; and then, instead of having their separate houses, like our parliament, they all sate together, thus giving the two orders of the nobility and clergy the prevalence over the commons. Still the commons did not omit to seize favourable opportunities to demand redress of grievances, and the concession of just rights; but they never displayed the solid and temperate spirit of the English commons, which would have enabled them to gain permanently their object; but they fell to butchering and massacreing the upper classes, and continually lost everything again.

Thus, when the dauphin, after the battle of Poictiers, which left king John a prisoner in the hands of the English, called the states-general together to demand moneys for the ransom of his father, and for the relief of the humbled government, the states demanded a full redress of grievances before granting the supplies. These must have been conceded, and the grievances were enormous; but the states fell to quarrelling and massacreing each other, and the dauphin was compelled to dismiss them. In dismissing them, however, he could not dismiss his necessities; and, on calling them together in the spring of 1357, the demands were renewed and complied with. But, as was the case in the great revolution which we are about to narrate, this excitable people did not know where to stop. Instead of being satisfied with its proper advantages, its leaders in the states, Stephen Marcel, the Prevôt des Marchands, and Robert le Coq, made the most unwarrantable attempts on the rights of the nobles and of the crown. These were resisted, and led to the most sanguinary massacres and conflicts. Marcel formed a league with the king of Navarre, who would fain have snatched the government from his brother-in-law, the dauphin, murdered two of the courtiers in the very presence of the dauphin, and, seizing the person of the dauphin, exhibited him as a prisoner to the exulting mob of Paris. Marcel took possession of the palace of the Louvre, but was soon after butchered himself; and these events introduced that terrible condition of anarchy called the Jacquerie, in which the people, both in town and country, rose against the upper classes, and massacred their lords and their families with unheard of atrocities, burnt their mansions, and ravaged their estates, in their turn to be attacked, hunted down, and exterminated by the aristocracy.

Similar scenes were enacted in 1380, twenty-two years later, when Charles VI. was a minor, and his uncles called together the states-general. The same demands of redress were made, and in part conceded; but the same bloody fury again possessed them, and the Maillotins, or Malleters, of Paris, who beat out people's brains with wooden clubs; and the Tuchins, or peasants, in the country, committed the most frightful massacres. Again in 1413, the statesgeneral being called together when Charles VI. was afflicted with insanity, the people, instead of securing their privileges by firmness and wisdom, broke out under Catoche, a butcher; and, under the name of Catochiens, insisted, amidst blood and rapine, on domineering over the aristocracy and crown. The country, at the same time, was rent to pieces by the factions of the Bourguignons and Armagnacs; and, such was the general anarchy and horror, that our Henry V.

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justified his invasion of France by exclaiming, "God has led me hither by the hand to punish the sins of this land, and to reign in it like a king. There is now no king, no government, no law in France!"

Charles VIII., in 1483, assembled the states-general at Tours, and there introduced the innovation of resolving the three orders, not into three chambers, but into six nations, according to the original nations of Old France. In these nations, however, the three orders continued to sit together. In 1558 Henry II. introduced a fourth estate into the statesgeneral, called L'Etat de la Justice, the members of it con sisting of the chief magistracy of the country. The last time that a states-general was convened previous to that of 1789, was by Louis XIII.; but this monarch took care that the people should derive no benefit from their assembling. The moment they prepared to present demands of reform, he dismissed them, and Louis XIV. never called them together at all. He declared, "L'etat c'est moi!" "I am the state;" and he and his successors ruled as they pleased, only making a show of consulting parliaments.

