The History of French Revolution. John Stevens Cabot Abbott
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of the king. If he wishes to take any of his produce to market, he must pay the duke for permission to travel on the highway. Thus robbed under the name of custom and law, the farmer toils joylessly from the cradle to the grave, with barely sufficient food and shelter to keep him in respectable working order; and when he dies, he leaves his children to the same miserable doom. Such was the condition of the great mass of the French people during the long reign of Louis XV.
This intolerable bondage spread all through the minutiæ of social life. It was, of course, impossible but that the masses of the people should be in the lowest state of ignorance and indigence. Their huts, destitute of all the necessities of civilized life, were dark and comfortless, and even the merriment with which they endeavored at times to beguile their misery was heartless, spasmodic, and melancholy.33
In the year 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to Mrs. Trist, of Philadelphia, "Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion that there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence, than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States."34
Again he writes, in the same year, to M. Bellini, a Florentine gentleman who was professor in William and Mary College, "I find the general state of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire's observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil."
FOOTNOTES:
22. Madame Campan's Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, vol. i., p. 388.
23. Ib.
24. "Men of rank sold their land piecemeal to the peasantry, reserving nothing but seigneurial rents, which furnished a nominal but not a substantial competency."—The Old Régime, De Tocqueville, p. 103.
25. History of the French Revolution, by M. Rabaud de St. Etienne, p. 188.
26. "A lord," writes Montesquieu, bitterly, "is a man who sees the king, speaks to the minister, has ancestors, debts, and pensions."
27. The Old Régime, by De Tocqueville, p. 18.
"It is a singularity worth remarking that the Gospel is nothing but a declaration of rights. Its mysteries were a long time hidden, because they attacked the priests and the great."—M. Rabaud de St. Etienne, p. 174.
28. "Shall we say, then, Woe to Philosophism that it destroyed Religion, what it called 'extinguishing the abomination'—écraser l'infâme? Woe rather to those that made the Holy an abomination and extinguishable."—Carlyle, French Revolution, i., 56.
29. Old Régime, p. 175.
Count Segur, a peer of France, in his Memoirs, has very frankly described the feelings with which he and the young nobles who were his companions regarded the writings of the philosophers:
"We felt disposed to adopt with enthusiasm the philosophical doctrines professed by literary men, remarkable for their boldness and their wit. Voltaire seduced our imagination. Rousseau touched our hearts. We felt a secret pleasure in seeing that their attacks were directed against an old fabric which presented to us a Gothic and ridiculous appearance. We were pleased with this petty war, although it was undermining our own ranks and privileges and the remains of our ancient power. But we felt not these attacks personally. It was, as yet, but a war of words and paper, which did not appear to us to threaten the superiority of existence which we enjoyed, consolidated as we thought it by a possession of many centuries."
30. History of the Revolution of France, by M. Rabaud de St. Etienne.
31. For appalling proof of the sufferings of the tax-payers, turn to the pages of Michelet, of De Tocqueville, of any writer upon the Old Régime.
32. Arthur Young, vol. i., p. 574; Marshall's Travels, vol. iv., p. 322.
33. "Care must be taken not to misunderstand the gayety which the French have often exhibited in the greatest affliction. It is a mere attempt to divert the mind from the contemplation of misfortune which seems inevitable."—The Old Régime, by De Tocqueville, p. 167.
34. Life of Jefferson, by Henry T. Randall, vol. i., p. 432.
Chapter V.
The Bastille
Absolute Power of the King.—Lettres de Cachet.—The Bastille.—Cardinal Balue.—Harancourt.—Charles of Armanac.—Constant de Renville.—Duke of Nemours.—Dungeons of the Bastille.—Oubliettes.—Dessault.—M. Massat.—M. Catalan.—Latude.—The Student.—Apostrophe of Michelet.
The monarchy was now so absolute that the king, without any regard to law, had the persons and the property of all his subjects entirely at his disposal. He could confiscate any man's estate. He could assign any man to a dungeon for life without trial and even without accusation. To his petted and profligate favorites he was accustomed to give sealed writs, lettres de cachet, whose blanks they could fill up with any name they pleased. With one of these writs the courtiers could drag any man who displeased them to one of the dungeons of the Bastille, where no light of the sun would ever gladden his eyes again. Of these sealed writs we shall speak hereafter. They were the most appalling instruments of torture despotism ever wielded.
The Bastille. At the eastern entrance of Paris stood this world-renowned fortress and prison. In gloomy grandeur its eight towers darkened the air, surrounded by a massive wall of stone nine feet thick and a hundred feet high. The whole was encircled by a ditch twenty-five feet deep and one hundred and twenty feet wide. The Bastille was an object exciting universal awe. No one could ever pass beneath its shadow without thinking of the sighs which ceaselessly resounded through all its vaults. It was an ever-present threat, the great upholder of despotic power, with its menace appalling even the boldest heart. It is easy to brave death from the bullet or the guillotine; but who can brave the doom of Cardinal Balue, who, for eleven years, was confined in an iron cage, so constructed that he could find no possible position for repose; or the fate of Harancourt, who passed fifteen years in a cage within the Bastille, whose iron bars required in their riveting the labors of nineteen men for twenty days? To be thus torn from wife, children, and home, and to be consigned for life to the unearthly woe of such a doom must terrify even the firmest soul. It is painful to dwell upon these details, but they must be known in explanation of the scenes of violence and blood to which they finally gave birth.
Charles of Armanac, for no crime whatever of his own, but because his brother had offended Charles XI., was thrown into prison. For fourteen years he lingered in the dungeon, until his reason was dethroned and his spirit was bewildered and lost