In the institutions of the church there was an article which has been hitherto very little noticed—namely, its penitential system. The study of this system is rendered much more interesting at the present day, since it is almost completely in accordance with the ideas of modern philosophy as to the principles and objects of the penal law. If we investigate the nature of the punishments used by the church, of the public penances which were its principal mode of inflicting chastisement, we shall find that their main design was to excite repentance in the mind of the criminal, and moral terror by the example in the beholders. There was also another idea mixed up with it—that of expiation. In a general point of view, I do not know if it be possible to separate the idea of expiation from that of punishment, and if there be not in every punishment a hidden and imperative demand for the expiation of the wrong committed, independently of the design of leading the guilty to repentance, and of scaring those who might be tempted to fall into crime. But putting aside this question, it is quite clear that repentance and example were the objects proposed by the church in its penitential system. Are these not also the objects of truly philosophic legislation? Have not the most enlightened jurists of the last age, and of our own days, advocated reform in the European penal legislation, upon the allegation of these very principles? Look at their works—look at those of Bentham, for example—and you will be surprised at the numerous resemblances you will find between the penal modes proposed by them and those employed by the church. They most certainly did not borrow them from her, nor could she have foreseen that her example might be one day adduced in aid of plans propounded by the least devout of philosophers.
By all sorts of methods the church likewise strove to repress the tendency of society to violence and continual wars. Every one is aware that it was by 'the truce of God,' and numerous measures of the same nature, that the church struggled against the employment of force, and devoted itself to introduce into society a greater degree of order and mildness. These facts are so well known, that I am spared the trouble of entering into any detail. [Footnote 9]
[Footnote 9: As many readers of this edition may not be such perfect masters of these facts as M. Guizot's auditory, it may be permitted the translator to mention, that the first volume of Robertson's History of Charles V. will be found the best expositor of these and other references which may not be familiar to the reader.]
Such are the principal points which I have to bring forward regarding the relations of the church with the people. We have now considered it under the three aspects which I first announced, and gained a knowledge of it both within and without, both in its internal constitution, and in its twofold outward position. It now remains to apply our knowledge to decide, by means of induction and conjecture, its general influence upon European civilisation. This is a labour almost accomplished, or at least much advanced, as the simple announcement of the predominant facts and principles in the church reveals and explains its influence; the results have in some sort already passed before us with the causes. However, in summing them up, we are led, I think, to two general conclusions.
The first is, that the church must necessarily have exercised a very considerable influence upon moral and intellectual order in modern Europe, and upon public ideas, sentiments, and manners. That the fact is unquestionable, is proved by the moral and intellectual development of Europe being essentially theological. A survey of history from the fifth to the sixteenth century exhibits theology possessing and directing the human understanding, and giving its impress to all opinions: philosophical, political, and historical questions, were all considered under a theological point of view. The church was so supreme in the intellectual order, that even mathematical and physical sciences were held to be subject to its doctrines. The theological spirit was, as it were, the blood which flowed in the veins of the European world, until Bacon and Descartes—Bacon in England, and Descartes in France—were the first to carry intellect out of the beaten tracks of theology.
The same fact is found in all branches of literature; theological modes of thought, feeling, and expression, are displayed at every step.
Upon the whole, this influence was salutary. Not only did it keep up, and render productive, the intellectual movement in Europe, but the system of doctrines and precepts, under sanction of which it imparted the movement, was very superior to anything that the ancient world had known. Movement and advancement existed at one and the same time.
The situation of the church, furthermore, has given an extension and variety to the development of the human mind which it never had previously. In the East, intellectual progress was altogether religious; in the Greek society it was almost exclusively human; in the one, humanity, properly so called, its actual nature and destiny, completely disappeared; in the other, it was man himself, his immediate passions, sentiments, and interests, which occupied the whole stage. In the modern world, the religious spirit has mingled with all things, without excluding any. Modern intelligence is impressed at once with humanity and divinity. Human sentiments and interests hold a material place in our literatures, and yet the religious character of man—that portion of his existence which is directed to another world—appears at every step therein; insomuch that the two great sources of the development of man, humanity and religion, have flowed abundantly, and at the same time; so that, in spite of all the evil and all the abuses mixed up with it, in spite of all its acts of tyranny, in an intellectual point of view the church has exercised an influence more calculated for development than repression, for expansion than contraction.
