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unfortunate.* They saw them in idyls, operas, stories, and romances, which caused them to shed tears of compassion; they wept with Bernardin Saint-Pierre, with Grétry and Sedaine, Berquin and Florian; they found merit in their tears, and would say to themselves: "I have a good heart."

Thus weak-hearted, easy, open-handed, and incapable of withstanding the temptation of spending, they required money, much money, more than their fathers. Hence the necessity of deriving large profits from their lands, of handing the peasant over to men of money, stewards, and agents. The more feeling the masters possessed, the more generous and philanthropic they were at Paris, and the more their vassals died of hunger; they lived less at their castles, in order not to see this misery, which would have been too painful for their sensibility.

Such was in general that feeble, worn-out, effeminate society. It willingly spared itself the sight of oppression, and oppressed only by proxy. However, there were not wanting provincial nobles, who prided themselves on maintaining in their castles the rude feudal traditions, and governed their family and their vassals harshly. Let us merely mention here the celebrated Ami des hommes, Mirabeau's father, the enemy of his family, who would lock up all his household, wife, sons, and daughters, people the state-prisons, have law-suits with his neighbours, and reduce his people to despair. He relates that, on giving a fête, he was himself astonished at the moody, savage aspect of his peasants. I can easily believe it; those poor people were probably afraid lest the Ami des hommes should take them for his children.

We must not be surprised if the peasant, having once taken up arms, made use of them, and had his revenge. Several lords had cruelly vexed their districts, who remembered it when the time had come. One of them had walled up the village well, and monopolised it for his own use. Another had seized on the common lands. They perished. Several other murders are recorded, which, doubtless, were acts of revenge.

*This is confessed by M. De Maitre, in his Considérations sur la Révolution (1796).

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The general arming of the towns was imitated in the rural districts. The taking of the Bastille encouraged them to attack their own bastilles. The only subject of astonishment, when one knows what they underwent, is, that they began so late. Sufferings and promises of revenge had accumulated by delay, and been stored up to a frightful height. When that monstrous avalanche, long pent up in a state of ice and snow, suddenly thawed, such a mass gave way, that everything was overwhelmed in its fall.

It would be necessary to distinguish, in that immense scene of confusion what appertains to the wandering bands of pillagers, people driven about by famine, from what the domiciled peasants, the communes, did against their lord.

The evil has been carefully collected, but not so the good. Several lords found defenders in their vassals: for instance, the Marquis de Montfermeil, who, in the preceding year, had borrowed a hundred thousand francs in order to relieve them. Nay, the most furious sometimes stopped short in presence of weak adversaries. In Dauphiné, for instance, a castle was respected, because they found in it only a sick lady, in bed, with her children; they merely destroyed the feudal archives.

Generally, the peasant marched at once to the castle to demand arms; then, more daring, he burned the acts and titles. The greater part of those instruments of bondage, those which were the most immediate and oppressive, were much oftener in the register offices, with the attorneys and notaries. The peasant rarely went there. He preferred attacking the antiquities, the original charters. Those primitive titles, on fine parchments, adorned with triumphant seals, remained in the treasury of the castle to be shown on grand days. They were stored away in sumptuous cases, in velvet portfolios at the bottom of an oaken ark,-the glory of the turret. No important feudal manor but showed, near its feudal dove-cote, its tower of archives.

Our country people went straight to the tower. There, in their estimation, was the Bastille, tyranny, pride, insolence, and the contempt of mankind; for many centuries, that tower had seemed to sneer at the valley, sterilizing, blighting, and oppressing it with its deadly shadow. A guardian of the country in barbarous times, standing there as a sentinel, it became

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later an object of horror, In '89, what was it but the odious witness of bondage, a perpetual outrage, to repeat every morning to the man trudging to his labour, the everlasting humiliation of his race! “Work, work on, son of serfs, earn for another's profit; work, and without hope.'

Every morning and every evening, for a thousand years, perhaps more, that tower had been cursed. A day came when it was to fall.

O glorious day, how long you have been in coming! How long our fathers expected and dreamed of you in vain! The hope that their sons would at length behold you, was alone able to support them; otherwise, they would no longer have consented to live; they would have died in their agony. And what has enabled me, their companion labouring beside them in the furrow of history, and drinking their bitter cup, to revive the suffering middle ages, and yet not die of grief? Was it not you, O glorious day, first day of liberty? I have lived in order to relate your history!