These parliaments-which appear only first to have been introduced by Louis IX., in the thirteenth century— did not include a representation of the people at all. The members were merely summoned by the crown at its own dictation and discretion, and were originally almost entirely selected from the clergy. By degrees, the clergy gave way to lawyers, and the parlement was, in fact, merely a more extensive royal council, the chief business of which was to register the royal decrees. Some of these decrees were amongst the most disgraceful facts in French history. The parliament of Paris registered the edict establishing the inquisition, and those which condemned to death, as Protestants, Anne du Bourg and admiral Coligny, which sanctioned the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and the massacre of St. Bartholemew. When a weak monarch or a woman was at the head of government, these parliaments often became very presuming and refractory, and then what were called lits de justice and séances royales were resorted to, in order to compel them to obedience. special visitations of the parliaments by the sovereign, attended by the princes of the blood, the peers of the realm, and the chief of the clergy, including cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, besides the great officers of the state-altogether a great and imposing train-supported by whom, the king compelled the parliament to register the decrees which he had submitted to them. Such monarchs as Louis XIV., however, had no need of lits de justice—his word was enough; and, on one occasion, hearing, whilst hunting at Vincennes, that the parliament hesitated to register some edict or other, he rode off to Paris, and, entering their chamber in his boots and spurs, and with his hunting-dress on, and his hunting-knife at his side, put an end to their deliberations. Louis XV., who had not the vigour of his predecessor, was compelled twice to banish them; but Louis XVI. recalled them, and found them tolerably submissive till 1785.

There were

Besides the states-general of Paris and the parliament of Paris, there were also provincial states-general and provincial parliaments; and there was also what was called the assembly of notables. This body was only called together on rare occasions, in crises of particular embarrassment,

They were, as the name implies, "men of note" and distinction for rank, ability, and wisdom, who were called together as a temporary council, to offer their advice to the crown, but possessing no legislative or executive functions. Such an assembly appears only to have been summoned from time to time in the history of France, previously to 1789namely, in 1558 and 1596, in 1617 and 1626. This concise sketch of the legislative and governmental institutions of France may enable the reader to comprehend the events which were now taking place in 1789.

The reigning monarch, Louis XVI., was a very amiable and well-disposed monarch, weak and yielding in character, but who, under a constitution like that of England, might have lived and died a beloved and popular prince. He was of a domestic and unambitious character, fond of mechanic arts, and an excellent locksmith, but by no means understanding how to restore the disordered mechanism of his government and kingdom. He had married Marie Antoinette, the daughter of the great Maria Theresa of Austria, and sister to Joseph II., a princess of great beauty and accomplishments, of most engaging manners, but with a love of gaiety and pleasure which, amid a people suffering the intensest misery, led to suspicions of her virtue, which were, there is every reason to believe, most unfounded, but, at that crisis, most fatal.

Louis XVI. had inherited a kingdom crushed under the maladministrations, the corruptions, and the wild military ambition of ages. The people, possessing no real voice in the legislature, and incapable, from their ignorance and impetuosity, of prudently obtaining one when circumstances put it within their reach, were reduced to a condition of wretchedness and demoralisation inconceivable. No man had done more to produce this result than Louis XIV., Le Grande Monarque, as the French, in their foolish vanity, delighted to style him. By endeavouring to exterminate protestantism, not only in France but throughout Europe, and surrounded only by cardinals and priests, he had driven from his own territories and from the Netherlands thousands of weavers and other artificers, with their trades, to increase the wealth and glory of free England. He had involved himself in wars with England, Holland, and Germany, which for awhile were successful, and witnessed with acclamation by his people, but which, through the exertions of William of Orange, of Marlborough, and Eugène, eventually overwhelmed France with ruin, poverty, and misery incalculable. This heritage of woe descended to his successors, and was only increased by the crimes and follies of the profligate regent Orleans and the feeble sway of Louis XV. It went down with a tenfold force from the moral depravity and mental darkness which Le Grand Monarque had perpetuated by his suppression of all freedom of religious inquiry. We have had to relate the terrible dragonades by which he sought to massacre the whole race of protestants, under the name of Huguenots, and especially his frightful extermination of the Cevennois, whom, for years, he pursued with sixty thousand soldiers, under the command of Marshal Villars and others of his ablest generals. Had protestantism been permitted to take its natural course, it would undoubtedly so have enlightened, ennobled, and tempered the French people, that no such

scene of diabolical fury and carnage as the Revolution of 1789 could ever have taken place. But all real and active religious inquiry and influence were crushed. There remained a nominal hierarchy, administering the outward rites of the Romish church, but perpetuating the moral darkness of the people as a system. The nobility and the clergy possessed all the property, and power, and privilege in the country, and the people sank lower and lower in indigence and vice, till it was clear that nothing but some terrific tempest of human passion and vengeance could clear the land of its miseries and tyrannies.