In a political point of view, the matter is very different. There can be no doubt that by softening feelings and manners, by decrying and suppressing a great number of barbarous practices, the church powerfully contributed to the amelioration of the social state; but in the political order, as properly defined, in that which affects the relations of government with subjects, of power with liberty, I do not believe that, upon the whole, its influence has been beneficial. Under this head the church has always come forward as the interpreter and defender of two systems—the theocratical and the imperial—that is to say, of despotism, sometimes under a religious form, sometimes under a civil form. Taking all its institutions, its entire legislation—taking its canons, and its modes of procedure—the principle of theocracy, or of the old empire, is throughout found predominant. When weak, the church sheltered itself under the absolute power of the emperors; when strong, it claimed that absolutism on its own account, on the plea of its spiritual power. We need not linger in adducing facts or particular cases. There is no question that the church often invoked the rights of the people against the bad government of the sovereigns; it often even approved of, and stimulated, insurrections; and it likewise frequently advocated, in its intercourse with the sovereigns, the rights and interests of the people. But whenever the question of political guarantees has arisen between power and liberty, whenever attempts have been made to establish a system of permanent institutions, which might truly and effectually shelter liberty from the encroachments of power, the church has generally ranged itself on the side of despotism.
There is no occasion for much astonishment at this, or to charge upon the clergy an undue proportion of human weakness, or to imagine it a vice peculiar to the Christian church. It has a much deeper and more powerful origin.
What does every religion lay claim to? The governance of human passions and of human will. Every religion is a curb, a power, a government. It comes in the name of divine law to subdue human nature. Therefore human liberty is its especial antagonist, which it is its object to vanquish. To this purpose is its mission and hope directed.
But although religions have to struggle with human liberty, and although they aspire to cast the will of man in a new mould, at the same time they have no other moral means of acting upon man than what he himself supplies, than his own will and liberty. When they act by outward means, as by force or seduction—in other words, by means other than the free concurrence of man— they treat him as we would one of the elements, water or wind, as a purely physical or material power; and they fail in their object, for they do not thereby reach or influence the inclination. For religions really to accomplish their task, it is necessary that man yields himself up to them, but voluntarily and of his own free will, and that he preserves his liberty even amidst his submission. Religions are thus called to solve a double problem.
This they have too often overlooked. They have considered liberty as an obstacle, and not as a means; they have forgotten the nature of the force to which they were to address themselves, and have acted with the human soul as with a material object. It is in consequence of this error that they have been led to range themselves on the side of power or despotism against human liberty, regarding it only as an adversary, and straining much more to subdue it than to procure it guarantees. If religions had well considered their means of action, if they had not given way to a natural but deceitful tendency, they would have discovered that their province was to strengthen liberty, in order morally to control it, that religion can, and ought to act only by moral influences; and they would have respected the free will of mankind, whilst applying themselves to direct it. This they have not done, and in the end the religious influence has itself suffered as much as liberty.
I will not go further with the examination into the general consequences of the influence of the church upon European civilisation. I sum them up in this twofold result—a great and salutary influence upon the intellectual and moral development; an influence more disastrous than beneficial upon the political order of things, properly so called. We have now to test our assertions by facts, and to verify by history what we have deduced from the mere nature of the ecclesiastical society, and the situation occupied by it. Let us see what was the condition of the Christian church from the fifth to the twelfth century, and whether, in fact, the principles which I have laid down, and the results I have endeavoured to draw from them, were such in their development as I have ventured to surmise.
We are not to believe that these principles and consequences have all appeared at once, and as connectedly as I have presented them. It is a signal, and yet a very common error, when contemplating the past at the distance of many centuries, to forget with a singular obliviousness that history is essentially successive. Take the life of a man, of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, or Cardinal Richelieu. He enters upon his career, and marches forward; great events influence him, he influences great events; finally he reaches the goal. Then we know him, but in his entirety, such as long experience and varied events have made him. [Footnote 10]
[Footnote 10: The original is not strictly followed in this phrase. M. Guizot gives vent to the following conceit:—'Tel qu'il est sorti en quelque sorte, après un long travail, de l'atelier de la Providence.']
Now, at starting he was not what he thus became, nor at any single period of his life was he complete and fully fashioned: his development was by a successive process. Men have a moral growth as well as a physical: every day brings its change: their being is perpetually undergoing modifications. The Cromwell of 1650 was not the Cromwell of 1640. There is, of course, always a certain individuality at bottom—it is the same man who works his way; but how changed are his ideas, his feelings, his designs! How many things were lost and acquired! In a word, whatever moment we may select in the life of a man, there is none in which he was such as we behold him when its term is reached.
