The Most Bitter Foe of Nations, and the Way to Its Permanent Overthrow

But Louis forgot one thing, and that the most important. Merely to defeat an aristocracy was not enough. He forgot to provide guarantees for the lower classes—he forgot to put rights into their hands which should enable them forever to check and balance the upper class when his hand was removed. You see that this mistake is just the reverse of that committed by previous statesmen.

Of course then, after the death of Louis, France relapsed into her old anarchy. Occasionally a strong King or city put a curb upon the nobles; but, in the main, it was the old bad history with variations ever more and more painful.

Over a hundred years more of this sort went by, and the rule of the nobles became utterly unbearable. The death of Henry the Fourth, in 1610, left on the throne a weak child as King, and behind the throne a weak woman as Regent. The nobles wrought out their will completely. They seized fortifications, plundered towns, emptied the treasury, domineered over the monarch, and impoverished the people. Curiously enough, too, to one who has not seen the same fact over and over in history, the nobles, during all these outrages of theirs, were declaiming, and groaning, and whining over their grievances and want of rights.³⁹

Compromise after compromise was made, and to no purpose. No sooner were compromises made than they were broken. Finally, a great statesman, recognizing the futility of compromises, gave the aristocracy battle. This statesman was Richelieu.

The nobles tried all their modes of working I have shown in other countries. They tried nullification, secession, disunion. They intrigued for the intervention of Spain. They preferred caste to country, and attempted to desert France at the moment of her sorest need—at the siege of La Rochelle.

But Richelieu was too strong for them. His victories were magnificent. While he lived France had peace.⁴⁰

Yet he makes the same mistake which Louis XI. had made. He defeats the upper caste; but he guarantees no rights to the lower caste; therefore he gives France no barrier against that old flood of evils—save his own hand, and when death removes that, chaos comes again.

Mazarin now grapples with them. They give him a fearful trial. They throw France into civil war. They pretend zeal for liberty, and form an anarchic alliance with the poor old stupid Parliament of Paris. They make Mazarin miserable. They throw filth upon him, then light him up with their fireworks of wit, and set the world laughing at him. Then they drive him out of France; but he is keen and strong, and finally throws his nets over them, and France has another breathing time.

But the nobility if quiet are not a whit more beneficial—they are virulent and cynical as ever. Mazarin commits the same fault which Louis XI. and Richelieu had committed before him.

His mind was keen always, bold sometimes—yet never keen enough to see, or bold enough to try the policy of giving France a guarantee of perpetual peace, by raising up that lower class, and giving them rights, civil and political, which should attach them to the legitimate government, and make them a balancing body against the aristocracy.

It is wonderful! Great men, fighting single-handed against thousands, clear in foresight and insight, quick in planning, vigorous in executing, finding every path to advantage, hurling every weighty missile, seeing everything, daring everything, except that one simple, broad principle in statesmanship which could have saved France from anarchy then and from revolution afterwards.

Gentlemen, it is a great lesson and a plain one. Diplomacy based on knowledge of the ordinary motives of ordinary men is strong,—statesmanship based on close study of the interests and aims of states and classes is strong;—but there is a Diplomacy and a Statesmanship infinitely stronger. Infinitely stronger are the Diplomacy and Statemanship whose master is a heart,—a heart with an instinct for truth and right;—a heart with a faith that on truth and right alone can peace be fitly builded.

Your common-place Cavour, with his deep instinct for Italian Liberty and Unity;—your uncouth Lincoln, with his deep instinct for American Liberty and Unity, are worth legions of compromise builders and conciliation mongers.

Mazarin delivered France into the hands of Louis XIV., and Louis brought them permanently into the narcotic phase. He stupefied them with sensuality,—attached them to his court,—made his palace the centre of their ambition,—gave scope to their fancy, by setting them at powdering and painting and frizzing,—gave scope to their activity by keeping them at gambling and debauchery,—weaned them from turbulence by stimulating them to decorate their bodies and to debase their souls.⁴¹

The central power was thus saved;—the people went on suffering as before.

Under the Regency of Louis XV. the nobility went from bad to worse. Their scorn for labor made them despise not merely those who toiled in Agriculture and Manufactures—it led them logically to openly neglect, and secretly despise professions generally thought the most honorable. When Racine ridiculed lawyers,⁴² and when Moliere ridiculed physicians⁴³ and scholars,⁴⁴ they but yielded to this current.

Wise men saw the danger. Laws were passed declaring that commerce should not be derogatory to nobility. Abbé Coyer wrote a book to entice nobles into commerce. It had a captivating frontispiece, representing a nobleman elegantly dressed going on board a handsome merchant ship.⁴⁵ All in vain. The serf-mastering traditions were too strong.