CHAPTER IV.

THE RIGHTS OF MAN.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.-Disturbances; the Danger of France. The Assembly creates the Committee of Inquiry, July 27th. -Attempts made by the Court; it wants to prevent the Trial of Besenval; the Royalist Party wishes to make a Weapon of Public Charity. The Revolutionary Part of the Nobility offer to abandon the Feudal Rights.-Night of the 4th of August; Class Privileges abandoned; Resistance of the Clergy; Privileges of Provinces abandoned.

ABOVE all that great commotion, in a region more serene, the National Assembly, without allowing itself to be molested by noise and clamour, was buried in thought and meditation.

The violence of party spirit which had divided it, seemed awed and restrained by the grand discussion with which its labours began. Then people plainly saw how profoundly that aristocracy, the natural adversary of the interests of the Revolution, had been wounded in its ideas. They were all Frenchmen, after all, all sons of the eighteenth century and philosophy.

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Either side of the Assembly, preserving its opposition, nevertheless entered upon the solemn examination of the declaration of rights with due solemnity.

The question was not a petition of rights, as in England, an appeal to the written law, to contested charters, or to the true or false liberties of the Middle Ages.

The question was not, as in America, to go seeking from state to state the principles which each of them acknowledged, to sum up and generalize them, and construct with them (à posteriori) the total formula which the confederation would accept.

The question was to give from above, by virtue of a sovereign, imperial, pontifical authority, the credo of the new age. What authority? Reason, discussed by a whole century of philosophers, profound thinkers, accepted by every mind and penetrating social order, and lastly, fixed and reduced to a formula by the logicians of the Constituent Assembly. The question was to impose as authority on reason what reason had found at the bottom of free inquiry.

It was the philosophy of the age, its legislator, its Moses, descending from the mount, with the rays of glory on its brow, and bearing the tables of the law in its hands.

There have been many disputations for and against the declaration of rights, but nothing to the point.

Mere

First of all, we have nothing to say to such as Bentham and Dumont, to utilitarians and quacks, who acknowledge no law but the written law, who know not that right is right only so far as it is conformable to right, to absolute reason. attorneys, nothing more, in the garb of philosophers; what right have they to despise practical men? Like them, who write the law upon paper and parchment, we would engrave ours on tables of eternal right, on the rock that bears the world invariable justice and indestructible equity.

To answer our enemies, let us confine ourselves to them and their contradictions. They sneer at the Declaration, and submit to it; they wage war against it for thirty years, promising their people the liberties which it consecrates. When conquerors in 1814, the first word they address to France they borrow from the grand formula which she laid

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down.* Conquerors did I say? No, conquered rather, and conquered in their own hearts; since their most personal act, the treaty of the Holy Alliance, reproduces the right that they have trampled on.

The Declaration of Rights attests the Supreme Being, the guarantee of human morality. It breathes the sentiment of duty. Duty, though not expressed, is no less everywhere present; everywhere you perceive its austere gravity. A few words borrowed from the language of Condillac, do not prevent us from recognising in the ensemble the true genius of the Revolution, a Roman gravity and a stoic spirit.

Right was the first thing to be spoken of at such a moment,† it was rights that it was necessary to attest and claim for the people. People had believed till then that they had only duties.

However high and general such an act may be, and made to last for ever, can one reasonably expect it to bear no marks of the troublous period of its birth, no sign of the storm?

The first word was uttered three days before the 14th of July and the taking of the Bastille; the last, a few days before the people brought the king to Paris (the 6th of October). A sublime apparition of right between two storms.

No circumstances were ever more terrible, nor any discussion more majestic or more serious, even in the midst of emotion. The crisis afforded specious arguments to both parties.

Take care, said one, you are teaching man his rights, when he perceives them but too plainly himself; you are transporting him to a high mountain, and showing him his boundless empire. What will happen, when, on descending, he will find himself stopped by the special laws that you are going to make, when he will meet with boundaries at every step? ‡

There was more than one answer, but certainly the strongest

* And very voluntarily borrowed; since it was done by all the kings of Europe at the head of eight hundred thousand soldiers. They acknowledge that every people has the right of choosing its government. See Alexandre de Lameth, p. 121.

Of right and liberty alone: nothing more at first in that charter of enfranchisement. I explain myself more fully in the Introduction, and in the other volumes.

Discours de Malouet.