Nevertheless, the majority of historians have fallen into error upon this point. Because they have acquired a complete idea of a man, they see him such during the whole course of his career: to them it is the same Cromwell who entered parliament in and who died thirty years afterwards in Whitehall palace. And with regard to institutions and general influences, the same mistake is incessantly committed. Let us take care to avoid it. I have sketched in their whole bearing the principles of the church and their consequences, but historically the picture is not correct. The whole has been partial, successive, distributed here and there over space and time. Our entirety, our prompt and systematic concatenation, will not be found in the recital of actual facts. Here one principle shoots forth, there another; all is incomplete, dissimilar, and scattered; and it is only by coming to modern times, to the end of the career, that the whole result is perceived.
I shall proceed to represent the different states through which the church passed from the fifth to the twelfth century. I thereby go to the fountain head; and if I fail in the complete demonstration of the assertions that I have thrown out, yet perhaps enough will be shown to evince them warrantable.
The first state in which the church is found in the fifth century is that of the imperial church, the church of the Roman Empire. At the period the Roman Empire fell, the church was indulging in the idea that her mission was accomplished, her triumph assured. She had then completely vanquished paganism. The last emperor who had assumed the office of pontifex maximus, a pagan dignity, was the Emperor Gratian, who had died at the end of the fourth century. She likewise believed herself at the end of her contest with heretics, especially with the Arians, the principal heretics of the day. The Emperor Theodosius had drawn up against them a peculiar and stringent body of laws at the end of the fourth century. The church, therefore, was in possession of the government, and had triumphed over her two greatest enemies. She was in this prosperous state when the Roman Empire suddenly failed her, and she found herself opposed to other pagans and heretics in the shape of the barbarians, as the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Franks. It was a prodigious fall. It may be easily imagined that a warm attachment for the Empire must have been preserved in the bosom of the church. Thus we see her steadily adhere to what remained of it, the municipal system and absolute power; and when the barbarians were converted, the church attempted to resuscitate the Empire. She addressed herself to the barbarian kings, and besought them to declare themselves Roman emperors, to assume all the rights formerly held by them, and to enter into the same relations with the church as she had had with the Roman Empire. It was especially to this point that the bishops of the fifth and sixth centuries laboured, and they imparted the general feature to the whole church.
It was impossible for this attempt to succeed. There were no means amongst the barbarians to reconstitute the Roman society. Like the civil world around it, therefore, the church itself fell into barbarism. That was its second state. When a comparison is made between the writings of the ecclesiastical chroniclers of the eighth century, and of those in the preceding ages, an immense difference is found. Every vestige of Roman civilisation disappeared, even to the language, and barbarism was at its very acme. For, on the one hand, barbarians entered into the clerical order, and became priests and bishops; and on the other, bishops adopted the barbarian life, and without quitting their bishoprics, constituted themselves chiefs of banditti, roaming over the country, pillaging and fighting, like the companions of Clovis. Gregory of Tours mentions several bishops who passed their lives after this fashion.
Two important facts, nevertheless, received their development in the bosom of this barbarian church. The first was the separation between the spiritual and temporal powers, which principle took its stand at that epoch, as a natural consequence of the state of things. The church not having succeeded in resuscitating the absolute power of the Roman Empire, so as to gain a share of it for herself, was driven to seek safety in independence. She was called upon to defend herself on every side, for she was incessantly threatened. The bishops and priests saw their barbarian neighbours interfere every instant in the affairs of the church, in order to seize upon her riches, her lands, and her power, and they had no other means of defending themselves than alleging—'The spiritual order is completely separated from the temporal, and you have no right to intervene in its affairs.' This principle became the defensive weapon of the church against barbarism in all quarters.
The second important fact which belongs to the same epoch, is the development of the monastic order in the West. It was at the commencement of the sixth century that Saint Benedict instituted his order amongst the monks of the West, who were then very few in number, but who subsequently multiplied prodigiously. The monks were not, up to that period, members of the clerical body, but were still regarded as laymen. No doubt priests and even bishops had been sought out amongst them; but it was not until the end of the fifth, and the beginning of the sixth century, that the monks in general were considered as forming part of the clergy, properly so called. After that, matters were reversed; priests and bishops became monks, conceiving that they thereby made a new progress in the religious life. Thus the monastic order took all at once an excessive development in Europe. The monks struck the imagination of the barbarians more forcibly than the secular clergy; their numbers, as well as the singularity of their lives, had an imposing effect upon them. The secular clergy, indeed—the bishop and the simple priest—were less reverently looked upon by the barbarians, accustomed as they were to see, maltreat, and despoil them. An attack on a monastery, on so many holy men congregated in one holy place, was a much more serious affair. Thus the monasteries were, during the barbarian epoch, places of asylum for the church, as she herself was a resort for refuge to the laity. Pious men flocked to them for shelter, as in the East they fled to the Thebaide to escape a worldly life and the contamination of Constantinople.
