Critical Miscellanies | Page 6

Report which first initiated the nation in the elements of
financial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater, and the monarchy
drew nearer to bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to the
state of things in France under Lewis the Sixteenth is to be sought in
the state of things in Egypt or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left
a debt of between two and three thousand millions of livres, but this
had been wiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the
way, which have never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt
soon grew again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and
by the rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like
two hundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to notice
that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at the
same time. The year's excess of expenditure over receipts in 1774 was
about fifty millions of livres: in 1787 it was one hundred and forty
millions, or according to a different computation even two hundred
millions. The material case was not at all desperate, if only the court
had been less infatuated, and the spirit of the privileged orders had been
less blind and less vile. The fatality of the situation lay in the characters
of a handful of men and women. For France was abundant in resources,
and even at this moment was far from unprosperous, in spite of the

incredible trammels of law and custom. An able financier, with the
support of a popular chamber and the assent of the sovereign, could
have had no difficulty in restoring the public credit. But the conditions,
simple as they might seem to a patriot or to posterity, were unattainable
so long as power remained with a caste that were anything we please
except patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought together, but it
was only the empty phantasm of national representation. Yet the
situation was so serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as it was,
still was willing to accept vital reforms. The privileged order, who were
then as their descendants are now, the worst conservative party in
Europe, immediately persuaded the magisterial corporation to resist the
Notables. The judicial corporation or Parlement of Paris had been
suppressed under Lewis the Fifteenth, and unfortunately revived again
at the accession of his grandson. By the inconvenient constitution of the
French government, the assent of that body was indispensable to fiscal
legislation, on the ground that such legislation was part of the general
police of the realm. The king's minister, now Loménie de Brienne,
devised a new judicial constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles, and
the lawyers all united in protestations against such a blow. The
common people are not always the best judges of a remedy for the evils
under which they are the greatest sufferers, and they broke out in
disorder both in Paris and the provinces. They discerned an attack upon
their local independence. Nobody would accept office in the new courts,
and the administration of justice was at a standstill. A loan was thrown
upon the market, but the public could not be persuaded to take it up. It
was impossible to collect the taxes. The interest on the national debt
was unpaid, and the fundholder was dismayed and exasperated by an
announcement that only two-fifths would be discharged in cash. A very
large part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities for lives,
and men who had invested their savings on the credit of the
government, saw themselves left without a provision. The total number
of fundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but it must
have been very considerable, especially in Paris and the other great
cities. Add to these all the civil litigants in the kingdom, who had
portions of their property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of
the courts into which the property had been taken. The resentment of
this immense body of defrauded public creditors and injured private

suitors explains the alienation of the middle class from the monarchy.
In the convulsions of our own time, the moneyed interests have been on
one side, and the population without money on the other. But in the
first and greatest convulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their
animosities shared by those who had had something to lose, and had
lost it.
Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had been
tried; both had failed, and there was no other device left, except one
which was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Sixteenth was
in 1789 in much the same case as that of the King of England in 1640.
Charles had done his best to raise money without any