The Ancient Regime. Taine Hippolyte
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and their pleasure-house within a circuit of twenty leagues; if they visit their estates at long intervals, it is to hunt. The fifteen hundred commendatory abbés and priors enjoy their benefices as if they were so many remote farms. The two thousand seven hundred vicars and canons visit each other and dine out. With the exception of a few apostolic characters the one hundred and thirty-one bishops stay at home as little as they can; nearly all of them being nobles, all of them men of society, what could they do out of the world, confined to a provincial town? Can we imagine a grand seignior, once a gay and gallant abbé and now a bishop with a hundred thousand livres income, voluntarily burying himself for the entire year at Mende, at Comminges, in a paltry cloister? The interval has become too great between the refined, varied and literary life of the great center, and the monotonous, inert, practical life of the provinces. Hence it is that the grand seignior who withdraws from the former cannot enter into the latter, and he remains an absentee, at least in feeling.
A country in which the heart ceases to impel the blood through its veins
presents a somber aspect. Arthur Young, who traveled over France between
1787 and 1789, is surprised to find at once such a vital center and
such dead extremities. Between Paris and Versailles the double file of
vehicles going and coming extends uninterruptedly for five leagues from
morning till night.1333 The contrast on other roads is very great. Leaving Paris by the Orleans road, says Arthur Young, "we met not one stage or diligence for ten miles; only two messageries and very few chaises, not a tenth of what would have been met had we been leaving London at the same hour." On the highroad near Narbonne, "for thirty-six miles," he says, "I came across but one cabriolet, half a dozen carts and a few women leading asses." Elsewhere, near St. Girons, he notices that in two hundred and fifty miles he encountered in all, "two cabriolets and three miserable things similar to our old one-horse post chaise, and not one gentleman." Throughout this country the inns are execrable; it is impossible to hire a wagon, while in England, even in a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, there are comfortable hotels and every means of transport. This proves that in France "there is no circulation." It is only in very large towns that there is any civilization and comfort. At Nantes there is a superb theater "twice as large as Drury-Lane and five times as magnificent. Mon Dieu! I cried to myself, do all these wastes, moors, and deserts, that I have passed for 300 miles lead to this spectacle? … In a single leap you pass from misery to extravagance, … the country deserted, or if a gentleman in it, you find him in some wretched hole to save that money which is lavished with profusion in the luxuries of a capital." "A coach," says M. de Montlosier, "set out weekly from the principal towns in the provinces for Paris and was not always full, which tells us about the activity in business. There was a single journal called the Gazette de France, appearing twice a week, which represents the activity of minds."1334 Some magistrates of Paris in exile at Bourges in 1753 and 1754 give the following picture of that place: "A town in which no one can be found with whom you can talk at your ease on any topic whatever, reasonably or sensibly. The nobles, three-fourths of them dying of hunger, rotting with pride of birth, keeping apart from men of the robe and of finance, and finding it strange that the daughter of a tax-collector, married to a counselor of the parliament of Paris, should presume to be intelligent and entertain company. The citizens are of the grossest ignorance, the sole support of this species of lethargy in which the minds of most of the inhabitants are plunged. Women, bigoted and pretentious, and much given to play and to gallantry."1335
In this impoverished and benumbed society, among these Messieurs Thibaudeau, the counselor, and Harpin, the tax-collector, among these vicomtes de Sotenville and Countesses d'Escarbagnas, lives the Archbishop, Cardinal de Larochefoucauld, grand almoner to the king, provided with four great abbeys, possessing five hundred thousand livres income, a man of the world, generally an absentee, and when at home, finding amusement in the embellishing of his gardens and palace, in short, the golden pheasant of an aviary in a poultry yard of geese.1336 Naturally there is an entire absence of political thought. "You cannot imagine," says the manuscript, "a person more indifferent to all public matters." At a later period, in the very midst of events of the gravest character, and which most nearly concern them, there is the same apathy. At Chateau-Thierry on the 4th of July, 1789,1337 there is not a café in which a new paper can be found; there is but one at Dijon; at Moulins, the 7th of August, "in the best café in the town, where I found near twenty tables set for company, but as for a newspaper I might as well have demanded an elephant." Between Strasbourg and Besançon there is not a gazette. At Besançon there is "nothing but the Gazette de France, for which, this period, a man of common sense would not give one sol, … and the Courier de l'Europe a fortnight old; and well-dressed people are now talking of the news of two or three weeks past, and plainly by their discourse know nothing of what is passing. At Clermont "I dined, or supped, five times at the table d'hôte with from twenty to thirty merchants, trade men, officers, etc., and it is not easy for me to express the insignificance—the inanity of their conversation. Scarcely any politics are mentioned at a moment when every bosom ought to beat with none but political sensations. The ignorance or the stupidity of these people must be absolutely incredible; not a week passes without their country abounding with events1338 that are analyzed an debated by the carpenters and blacksmiths of England." The cause of this inertia is manifest; interrogated on their opinions, all reply: "We are of the provinces and we must wait to know what is going on in Paris." Never having acted, they do no know how to act. But, thanks to this inertia, they let themselves be driven. The provinces form an immense stagnant pond, which, by a terrible inundation, may be emptied exclusively on one side, and suddenly; the fault lies with the engineers who failed to provide it with either dikes or outlets.
Such is the languor or, rather, the prostration, into which local life falls when the local chiefs deprive it of their presence, action or sympathy. I find only three or four grand seigniors taking a part in it, practical philanthropists following the example of English noblemen; the Duc d'Harcourt, who settles the lawsuits of his peasants; the Duc de Larochefoucauld-Liancourt who establishes a model farm on his domain, and a school of industrial pursuits for the children of poor soldiers; and the Comte de Brienne, whose thirty villages are to demand liberty of the Convention.1339 The rest, for the most part liberals, content themselves with discussions on public affairs and on political economy. In fact, the difference in manners, the separation of interests, the remoteness of ideas are so great that contact between those most exempt from haughtiness and their immediate tenantry is rare, and at long intervals. Arthur Young, needing some information at the house of the Duc de Larochefoucauld himself, the steward is sent for. "At an English nobleman's, there would have been three or four farmers asked to meet me, who would have dined with the family amongst the ladies of the first rank. I do not exaggerate when I say that I have had this at least an hundred times in the first houses of our islands. It is, however, a thing that in the present style of manners in France would not be met with from Calais to Bayonne except, by chance, in the house of some great lord that had been much in England, and then not unless it was asked for. The nobility in France have no more idea of practicing agriculture, and making it a subject of conversation, except on the mere theory, as they would speak of a loom or a bowsprit, than of any other object the most remote from their habits and pursuits." Through tradition, fashion and deliberation, they are, and wish only to be, people of society; their sole concern is to talk and to hunt. Never have the leaders of men so unlearned the art of leading men; the art which consists of marching along the same pathway with them, but at the head, and directing their labor by sharing in it.—Our Englishman, an eye-witness and competent, again writes: "Thus it is whenever you stumble on a grand seignior, even one that was worth millions, you are sure to find his property desert. Those of the Duc de Bouillon and of the Prince de Soubise are two of the greatest properties in France;