Such are the two great facts which appertain to the barbarian epoch in the history of the church: on the one hand, the development of the principle of the separation between the spiritual and temporal powers; and on the other, the development of the monastic system in the West.
Towards the end of the barbarian epoch, there was a new attempt to resuscitate the Roman Empire made by Charlemagne. The church and the civil sovereign contracted once more a strict alliance. It was a period of great docility, and therefore of great advancement to the Papacy. The attempt at resuscitation again failed; the Empire of Charlemagne fell, but the advantages that the church had drawn from its alliance remained with her. The Papacy was definitively planted at the head of Christianity.
After the death of Charlemagne, chaos came again; the church relapsed into it as well as civil society, and emerged in like manner to enter into the frame of feudalism. This was its third state. The dissolution of the Empire of Charlemagne produced in the ecclesiastical order almost the same effect as in the civil—the complete disappearance of unity, a break-up into local, partial, and individual distributions. This situation of the clergy, then, originated a struggle not previously known up to that period—namely, the struggle between the sentiments and interests of a fief-holder and those of a priest. The chiefs of the church were between these two temptations, each striving for the mastery; the ecclesiastical spirit was no longer so powerful or universal, private interest had more charms, whilst the taste for independence, and the habits of a feudal life, relaxed the bonds of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. An attempt was made in the bosom of the church to avert the effects of this relaxation, and by a system of federation, by means of general assemblies and deliberations, to organise in various quarters national churches. It is at this epoch, under the feudal system, that we perceive the greatest number of councils and convocations, of provincial and national ecclesiastical assemblies, held. This essay at unity appears to have been especially followed out in France. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, may be considered as the chief organ of this idea; he was constantly engaged in the labour of organising the French church; he sought out and employed all the means of intercourse and correspondence which might restore some portion of unity to the feudal church. Hincmar maintained, on the one hand, the independence of the church with regard to the temporal power, and on the other, its irresponsibility to the Papacy. It was he who, knowing that the Pope wished to come into France, and threatened to excommunicate some bishops, said, 'Si excommunicaturus venerit, excommunicatus abibit' ('If he come here to excommunicate, he shall go back with an anathema at his own head.')
But the endeavour thus to organise the feudal church, had no better success than the previous one to restore the organisation of the imperial church. There were no means available to reestablish unity in that church. Its disorganisation was continually increasing. Each bishop, prelate, and abbot, isolated himself more and more in his diocese or in his monastery. Disorders multiplied from the same cause. This period was distinguished for the greatest abuses of simony, for the completely arbitrary disposition of ecclesiastical benefices, and for the most deplorable corruption of manners amongst the priests.
These disorders were extremely revolting both to the people and the better-minded portion of the clergy. Hence we see that at an early date a spirit of reform arose in the church, and a desire to find some authority competent to rally the stray elements and give them law. Claude, bishop of Turin, and Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, made some attempts of this sort in their respective dioceses; but they were in no condition to accomplish so great a work. There was only one force within the church itself which could succeed in such an object, and that was the court of Rome, the Papacy. In consequence, it was not long in becoming predominant. In the course of the eleventh century the church passed to her fourth state, that of a theocratical and monastical church. The creator of this new form assumed by the church, so far as it belongs to a man to create, was Gregory VII.
We are accustomed to regard Gregory VII. as a man who strove to render all things stagnant, as an adversary of intellectual development and of social progress, as a man, in fact, who laboured to retain the world in a stationary or retrograding system. No idea can be less correct; Gregory VII. was a reformer by means of despotism, like Charlemagne and Peter the Great. He was in the ecclesiastical order pretty nearly what Charlemagne in France and Peter the Great in Russia were in the civil order. His object was to reform the church, and, through her, civil society—to introduce into them a greater degree of morality, justice, and regularity; and this he wished to effect through the Holy See, and to its advantage.
At the same time that he endeavoured to subject the civil world to the church, and the church to the Papacy, in the spirit of reform and advancement, and not of stagnation or retrogression, an attempt of the same nature was made, a similar movement was produced, in the cloisters of the monasteries. A desire for order, discipline, and rigid morality was zealously manifested. It was the period in which Robert de Molême introduced a severe order at Citeaux, it was the era of St. Norbert, and the reform of the prebendaries, of the reform of Cluny, and finally of the great reform of St. Bernard. A general ferment reigned in the monasteries; the old monks stood up in their own defence, asserted innovation to be a thing of evil, proclaimed their liberty infringed upon, maintained that the people ought to rest satisfied with the manners of the age, that it was out of the question to return to the primitive strictness of the church, and treated all these reformers as madmen, dreamers, and tyrants. Look at the history of Normandy by Orderic Vital, and these complaints will be found unceasingly urged.
