personal freedom, and diffusion of landed property, the common people of France formed one compact and indivisible nation. Two circumstances which aggravated the wretchedness of the third estate increased their importance. The feudal aristocracy had been called into being for the protection of the kingdom; but, in the progress of ages, they escaped from the obligation to military service. In this manner they abdicated their dignity as the peers of their sovereign; and, though they still scorned every profession but that of arms, they received their commissions from the king's favor, and drew from his exchequer their pay as hirelings. Thus the organization of the army ceased to circumscribe royal power, which now raised soldiers directly from the humbler classes. The defence of the country had passed from the king and his peers with their vassals to the king in direct connection with those vassals who were thus become a people. 1774. May. Again, the nobility, carefully securing the exemption of their own estates, had, in their struggles with the central power, betrayed the commons, by allowing the monarch to tax them at will. Proving false to their trust as the privileged guardians of liberty, and renouncing the military service that had formed the motive to their creation, they made themselves an insulated caste. All that was beneficent in feudalism had died out. Soulless relics of the past, the nobles threw up their hereditary rustic independence to fasten themselves as courtiers upon the treasury. They hung like a burden on the state, which they no longer guided, nor sustained, nor defended, nor consoled. Some few among them, superior to their rank, helped to bear society onwards to its regeneration; but, as a class, their life was morally at an end. They had renounced their political importance, which passed to the people. imposts which they refused to share, and which in two centuries had increased tenfold, fell almost exclusively on the lowly, who toiled and suffered, having no redress against those employed by the government; regarding the monarch with touching reverence and love, though they knew him The 1774. May. mostly as the power that harried them; ruled as though joy were no fit companion for labor; as though want were the necessary goad to industry, and sorrow the only guarantee of quiet. They were the strength of the kingdom, the untiring producers of its wealth; the repairer of its armies; the sole and exhaustless source of its revenue; and yet, in their forlornness, they cherished scarcely a dim vision of a happier futurity on earth. Meantime, monarchy was concentrating a mass of power, which a strong arm could wield with irresistible effect, which an effeminate squanderer could not exhaust. In. stead of a sovereign restrained by his equals, and depending on free grants from the states, one will commanded a standing army, and imposed taxes on the unprivileged classes. These taxes, moreover, it collected by its own officers; so that throughout all the provinces of France an administration of plebeians, accountable to the king alone, superseded in substance, though not always in form, the methods of feudalism. supreme. Nor had the established religion wholly escaped dependence on the crown. The Catholic Church assumes to represent the Divine Wisdom itself, and, as a logical consequence, its decisions, though pronounced by an alien, should be The Gallican church had at least a name of its own; and when it was observed that Jesuits had inculcated the subordination of the temporal sovereign to a superior rule under which the wicked tyrant might be arraigned, dethroned, or even slain, Louis XV. uprooted by his word and exiled the best organized religious society in Christendom; not perceiving that the sudden closing of their schools of learning left the rising generation more easy converts to unbelief in royalty itself. The clergy were tainted with the general skepticism; they stooped before the temporal power to win its protection, and did not scruple to enforce by persecution a semblance of homage to the symbols of religion, of which the life was put to sleep. The magistrates, with graver manners than the clergy or the nobility, did not so much hate administrative despot ism as grasp at its direction; they themselves had so scanty means of self-defence against its arm that, when they hesitated to register the king's decrees, even the word of Louis XV. could make an end of parliaments which were almost as old as the French monarchy itself. 1774. May. For the benefit of the king's treasury, free charters, granted or confirmed in the middle ages to towns and cities, had over and over again been confiscated, to be ransomed by the citizens or sold to an oligarchy; so that municipal liberties were no longer independent of the royal caprice. France was the most lettered nation of the world, and its authors loved to be politicians. Of these, the conservative class, whose fanatical partisanship included in their system of order the continuance of every established abuse, had no support but in the king. Scoffers also abounded; but they did not care to restrain arbitrary power, or remove the abuses which they satirized. One universal skepticism questioned the creed of churches and the code of feudal law, the authority of the hierarchy and the sanctity of monarchy; but unbelief had neither the capacity nor