Thiers has presented us with the following picture of the condition of France at the commencement of the great crisis:-"This condition, both political and economical. was intolerable. There was nothing but privilege-privileges invested in individuals, in classes, in towns, in provinces, and even in trades and professions. Everything contributed to check industry and the natural genius of man. All the dignities of the state, civil, ecclesiastical, and military, were exclusively reserved to certain classes, and in those classes to certain individuals. No man could take up a profession without certain titles and a compliance with certain pecuniary conditions. Even the graces and favours of the crown were converted into family property, so that the king could scarcely exercise his own judgment, or give any preference. Almost the only liberty left to the sovereign was that of making pecuniary gifts; and he had been reduced to the necessity of disputing with the duke of Coigny for the abolition of a useless place. Everything, then, was made immovable property in the hands of a few, and everywhere these few resisted the many who had been despoiled. The burdens of the state weighed on one class only. The noblesse and the clergy possessed about two-thirds of the landed property; the other third, possessed by the people, paid taxes to the king, a long list of feudal droits to the noblesse, tithes to the clergy, and had, moreover, to support the devastations committed by the noble sportsmen and by their game. The taxes upon consumption pressed upon the great multitude, and consequently upon the people. The collection of these imposts was managed in an unfair and irritating manner; the seigneurs, or lords of the soil, left long arrears with impunity; but the people, upon any delay in paying, were harshly treated, arrested, and condemned to pay in their persons, in default of money or produce. The people, therefore, nourished with their labour and defended with their blood the higher classes of society, without being able to procure a comfortable subsistence for themselves. The bourgeoisie, or towns-people, or body of citizens, industrious, educated, less miserable than the people, could, nevertheless, obtain none of the advantages to which they had a right to aspire, seeing it was their industry that enriched, and their talents that adorned the kingdom. Public justice, administered in some provinces by seigneurs, in the royal jurisdiction by magistrates, who bought their places, was slow, often partial, always ruinously expensive, and, above all, atrocious in criminal proceedings. Personal liberty was violated by lettres de cachet, the liberty of the press by royal censors."

The people, thus oppressed through long ages, ground to the dust, plunged in the grossest ignorance by neglect, or,

A.D. 1789.]

rather, by suppression of all true Christian teaching, of all education, brutalised by contempt and harshness in those above them, were ripe for an outburst, but wholly incapacitated for any rational revolution. That revolution, when it came, must of necessity be one of blood and horror, a fierce revenge, knowing no restraints of conscience or knowledge. Whoever has read carefully this history, must have seen that, in all ages, the outbreaks of the French people were at once sanguinary, lawless, vindictive, and mingled with the most revolting features of levity and grimace. The tremendous atrocities, frivolities partaking largely of the horrible, and fury without restraint of principle, which astonished the world in the revolution of 1798, were only different from those of all former outbreaks, in that they were on a more extended scale. The character of the revolution lay in the character of the French people. Voltaire, their own countryman, described the Frenchman in a line, “half monkey and half tiger." Those elements of the grotesque and cruel are for ever mingled in French émeutes. We have only to refer to the popular insurrections of England, to the affairs of Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, Kett of Norfolk, and to tlie scenes of the civil wars of king and parliament, to perceive the essential difference. In the commotions of our most ignorant countrymen, in the least civilised times, there has always been mingled with a clearlydefined public object an absence of cruelty, and a knowing at what point to stop. In the French, blood once drawn, all the tiger broke loose, and the monkey element made the furious carnage more awfully revolting.