All, therefore, seemed turning to the advantage of the church, to its unity and power. But whilst the Papacy was striving to clutch the government of the world, and the monasteries were reforming themselves in a moral point of view, a few vigorous-minded, although isolated, men asserted the right of human reason to be considered of some value, and to take part in the constitution of opinions. The majority of them did not attack the received doctrines, the articles of religious belief; they merely said that reason had a right to investigate them, and that it was not sufficient that they were affirmed by authority. John Erigena (Scotus), Roscelin, and Abelard—these were the advocates by whom individual reason recommenced to claim its inheritance; these were the first authors of the movement made for liberty, which was contemporaneous with the movement for reform made by Hildebrand and St. Bernard. When we inquire into the predominant character of this movement, we perceive it was not a change of opinion, or a revolt against the public articles of faith, but merely an assertion of the right of reason to exercise its functions. The scholars of Abelard asked him, as he tells us himself in his 'Introduction to Theology,' 'for philosophical arguments proper to satisfy reason, begging him to instruct them, not merely so as to repeat by rote what he communicated to them, but to understand him; for no one can believe without first comprehending, and it is absurd to preach to others of things which neither he who professes, nor those whom he teaches, can understand. What object can the study of philosophy have, if not to lead to that of God, to whom all ought to be referred? With what view are the faithful permitted to read the writings treating of the events of the age and the books of the Gentiles, unless it be to form them for the understanding of the truths of the Holy Scriptures, and to give them the necessary ability to defend them? It is especially necessary to be fortified by all the powers of reason, in order to prevent, upon questions so difficult and complicated as those which are the objects of the Christian faith, the subtleties of its enemies succeeding too easily in adulterating the purity of our faith.'
The importance of this first attempt at liberty, of this reproduction of the spirit of examination, was soon felt. Although occupied in reforming itself, the church did not the less take alarm: it immediately declared war against these new reformers, whose appearance threatened it much more than their doctrines. Behold the great fact which illustrates the end of the eleventh and the commencement of the twelfth century, whilst the church presented itself in the theocratic and monastic state! For the first time, a serious contest arose between the clergy and the free-thinkers. The quarrels of Abelard and St. Bernard, the councils of Soissons and Sens, in which Abelard was condemned, are but the evidences of that fact which has held so important a place in the history of modern civilisation. It was the principal circumstance in the state of the church in the twelfth century, the point of time at which we shall now leave it.
A movement of a different nature took place at the very same period, the movement towards the enfranchisement of the boroughs. It was attended by a singular proof of the inconsistency of barbarian and rude minds. If those burgesses who maintained their own freedom with such zeal, had been told that there were men who asserted the rights of human reason, of free examination, and were denounced by the church as heretics, they would have stoned or burnt them on the instant. Abelard and his friends were exposed to this danger more than once. On the other hand, those very writers who were the champions of the rights of human reason, spoke of the efforts for enfranchisement of the boroughs as productive of abominable disorder, and of the overthrow of society. Thus war seemed declared between the philosophical and the municipal movement, between intellectual and political enfranchisement. To reconcile these two great actions, and to bring them to a comprehension of the community of their interests, ages have been required. In the twelfth century they were utterly severed, as we shall see in our succeeding inquiry into the enfranchisement of the boroughs.
Lecture VII.
Boroughs And Their Influence.
The feudal system and the church, the two first great fundamental elements of modern civilisation, have now been brought down to the twelfth century, and our present object will be to trace the third of those elements, the boroughs, to the same era, confining ourselves within the limits we have observed with regard to the other two.
Our inquiry into boroughs commences with a different situation from that held by the church or the feudal system. From the fifth to the twelfth century, these latter, although they afterwards underwent new developments, exhibited themselves as nearly complete, and in a definitive state; their birth, growth, and maturity, all occurred within that interval. It was very different with boroughs. It was not until the end of the epoch upon which our attention is engaged, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that they took any place in history; not meaning thereby that their previous history calls for no examination, or that the traces of their existence long before that period are not discoverable, but that it was only in the eleventh century that they made a distinct appearance on the great stage of the world, and came out as an important element of modern civilisation. Thus, in surveying the feudal system and the church from the fifth to the twelfth century, we have found effects developed and produced from causes, or, in other words, whenever, by induction or conjecture, we have deduced results from certain principles, we have been able to verify them by reference to facts. This is a facility which we do not possess with the boroughs. At the present moment, I shall only speak of causes and origins; and what I may say upon the effects of their existence, and upon their influence on the progress of European civilisation, will be in some sort by way of prediction, as the adducement of contemporary and known facts will be impossible. It is not until a later date, in the period stretching from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, that we shall perceive corporations take their development, as an institution bear fruit, and history prove our predictions. I mark this difference of situation the more emphatically, in order to obviate objections against the incompleteness and prematureness of the picture I am about to give.