the wish to organize a new civilization. The philosophy of the day could not guide a revolution, for it professed to receive no truth but through the senses, denied the moral government of the world, and derided the possibility of disinterested goodness. As there was no practical school of politics in which experience might train statesmen to test new projects, the passion for elementary theories had no moderating counterpoise; and the authors of ameliorating plans favored the unity of administration, that one indisputable word might substitute a uniform and rational system for the complicated usages and laws which had been the deposits of many conquests and ages. At this time, the central power, in the hands of a monarch infamous by his enslavement to pleasure, had become hideously selfish and immoral, palsied and depraved; swallowing up all other authority, and yet unconscious of the attendant radical change in the feudal constitution; dreaming itself absolute, yet wanting personal respectabil May. ity; confessing the necessity of administrative reforms, which it was yet unable to direct. For great ends it was helpless, though it was able to torture and distress the 1774. feeble; to fill the criminal code with the barbarisms of arrogant cruelty; to evoke before exceptional courts. every accusation against even the humblest of its agents; to judge by special tribunals questions involving life and fortune; to issue arbitrary warrants of imprisonment; to punish without information or sentence; making itself the more hateful the less it was restrained. The duty and honor of the kingdom were sacrificed in its foreign policy. Louis XV. courted the friendship of George III. of England, not to efface the false notion of international enmity which was a brand on the civilization of that age, but to gain a new support for monarchical power. For this end, the humiliations of the last war would have been forgiven by the monarch, had not the heart of the nation still palpitated with resentment. Under the supremacy of the king's mistress, sensual pleasure ruled the court; dictated the appointment of ministers; confused the administration; multiplied the griefs of the overburdened peasantry; and would have irretrievably degraded France, but for its third estate, who were ready to lift their head and assert their power, whenever in any part of the world a happier people should give them an example. The heir to the throne of France was not admitted to the royal council, and grew up ignorant of business and inert. The dauphiness Marie Antoinette, in the splendor of supreme rank, preserved the gay cheerfulness of youth. Soon after her arrival in France, her mother had written to her: "God has crowned you with so much grace and sweetness and docility that all the world must love you." She was conscious of being lovely, and was willing to be admired; but she knew how to temper graceful condescension with august severity. Impatient of stately etiquette, which controlled her choice of companions even more than the disposition of her hours, she broke away from wearisome formalities with the eager vivacity of self-will, and was happiest when she could forget that she was a princess and be herself. From the same quickness of nature, she readily took part in any prevailing public excitement, regardless of reasons of state or the decorum of the palace. In music, her taste was exquisite; and she merited the graceful flattery of Glück. Unless her pride was incensed, she was merciful; and she delighted in bestowing gifts; but her benevolence was chiefly the indulgence of a capricious humor, which never attracted the affection of the poor. Faithful in her devotedness to the nobles, she knew not the utter decay of their order; and had no other thought than that they were bound by the traditions of centuries to defend her life and name. But the rugged days of feudalism were gone by; and its frivolous descendants were more ready to draw their swords for precedence in a dance at court than to protect the honor of their future queen. From her arrival in France, Marie Antoinette was hated by the opponents of the Austrian alliance; and, in her first years at Versailles, a faction in the highest ranks began to calumniate her artless impulsiveness as the evidence of crime. 1774. May. On this scene of a degenerate nobility and popular distress; of administrative corruptness and ruined finances; of a brave but luxurious army and a slothful navy; of royal authority, unbounded, unquestioned, and yet despised; of rising deference to public opinion in a nation thoroughly united and true to its nationality, Louis XVI., the “desired one" of the people, while not yet twenty years old, entered as king. When on the tenth of May, 1774, he and the still younger Marie Antoinette were told that his grandfather was no more, " I feel,” said he, “as if the universe were about to crush me;" and the two threw themselves on their knees, crying, "We are too young to reign," and praying God to direct their inexperience. The city of Paris was delirious with joy at their accession. "It is our paramount wish to make our people happy," was the language of the first edict of the new absolute prince. excels in writing prose," said Voltaire, on reading the words of promise; "he seems inspired by Marcus Aurelius; he desires what is good, and does it. Happy they, who, like "He |