The Marquis D'Argenson: A Study in Criticism / Being the Stanhope Essay: Oxford, 1893

XXXIV.

The Catholic Establishment shall be maintained as

"la base de la morale, dont le maintien est essentiel à la tranquillité et au bonheur public. Ceux que auraient le malheur de n'être pas convaincus des vérités qu'elle nous enseigne"

will be ineligible for public office; but no step shall be taken in the direction of persecution or proscription.

Complete toleration shall be maintained in so far as it is compatible with public order.

Such was the constitution projected by d'Argenson during the few years before his death. Its real meaning is clear and unmistakable: yet it has not escaped the evil fortune which has pursued so many of its author's plans. It is true that to concede to thirty-two provincial assemblies a virtually absolute power, while providing that the authority of the Crown shall be in no way diminished, may appear at first sight as strange an inconsequence as M. de Broglie[429] and others have found it. Yet a patient reading of d'Argenson's scheme is sufficient to show that with all its elaborate reservations, it involved nothing more nor less than the provisional surrender of the Sovereignty of France into the hands of the French people.

It is to be remembered that in the years which succeeded the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, d'Argenson had been watching with growing alarm the disaffection which was beginning to ferment:[430] and at the same time his old belief in the sovereign virtues of absolutism had been profoundly modified by a more lengthened experience.[431] We have only to bear in mind this change of opinion in considering his project of reform, to be alive to the numerous hints which it contains and to detect the real significance of its provisions. What d'Argenson proposed was virtually this: the whole administration of the interior was to be ceded to the people of France, organised in their parishes, districts, and provinces; the royal bureaucracy, the entire system of intendancies and sub-delegacies was to be swept away; and the Crown was to be represented in each Province by four Royal Commissioners, who should open the Estates at the end of November and explain to the deputies the wishes of the King, while leaving the execution of them to the Provincial government. These Royal Commissioners had power to appoint a flying squadron of subordinates, who were attached to no particular place nor any defined duty, whose principal business was to report to their superiors, and who were strictly forbidden to act upon their own authority, or, except in cases of the last emergency, to employ force against the people. Within the province not only the whole administration, but the assessment, collection and payment of the taxes, was entirely in the hands of the Estates.

"La guerre se faisait alors en nature, et actuellement elle se fait, pour ainsi dire, en argent."—"Considérations" (1784).

We cannot mistake the possible significance of these proposals, however implicitly it be conveyed. The provision that the King alone should make laws and impose taxes might be really little more than a constitutional fiction, which, so long as the laws were prudently made and the taxes equitably imposed, might pass as undisputed fact. The proposition that the royal ordinances must always be accepted might prove to be a fiction of the same kind. Indeed, in certain eventualities the whole scheme might be one continued fiction in so far as it relates to the Crown. The Provincial Estates shall not legislate, but they shall have power to present bills for the royal ratification. What will happen if their petitions are rejected is a question for time and circumstance, and not for legislation, to decide. In the same way the Estates must accept the contribution assessed upon them: but they may present representations in regard to it. If those representations are neglected the Estates will proceed as their power and wisdom may dictate. In a word, the absolute power of the Crown in legislation was conditioned only by the proper use of it.

D'Argenson had arrived at the conviction that the causes of the evil from which the country was suffering were the practical nullity of the Crown and the political nullity of the people; and he felt that the remedy was to be found in the admission of the people to a share of power. He knew not less than any of his critics, that where power is divided differences will arise; but he saw no reason to doubt that if King and people were guided by a common patriotism and mutual respect, such differences need never issue in violent collision. At the same time he knew that when the interests of the King were obstinately opposed to those of the people, such collisions would occur; they were calamitous, but they were the lesser of two calamities. He declares that in the case of "a King who is worthy of the name," such divergence of interest need never be feared. Should there be a King who was not worthy of the name, he might be left to the discretion of an indignant people, and of the most daring and determined man who happened at the moment to possess their confidence. It was none of d'Argenson's concern.

It is true that we do not find him stating, in this uncompromising way, the revolutionary aspect of his programme; he would have shrunk from formulating it clearly even to himself. At the same time we know that it was by no means distant from his mind. Notwithstanding, he cannot have regarded it as of any immediate or direct importance; for he could not but think that only by an access of inconceivable folly on the part of the people or of inconceivable madness on the part of the Crown, could such a revolutionary ferment be occasioned.