I will suppose that a burgher of the twelfth century had suddenly appeared amongst us in 1789, at the moment that the terrible regeneration of France commenced, and that there had been given him to read (for we must endow him with the power to read) one of those pamphlets which then so violently agitated the minds of men; for example, the pamphlet of M. Sieyes—'What is the third estate?' Let us imagine his eyes falling on this phrase—the main point of the publication—'The third estate is the French nation, less the nobility and the clergy.' I ask, what impression would such a phrase produce on the mind of this man? Would he understand it? The words, 'the French nation,' would be beyond his comprehension, for they would convey no idea of anything known to him, or existing in his own day; but if he should understand the phrase—if he had a clear conception of that sovereignty attributed to the third estate over all society, it would assuredly appear to him a nearly insane and impious proposition, so much would it be in contradiction to what he had seen, and to the entire bent of his ideas and sentiments.
Now, ask this bewildered burgher to follow you, and conduct him to some of the then boroughs of France, to Rheims, Beauvais, Laon, or Noyon. A surprise of a different nature would here await him. On entering the town he would perceive no towers, no ramparts, no burgher guard, no means of defence, but all open and exposed to the first hostile occupant. The safety of such a municipality would appear to him very uncertain and weakly guaranteed. Penetrating into the interior, and inquiring into what was there passing, into the manner in which it was governed, and into the condition of the inhabitants, he would be told that there was a power outside which taxed them as it pleased, summoned their militia, and sent it to distant wars, regardless of their consent; that there were magistrates, mayors, and sheriffs, whom the burgesses had no share in nominating, and that the affairs of the borough were not decided in the borough itself, but that a man named by the king, an intendant, alone and from a distance, administered them. Furthermore, he would be told that the inhabitants had no right to assemble and deliberate in common upon what concerned them—that the bell of their church did not summon them to the public square. The burgess of the twelfth century would be perfectly at a loss to comprehend these matters. First he was bewildered and dismayed at the grandeur and importance that the burgher community, the third estate, attributed to itself, and now he finds it, upon its own hearthstone, in a state of servitude, weakness, and nullity, worse than anything he had known as most disastrous. Passing from one contemplation to the other—from the idea of a sovereign commonalty to the survey of its powerlessness—how could he comprehend and reconcile the difference, or disentangle his mind from confusion?
On the other hand, let us carry a burgess of the nineteenth century back to the twelfth, and he will find things under the same double aspect, but the situations changed. Contemplating the general affairs of the age, the state, the government of the country, and society at large, we see or hear nothing of the burgesses; they are altogether without importance in the state. And not only so, but in speaking or thinking of themselves and their situation in relation to the general government of France, their language is timid and humble in the extreme. Their old masters, the lords of fiefs, from whom they wrung their franchises, are found treating them, in words at least, with a pride which surprises us, but was far from astonishing or irritating them.
But entering into the borough itself, and surveying what is there passing, we find the scene changed. We are in a sort of fortified place, defended by the armed burgesses, who tax themselves, elect their own magistrates, sit in judgment, inflict punishments, and assemble to deliberate upon their own affairs; making war even against their lord, and having their own militia. In a word, they govern themselves, and are superior to control.
Here is a contrast of the same order as that which so much surprised the burgess of the twelfth century in the France of the eighteenth, only the parts are reversed. In the latter, the burgher order or nation is everything, the borough nothing; in the former, the degrees of importance are diametrically opposite.
Assuredly many things and many extraordinary events must have passed, and many revolutions have been accomplished between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, to produce so prodigious a change in the state of one social class. Yet, in spite of this change, there is no doubt that the third estate of 1789 was, politically speaking, the descendant and heir of the burghers of the twelfth century. That haughty and ambitious 'French nation,' which raised its pretensions so high, proclaimed its sovereignty with such pomposity, and pretended not only to regenerate and govern itself, but also to govern and regenerate the world, incontestibly descended from those borough communities, who made their obscure though courageous stands in the twelfth century, with the sole object of throwing off the tyrannical yoke of nameless lords in their respective isolated corners.
