Such seems to be the education and government appointed for man by the voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatum, and the education, therefore, which the man of science will accept and carry out.But the men of the Ancien Regime--in as far as it was a Regime at all--tried to be wiser than the Almighty.Why not? They were not the first, nor will be the last, by many who have made the same attempt.So this Council of State settled arbitrarily, not only taxes, and militia, and roads, but anything and everything.Its members meddled, with their whole hearts and minds.They tried to teach agriculture by schools and pamphlets and prizes; they sent out plans for every public work.A town could not establish an octroi, levy a rate, mortgage, sell, sue, farm, or administer their property, without an order in council.The Government ordered public rejoicings, saw to the firing of salutes, and illuminating of houses--in one case mentioned by M.de Tocqueville, they fined a member of the burgher guard for absenting himself from a Te Deum.All self-government was gone.A country parish was, says Turgot, nothing but "an assemblage of cabins, and of inhabitants as passive as the cabins they dwelt in." Without an order of council, the parish could not mend the steeple after a storm, or repair the parsonage gable.If they grumbled at the intendant, he threw some of the chief persons into prison, and made the parish pay the expenses of the horse patrol, which formed the arbitrary police of France.Everywhere was meddling.There were reports on statistics--circumstantial, inaccurate, and useless--as statistics are too often wont to be.
Sometimes, when the people were starving, the Government sent down charitable donations to certain parishes, on condition that the inhabitants should raise a sum on their part.When the sum offered was sufficient, the Comptroller-General wrote on the margin, when he returned the report to the intendant, "Good--express satisfaction."If it was more than sufficient, he wrote, "Good--express satisfaction and sensibility." There is nothing new under the sun.
In 1761, the Government, jealous enough of newspapers, determined to start one for itself, and for that purpose took under its tutelage the Gazette de France.So the public newsmongers were of course to be the provincial intendants, and their sub-newsmongers, of course, the sub-delegates.
But alas! the poor sub-delegates seem to have found either very little news, or very little which it was politic to publish.One reports that a smuggler of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; another that a woman in his district has had three girls at a birth; another that a dreadful storm has happened, but--has done no mischief; a fourth--living in some specially favoured Utopia--declares that in spite of all his efforts he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will subscribe to so useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal seems to have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his minister, who had of course expected to secure fine weather by nailing, like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weather-glass.
Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped there.But, by a process of evocation (as it was called), more and more causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular tribunals, to those of the intendants and the Council.
Before the intendant all the lower order of people were generally sent for trial.Bread-riots were a common cause of such trials, and M.de Tocqueville asserts that he has found sentences, delivered by the intendant, and a local council chosen by himself, by which men were condemned to the galleys, and even to death.Under such a system, under which an intendant must have felt it his interest to pretend at all risks, that all was going right, and to regard any disturbance as a dangerous exposure of himself and his chiefs--one can understand easily enough that scene which Mr.Carlyle has dramatised from Lacretelle, concerning the canaille, the masses, as we used to call them a generation since:
"A dumb generation--their voice only an inarticulate cry.
Spokesman, in the king's council, in the world's forum, they have none that finds credence.At rare intervals (as now, in 1775) they will fling down their hoes, and hammers; and, to the astonishment of mankind, flock hither and thither, dangerous, aimless, get the length even of Versailles.Turgot is altering the corn trade, abrogating the absurdest corn laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even factitious, an indubitable scarcity of broad.And so, on the 2nd day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances.The chateau-gates must be shut; but the king will appear on the balcony and speak to them.
They have seen the king's face; their petition of grievances has been, if not read, looked at.In answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows forty feet high, and the rest driven back to their dens for a time."Of course.What more exasperating and inexpiable insult to the ruling powers was possible than this? To persist in being needy and wretched, when a whole bureaucracy is toiling day and night to make them prosperous and happy? An insult only to be avenged in blood.