The Revolution comes. The nobles stand out against the entreaties of Louis XVI.—the statesmanship of Turgot, the financial skill of Necker,—the keenness of Sieyes,—the boldness of Mirabeau. The very existence of France is threatened; but they have erected, as nobles always do, their substitute for patriotism. They stand by their order. Royalty yields to the third estate,—the clergy yield, the nobility will not.

They are at last scared into momentary submission to right and justice and the spirit of the age. On the memorable Fourth of August they renounce their most hideous oppressions.

There is no end of patriotic speeches by these converts to liberty. The burden of all is the same. They are anxious to give up their oppressions. It is of no use to struggle longer, they are beaten, they will yield to save France.⁴⁶ Artists illustrate the great event, some pathetically, some comically.⁴⁷ The millennium seems arrived, a Te Deum is appointed. Yet plain common sense Buchez notes one thing in all this not so pleasant. In these "transports and outpourings," (transports et l'effusion de sentiments genereux,) one very important thing has been forgotten. The nobles forget to give, and the people forget to take—guarantees.⁴⁸

Woe to the people who trust merely the word of an upper caste habituated to oppression! Woe to the statesmen who do not at once crystallize such promises into constitutional and legislative acts!

These nobles shortly regretted their concessions and sought to evade them.⁴⁹ The aristocrats whom they represented soon denied the right of their deputies to make these concessions, and soon after repudiated them.⁵⁰

How could it be otherwise? When you speak of concessions by a caste habituated to oppression, you do not mean that they give away a single, simple, tangible thing, and that that is the end of it;—not at all. You mean that they give up old habits of thought,—habits of action. You mean that every day of their lives thereafter they are to give up a habit, or a fancy, or a comfort. No mere promises of theirs to do this can be trusted. There must be guarantees fixed immutably, bedded into the constitution,—clamped into the laws. That same anchoring of liberties, and not "transports et l'effusion de sentiments genereux," is statesmanship.

These concessions were not thus secured. The old habits of oppression again got the upper hand. The upper class became as hostile to liberty and peace as ever.

Then thundered through France the Revolution. It must come;—that great and good French Revolution which did more to advance mankind in ten years than had been done politically in ten centuries,—which cost fewer lives to establish great principles than the Grand Monarque had flung away to gratify his whimsies! The right hand of the Almighty was behind it.

I refuse at the will of English Tory historians to lament more over the sufferings that besotted caste of oppressors brought upon themselves during those three years, than over the sufferings they brought upon the people during three times three centuries.⁵¹

The great thing was now partially done which Louis XI. and Richelieu had left entirely undone. The lower class were not merely freed from serfdom; they received guarantees of full civil rights.⁵²

So far all was well, but at another point the constituent assembly stumbled. They were not bold enough to give full political rights. They thought the peasantry too ignorant—too much debased by a long servitude, to be entrusted with political rights,—therefore they denied them, and invented for them "passive citizenship."⁵³

It was skillfully devised, but none the less fatal. The denial of political rights to the enfranchised was one of the two great causes of the destruction of the Constitution of 1791, and of the inauguration of the Reign of Terror.

Political rights could not be refused long. As they could not be obtained in peace the freed peasantry never allowed France rest until it gained them by long years of bloodshed and anarchy. Revolution after revolution has failed of full results. Dynasty after dynasty has failed to give quiet until a great statesman in our own time, Napoleon III., has been bold enough to make suffrage universal.

Whatever the first French Revolution failed to do, it failed to do mainly by lack of bold faith in giving political rights;—whatever it succeeded in doing, it succeeded by giving full civil rights.

When Louis XVIII. was brought back by foreign bayonets, the nobility also came back jubilant; all seemed about to give France over to her old caste of oppressors. The revolution was gone, its great theories were gone, its great men were swept away by death and by discouragement worse than death.

But one barrier stood between France and all her old misery. That barrier stood firm; it was the enfranchised peasantry—possessing civil rights and confiscated property in land. Against these the whole might of the nobility beat in vain.

Peace came, and with peace prosperity. France had been fearfully shattered by ages of evil administration and false political economy; she had been devastated by wars without and within; she had been plundered of an immense indemnity by the allies; the best of her people had been swept off by conscriptions; but under the distribution of lands to the former serfs, and the full guarantee of civil rights and the germs of political rights, the nation showed an energy in recuperation and a breadth of prosperity never before known in all her history.

There are other nations which, did time allow, might be summoned before us to aid our insight into the tendencies of castes habituated to oppression.

I might show from the annals of Germany how such a caste, having dragged the country through a thousand years of anarchy, have left it in chronic disunion,—the loss of all natural consideration, and oft-recurring civil wars, one of which is now devastating her.⁵⁴

I might show from the history of Russia how the despotism of the Autocrat has been made necessary to save the empire from a worse foe—from a serf-mastering aristocracy. And I might go further and show how the statesmanship which has emancipated the lower class in Russia has recognized the great truth that the nation is not safe against the aristocracy—that no barrier can stand against them except the enfranchised endowed with rights and lands.⁵⁵