Now, although there is no question that the explication of so great a metamorphosis will not be found in the state of the boroughs in the twelfth century, but that it has been effected and has its causes in the events which have occurred between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, yet the origin of the third estate has been of great consequence in its history; and whilst we shall not therein discover the full secret of its destiny, we may at least discern the germ thereof; for what it was at first, is found again in what it has become, to a much greater extent than appearances would lead us to presume. A survey, although an incomplete one, of the state of the boroughs in the twelfth century, will, I think, be decisive of the fact.
In entering upon an investigation into this state, in order fully to comprehend it, we must consider the boroughs in two main points of view. There are two important questions to resolve: the first, that of the enfranchisement of the boroughs themselves, the inquiry how the revolution operated, and from what causes, what change it produced in the situation of the burghers, and what was its effect upon society at large, upon the other classes, and upon the state. The second question is relative to the government of the boroughs, the internal condition of the enfranchised towns, the relations of the burgesses amongst themselves, and the principles, the forms, and the manners in vogue within the communities.
From these two sources—on the one hand, from the change introduced into the social position of the burghers, and on the other, from their internal or borough government—all their influence on modern civilisation has been derived. That influence has been productive of no one fact which may not be referred to one or other of these two causes. Therefore, when we shall have thoroughly sifted them, and obtained an insight into the circumstances of their enfranchisement on the one hand, and their government on the other, we shall possess, as it were, the two keys to their history.
I will first say a few words on the diversity in the state of boroughs throughout Europe. The facts which I shall bring forward will not apply indifferently to all the Italian, Spanish, English, and French boroughs; some of them are referable to them all; but there are great and important differences. These I will indicate as I go on: we shall subsequently find them in the progress of civilisation, and will then investigate them more narrowly.
To have a proper idea of the enfranchisement of the boroughs, it is necessary to go back to the state of towns from the fifth to the tenth century, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the time at which the borough revolution commenced. The differences were, I repeat, very great; the condition of towns varied extensively in the different countries of Europe, yet there are some general facts which may be affirmed of almost all towns, to which I shall endeavour to restrict myself. When I have done with them, the more special matter will apply to the boroughs of France, and particularly to those in the north of France, above the Rhone and the Loire. These will be prominent points in the picture it is my object to draw.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, from the fifth to the tenth century, the towns were in a state neither of liberty nor of servitude. In the use of words, we run the same chance of error as I previously remarked took place in the description of men and of events. When a society has endured for a long period, and also its language, words take a complete, determinate, and precise meaning, a legal and official sense, as it were. Time has introduced into the meaning of each term a multitude of ideas which are awakened as soon as it is pronounced, but which, not being all included at the same date, are not all applicable to one period. For example, the words slavery and liberty arouse ideas in our minds at the present day infinitely more precise and perfect than correspond to the facts existing in the eighth, ninth, or tenth centuries. If we say that the towns were in a state of liberty in the eighth, we say far too much, for we attach at present a meaning to the word 'liberty' which does not portray the state of things in that century. We fall into the same error if we say that the towns were in servitude, for this word implies something very different from the municipal conditions of the period. Thus, I repeat, the towns were not then in a state either of servitude or of liberty; they suffered all the evils which befall weakness, and were a prey to the continual violence and depredations of the strong; but in spite of so many and such frightful disorders, in spite of their impoverishment and depopulation, they never lost a certain degree of importance. In the major part there was a clergy or a bishop who exercised considerable power, having influence over the inhabitants, and serving as a link between them and their conquerors, thus maintaining the town in a species of independence, and covering it with the shield of religion.
Considerable remnants of the Roman institutions likewise lingered in the towns. Frequent instances of the convocations of the senate and the curia are met with at this epoch, and many facts of that nature have been collected by Messrs de Savigny and Hulmann, Mademoiselle de Lezardière, &c. There is some doubt concerning public assemblies and municipal magistrates. But the affairs of civil life, testaments, donations, and a multitude of other acts, are legalised in the curia by its officers, as took place in Roman municipalities. Yet barbarism, and an always increasing disorder, hastened the depopulation of towns, and gradually undermined all that remained of urban activity and freedom. The establishment of the masters of the land in the country districts, and the growing preponderance of the rural life, were additional causes of decay to the towns. The bishops themselves, when they had entered into the feudal frame, attached much less importance to their municipal ties. Finally, when feudalism had completely triumphed, the towns, without falling into the slavery of the serfs, found themselves under the sway of liege lords, and comprised within fiefs, in consequence of which they lost that share of independence which had been left to them in times even more barbarous, in the first ages of the invasion. So that from the fifth century to the period of the complete organisation of feudalism, the state of towns was continually getting worse.