Never was there more urgent cause for revolution, and for the sweeping away of a thousand tyrannies and intolerable customs and laws, than in France at this time; but the people were certain, from all past precedents, to abuse and tyrannise; in their turn, to grow more furious as they proceeded, and to put no limits to their destructive instincts. Unfortunately, there were none of the classes above them qualified, or likely to take part with them for any just and wise end. The limits of necessary change were sure to be ignored, from the causes already stated; but, still more unfortunately, a new element was introduced into the fermenting mass of political abuses, pregnant with the most unbounded desolation.

For a long time there had been a systematic endeavour, by the wits and philosophers of France, to root out all faith in the Christian religion. Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, the whole clique of the encyclopædists, Rousseau, Condorcet, and numbers of others, had employed every weapon of ridicule, sarcasm, and argument to unchristianise Europe. They had drawn their original views from our own infidel writers, Hobbes, Tindal, Hume, &c., and they had applied them with wonderful effect to the inhuman and putrid condition of France. The tales of Voltaire, charged with the most vile, indecent, and insolent mockeries of the sacred writings, the Confessions and Nouvelle Heloise of Rousseau, had penetrated to every corner of France, and had produced the most ruinous effects. The grave reasonings of the encyclopædists, and the Contrat Sociale of Rousseau, though they did not reach the common people directly, were greedily imbibed by those just above them, who were soon to become their teachers, and from whose speeches and journals-the

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foaming yeast of political levelling-they were to be amply leavened with them at second hand. By this new philosophy, so called, every ancient principle was annihilated; every binding and social force was destroyed, and, in their stead, the Rights of Man, and the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the human race, were preached as a most delectable doctrine to a multitude totally destitute of every motive for selfrestraint and every sense of duty towards others. Society, under such circumstances, must inevitably become only a scene of the wildest license; selfishness, without inward law, was set free from all outward law, and the result must be universal destruction of the old, without a single germ of reconstruction of the beneficial or the wise in the new. The doctrine of the Rights of Man, in a multitude without knowledge and without virtue, could only be the doctrine of every man seizing whatever he could. Carried out to its ultimate issue, it was an analytical principle which must throw down and divide so long as anything was tangible and divisible. True, these philosophers and soi-disant philanthropists dealt largely in certain phrases, such as brotherhood, and pure reason, and instincts of humanity; but as they, at the same time, asserted the mere materiality of man, and treated spiritual life and moral responsibility as fables, their fine words were words and nothing more, possessing no more force on the surface of the raging sea of excited human passion, than the foam on the crest of the ocean surge. Christianity once dethroned, the only religion and the only philosophy which ever opposed and demanded the annihilation of self was gone, and the new philosophy became only a spectre light playing over a charnel-house.

The spiritual condition of the French people fully exposed them to the poison of this new teaching. They had never been taught the real truths of the New Testament; they had never been permitted to make acquaintance with its text. They had received their religion from a race of priests, who taught them in a foreign language, and whose lives, as the interpretation of their tenets, presented only atheism. The people saw them only part and parcel of their oppressors; as living in pomp, luxury, and the grossest sensuality. Their religion was a mere tissue of forms, and rites, and spectacles, and the people had only to be told that this so-called Christianity was a hoax, and a machinery of selfish priestcraft, to abandon it, to trample upon it, and to rush to the plunder of its shrines. The French revolution, from mere political and physical causes, was certain to be fearful; but, with this addition of a philosophical atheism, it could be nothing but Pandemonium broken loose!

Had there ascended the throne a monarch of vigorous character, who could have attached to his person the army, by consulting their interests and their ambition, the outbreak of the people would have been speedily crushed; for, after all that has been said of the bravery of the French mob, it is an undoubted fact, as will be seen, that it was brave only in the absence of any real danger. On every occasion when a vigorous resistance was made, not only the mob but the National Assembly trembled and recoiled; the most violent of the orators and journalists fled and hid themselves. But the whole government was demoralised and enfeebled; and whilst the mob grew daring from the consciousness of this fact, the monarch had neither vigour