The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789. Alexis de Tocqueville
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kept, but greatly increased their fortunes; they were still first in riches as in power. The new families which had risen beside them had only copied but had not surpassed their wealth.
In France the non-noble classes alone seemed to inherit all the wealth which the nobility had lost; they fattened, as it were, upon its substance. Yet there were no laws to prevent the middle class from ruining themselves, or to assist them in acquiring riches; nevertheless they incessantly increased their wealth; in many instances they had become as rich as, and often richer than the nobles. Nay, more, their wealth was of the same kind, for, though dwelling in the town, they were often landowners in the country, and sometimes they even bought seignorial estates.
Education and habits of life had already created a thousand other points of resemblance between these two classes of men. The middle class man was as enlightened as the noble, and it deserves to be remarked, his acquirements were derived from the very same source. The same light shone upon both. Their education had been equally theoretical and literary. Paris, which became more and more the sole preceptor of France, had ended by giving to all minds one common form and action.
At the end of the eighteenth century no doubt some difference was still perceptible between the manners of the nobility and those of the middle class, for nothing assimilates more slowly than that surface of society which we call manners; at bottom, however, all men above the rank of the common people were alike; they had the same ideas, the same habits, the same tastes; they indulged in the same pleasures, read the same books, and spoke the same language. The only difference left between them was in their rights.
I much doubt whether this was the case in the same degree anywhere else, even in England, where the different classes, though firmly united by common interests, still differed in their habits and feelings; for political liberty, which possesses the admirable power of placing the citizens of a State in compulsory intercourse and mutual dependence, does not on that account always make them similar; it is the government of one man which, in the end, has the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike, and all mutually indifferent to their common fate.
CHAPTER IX
Let us now look at the other side of the picture, and we shall see that these same Frenchmen, who had so many points of resemblance amongst themselves, were, nevertheless, more completely isolated from each other than perhaps the inhabitants of any other country, or than had ever been the case before in France.
It seems extremely probable that, at the time of the first establishment of the feudal system in Europe, the class which was subsequently called the nobility did not at once form a caste, but was originally composed of the chief men of the nation, and was therefore, in the beginning, merely an aristocracy. This, however, is a question which I have no intention of discussing here; it will be sufficient to remark that, during the Middle Ages, the nobility had become a caste, that is to say, that its distinctive mark was birth.
It retained, indeed, one of the proper characteristics of an aristocracy, that of being a governing body of citizens; but birth alone decided who should be at the head of this body. Whoever was not born noble was excluded from this close and particular class, and could only fill a position more or less exalted but still subordinate in the State.
Wherever on the continent of Europe the feudal system had been established it ended in caste; in England alone it returned to aristocracy.
It has always excited my surprise that a fact which distinguishes England from all other modern nations, and which alone can throw light upon the peculiarities of its laws, its spirit, and its history, has not attracted to a still greater degree the attention of philosophers and statesmen, and that habit has rendered it, as it were, imperceptible to the English themselves. It has frequently been seen by glimpses, and imperfectly described, but no complete and distinct view has, I believe, ever been taken of it. Montesquieu, it is true, on visiting Great Britain in 1739, wrote, ‘I am now in a country which has little resemblance to the rest of Europe:’ but that is all.
It was indeed, not so much its parliament, its liberty, its publicity, or its jury, which at that time rendered England so unlike the rest of Europe; it was something far more peculiar and far more powerful. England was the only country in which the system of caste had been not only modified, but effectually destroyed. The nobility and the middle classes in England followed the same business, embraced the same professions, and, what is far more significant, intermarried with each other. The daughter of the greatest nobleman could already without disgrace marry a man of yesterday.
In order to ascertain whether caste, with the ideas, habits, and barriers it creates amongst a nation, is definitely destroyed, look at its marriages. They alone give the decisive feature which we seek. At this very day, in France, after sixty years of democracy, we shall generally seek it in vain. The old and the new families, between which no distinction any longer appears to exist, avoid as much as possible to intermingle with each other by marriage.
It has often been remarked that the English nobility has been more prudent, more able, and less exclusive than any other. It would have been much nearer the truth to say, that in England, for a very long time past, no nobility, properly so called, has existed, if we take the word in the ancient and limited sense it has everywhere else retained.
This singular revolution is lost in the night of ages, but a living witness of it yet survives in the idiom of language. For several centuries the word gentleman has altogether changed its meaning in England, and the word roturier has ceased to exist. It would have been impossible to translate literally into English the well-known line from the ‘Tartuffe,’ even when Molière wrote it in 1664:—
If we make a further application of the science of languages to the science of history, and pursue the fate of the word gentleman through time and through space,—the offspring of the French word gentilhomme,—we shall find its application extending in England in the same proportion in which classes draw near one another and amalgamate. In each succeeding century it is applied to persons placed somewhat lower in the social scale. At length it travelled with the English to America, where it is used to designate every citizen indiscriminately. Its history is that of democracy itself.
In France the word gentilhomme has always been strictly limited to its original meaning; since the Revolution it has been almost disused, but its application has never changed. The word which was used to designate the members of the caste was kept intact, because the caste itself was maintained as separate from all the rest as it had ever been.
I go even further, and assert that this caste had become far more exclusive than it was when the word was first invented, and that in France a change had taken place in the direction opposed to that which had occurred in England.
Though the nobility and the middle class in France had become far more alike, they were at the same time more isolated from each other—two things which are so essentially distinct that the former, instead of extenuating the latter, may frequently aggravate it.
During the Middle Ages, and whilst the feudal system was still in force, all those who held land under a lord (and who were properly called vassals, in feudal law) were constantly associated with the lord, though many of them were not noble, in the government of the Seignory; indeed this was the principal condition of their tenures. Not only were they bound to follow the lord to war, but they were bound, in virtue of their holdings, to spend a certain part of the year at his court, that is in helping him to administer justice, and to govern the inhabitants. The lord’s court was the mainspring of the feudal system of government; it played a part in all the ancient laws of Europe, and very distinct vestiges of it may still be found in many parts of Germany. The learned feudalist, Edmé de Fréminville, who, thirty years before the French Revolution, thought fit to write a thick volume on feudal rights and on the renovation of manor rolls, informs us that he had seen in ‘the titles of a number of manors, that the vassals were obliged to appear every fortnight at the lord’s court, and that being there assembled they judged conjointly with the lord and his ordinary judge, the assizes and differences which had arisen between the inhabitants.’ He adds, that he had found ‘there were sometimes