When feudalism was once fairly established, when each man had taken up his station, and planted himself on an estate, and the wandering life had finally ceased, the towns, after a certain interval, began again to acquire some importance, and to deploy a renewed activity. Human activity is like the fecundity of the earth; as soon as the storm ceases, it reappears, germinates, and bears fruit. Whenever there is the least glimpse of order and peace, mankind resumes hope, and with hope labour. Thus it happened in the towns: so soon as the feudal system was well fixed, there sprang up amongst the fief-holders new wants and a certain taste for advancement and amelioration, to satisfy which a little commerce and industry took root in the towns of their domains, and wealth and population returned to them; slowly, I admit, but still they returned. Amongst the circumstances which hastened that result, may be reckoned one not hitherto much regarded—namely, the right of sanctuary in churches. Even before the boroughs were constituted, and before their force and ramparts enabled them to hold out an asylum to the wretched population of the fields, the protection which could be found in the church alone was sufficient to attract a great many fugitives into the towns. They came to shelter themselves either in the church itself, or around the church; and they were not confined to men of the inferior class, serfs and boors, but were frequently men of consideration and wealth who had been proscribed. The chronicles of the epoch are full of such examples. We see men, formerly powerful, pursued by a neighbour yet more powerful, or by the king himself, abandoning their domains, carrying off all their movables, and flying to a town to put themselves under the protection of a church. These men became burgesses; and such refugees were, in my opinion, of some influence on the progress of towns, as they brought into them both wealth and the elements of a population superior to the bulk of the former inhabitants. Besides, is it not probable that when anything like a considerable association had been formed in any quarter, men would flock to it not only on account of the greater security afforded by it, but also from the mere spirit of sociability which is so natural to them?
By dint of all these causes, the towns acquired a certain degree of strength after the feudal system had become somewhat regulated. But security was not gained in the same proportion. It is true the wandering life had ceased, yet this wandering life had been to the conquerors and new proprietors of the soil a great means of gratifying their passions. When urged by a craving for plunder, they had made a foray, or gone to a distance in search of fresh fortune or a fresh domain. But when each had fixed himself, and it was necessary to renounce the conquering vagabond life, the taste for it was far from ceasing, or brutish appetites, or fierce desires, from abating. Their weight fell upon that part of the population lying most at the mercy of those possessed of power, upon the towns. Instead of going to a distance to pillage, they pillaged near their own homes. The extortions of the lords upon the burgesses redoubled from the beginning of the tenth century. Every time that the proprietor of a domain in which a town was included had any lust of pelf to satisfy, the burgesses were sure to feel its worst effects. It was at this epoch, more than at any other, that the complaints of the boroughs were loud and repeated, in consequence of the absolute want of security to commerce. The merchants, after making their rounds, were unable to return in peace into their towns; the roads and avenues were incessantly blocked up by the lord and his followers. The period in which industry recommenced its exercise was thus precisely that in which security was most deficient. Nothing frets men more than to be thus troubled in their labours, and despoiled of the fruits which they had thence anticipated. They are thereby much more annoyed and enraged than when they are subjected to suffering in a course of life for a long time fixed and monotonous, or when that of which they are deprived is not the result of their own activity, exerted in the reasonable hope of drawing sure returns. In the progressive movement which lifts up a man or a population to a new fortune, there is a principle of abhorrence for iniquity and violence much more energetic than in any other situation.
This, then, was the condition of the towns in the course of the tenth century. Their strength, importance, and riches had increased; and these acquisitions rendering them every day objects of greater envy to the lords, it became more than ever necessary to be able to defend them. The danger and the evil grew in magnitude with the means of resisting them. Indeed the feudal system offered to all its participators the continual example of resistance; it presented to the mind, under no modification, the idea of an organised government, capable of regulating and controlling all by its intervention alone. On the contrary, the spectacle of individual will, refusing to submit to any restraint, was unceasingly displayed. The greater number of the fief-holders was in this position with regard to their lords-paramount, and the small lords with regard to the great; so that, at the very time when the towns were oppressed and tormented, and they began to have new and important interests to maintain, they had under their eyes a continual lesson of insurrection. Feudalism has certainly done this service to humanity, that it has given a perpetual exhibition of individual will acting in all its energy. The lesson was not thrown away, for notwithstanding their weakness, and the prodigious inequality of condition between them and their lords, the towns became insurgent on all sides.