With the recall of the parlements and the appointment of fresh Ministers, the people began to hope that a new age might be dawning. In Paris a placard bearing the legend ‘Resurrexit’ was hung around the statue of that revered monarch, Henri IV, and portraits of the new King who, it was believed, was prepared to follow the example of his popular predecessor, were displayed in shop windows. ‘All the nation shouts in chorus,’ Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, the mathematician and philosopher, reported to Frederick the Great, ‘“A better day dawns upon us”…The priests alone make sound apart, murmuring softly.’ But this approval did not last long. The King’s intermittently painstaking industry, his desire to be respected and loved by his people, and the cautious, tentative reforms of Turgot, Maurepas and the Minister of War, the Comte de Saint-Germain, did little to alleviate the plight of a nation whose fundamental grievances remained without remedy.
The population of France in the late eighteenth century was about 26,000,000. Of these about 21,000,000 lived by fanning, many of them owning the land on which they lived. But although over a quarter of the land in the country was owned by peasants, few possessed more than the twenty acres or so which were necessary to support a family, and these few acres were generally farmed in an antiquated manner indicative of their owners’ distrust of scientific agriculture. So, while some country people were able to maintain their independence in comfort and security, most were forced to work for at least part of the year as poorly paid labourers on bigger farms, or to borrow livestock, wagons and implements from richer farmers who in return claimed a share, usually a large share, of the crop. Conditions varied widely from one region to another, and French peasants were generally less ill-fed than those of Russia and Poland, but in times of scant harvests or epidemics of murrain many went hungry. Arthur Young, the observant and well-informed English landowner who travelled extensively in France at this time, frequently recorded examples of the most abject poverty, of countrywomen and ploughmen without shoes or stockings, of hungry-looking children ‘terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than if with no cloaths at all’. One little girl of six or seven years, playing with a stick, made his ‘heart ache to see her’. ‘They did not beg,’ he wrote, ‘and when I gave them anything seemed more surprised than obliged. One-third of what I have seen in this province [he was then at Montauban in Brittany] seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery.’ A few years before, another English traveller, the splenetic novelist Tobias Smollett, was even more appalled by the sight of the peasants he encountered travelling across France; they had the appearance more of ‘ravenous scarecrows’ than of human beings.
The poverty of many and the grievances of nearly all French peasants were much aggravated by their liability for taxes from which noble landowners might well be immune, and for increasingly burdensome feudal dues which were required of them by the local seigneur. It was also exasperating for the poor peasant that the tithe which he might perhaps have paid without undue complaint to the village curé, or as a contribution to the village church, was liable to go instead to some rich abbot of aristocratic birth whose monastery, though it might well be decaying, had as little need of the money as the abbot himself.
The clergy in France then numbered rather less than 100,000, yet they owned over one-tenth of the land, that is to say about 20,000 square miles. Despite these rich and rolling acres, most of the clergy were poor, for there existed in the Church a hierarchy quite as distinctly stratified as in the other orders of society. The bishops were all nobles, and canonrics were often considered the perquisites of well-to-do bourgeois families. Moreover, in many towns there were far more canons than there were hard-worked parish priests. In Angers, for example, where Church buildings and gardens took up half the area of the town, there were seventy canons but less than twenty priests.
Yet, although many priests were extremely poor, the Church as an institution was not only very rich but also powerful. It paid no taxes, voluntarily contributing instead a grant to the state every five years, and, as the amount of this grant was decided in the quinquennial Church Assemblies, the clergy were able to exercise a considerable influence over the policies of the Government. Nearly all schools were in the hands of the Church which had, in addition, its own courts of law. It also controlled most sources of information, since it had taken upon itself the responsibilities of censorship. For those who could not read, the clergy were the means by which Government decrees and intentions became known.
The charges made against the Church by the philosophes of the Enlightenment were often unjust: most clergy, particularly those of the humbler orders, were neither corrupt nor unfeeling, nor even harshly intolerant of religious dissent. But the Church’s great privileges, the scrupulously, not to say severely, businesslike manner in which many of its large estates were run, the number of absentee abbots and of well-endowed religious houses whose members were exclusively aristocratic, the gradual decline in belief of the virtues of a life of religious contemplation and the spread of scepticism among the influential middle class of the larger towns, all contributed to the growing spirit of anti-clericalism.
High as feelings ran against the Church in certain quarters, the general dislike of the aristocracy, from which its leaders came, was much more intense. King Louis XIV, while recognizing the social privileges of the nobility had done his best to exclude them from the exercise of power which he endeavoured to keep in his own hands and in those of his chosen Ministers. But, despite the resistance of Louis XVI’s Ministers, the aristocracy were, in the later years of the eighteenth century, beginning once again to tighten their hold on the machinery of government; and, bent upon the eventual destruction of royal absolutism, which was declining but by no means extinct, were determined, in the meantime, to resist any encroachments upon their privileges. These privileges were extensive: only they could become ambassadors; only they could reach the highest offices in the Church; only they could command regiments in the army. Indeed, since 1781 it had become virtually impossible to obtain a commission in the army at all unless four generations of aristocratic birth could be proved. The nobility were further privileged by being exempt from the direct tax known as the taille which fell largely upon the peasants–taillable being a social indignity as well as a burdensome expense – and from the corvées royales which obliged those liable, again mostly peasants, to pay for the construction and maintenance of roads and for the supply of wagons for the transport of troops. And although legally liable to pay those other more recent taxes levied in relation to income, the capitation and the vingtièmes, nobles enjoyed certain exemptions from these as well and were generally able to make a bargain with the intendant so as to escape paying the full amount.