We cannot better appreciate the spirit and scope of d'Argenson's proposal than by comparing it with the universally admired design broached, about twenty years later, by the great minister Turgot. The principle of the two policies was practically the same. Turgot proposed, like d'Argenson, to entrust to the people and popular organisations the whole administration of the interior, while retaining the entire legislative authority in the hands of the Crown.[432] The people, as in d'Argenson's scheme, had merely the power of suggesting legislation, though the actual law must proceed from the King. Between the two plans, however, there was one great difference of detail. D'Argenson had surrounded the authority of the Crown with a sacred barrier; behind that barrier the people might exercise all the effective powers of popular control: beyond it they were forbidden to pass. In the proposal of Turgot that barrier was destroyed. Above the circle of Provincial Estates he desired to constitute a Municipality of the Whole Realm; by doing so he would have brought the sphere of popular action into direct juxtaposition with that of the Crown, and have surrounded the very palace gates with the acclamations or with the clamour of the people.

Perhaps both policies, at their several periods, had equally little prospect of realisation; but if it were necessary to choose between them with regard to the state of feeling existing and likely to exist in France, the preference might be given to the earlier plan. For a time of disturbance and strain, it can claim one signal excellence, in attempting to provide for the maximum of exasperation with the minimum of indecency and danger. It is the great vice of central, but not sovereign assemblies that they can never come into collision with the Crown without inflicting a grievous blow upon the prestige and authority of the Crown. The veil which shroud it from the vulgar gaze, which surrounds it with an air of sacramental mystery, is torn into a thousand disreputable pieces, and the solemn difference between King and citizen is seen to fade guiltily away. D'Argenson feared, and had always feared, that blighting closeness of contact; and he endeavoured to preserve the influence of the Crown while placing the people in a position from which, in cases of the last emergency, they would be able to control the Crown. It is easy to see how the King at Versailles and a number of Estates in the provincial cities might have quarrelled to the verge of revolution, and yet how the King, by timely concession, might have retained his authority unimpaired.

Nor is it hard to answer the question which some have found it necessary to ask, and to sketch the progress of a revolution proceeding from the basis of d'Argenson's scheme. Had the Government become utterly despicable and bad, and had the King shown himself unable or unwilling to undertake reform, the Provincial Estates might have waited in patience until popular feeling was at fever height, and then they might have offered the King his choice between a national insurrection

"Les jalousies réciproques des Princes Chrétiens sont peut-être aujourd'hui son appui le plus solide."—"Considérations" (1784). [Of the Turkish Empire.]

and the acceptance of a certain demand. That demand would have been that the hundred and twenty-eight deputies who represented the several Estates at the Court,[433] should be combined in a single assembly in order to concert measures for the future of the Kingdom. If the King had yielded, the deputies would have met, and have offered him the choice between a national insurrection and the acceptance of their advice. If he chose the latter alternative and endeavoured loyally to fulfil it, the assembly would disperse, matters would revert to their normal condition, and a politic effort would be made by all parties to forget the past. If, on the other hand, he remained contumacious, the people would resort to that last of political resources employed by England with such signal success a century and a half before. Such a state of things was never for a moment likely to arise. In 1755 the tradition of the French Monarchy remained unshaken.[434] A popular constitution would have been accepted as an act of grace; and the people would have been engaged too busily in remedying abuses to spend their strength in factious opposition. Only by suicidal folly on the part of the Crown could any danger have arisen. A moderate endowment of public spirit and common sense would have sufficed to protect the Government; and a monarch with one-half of the ability even of Louis XVI., or one tithe of the devotion maintained for generations in the House of Hohenzollern, would have been able to maintain his position with ease.

As a general constitutional proposition d'Argenson's plan is admirable enough; but when considered in relation to the paramount need of France at that particular moment it becomes a very master-work of statesmanship and sagacity. He alone could diagnose the conditions of the disease and discern the only remedy it was possible to apply. It is scarcely half the truth to say that the French Revolution was induced by bad government; there were times when the Government had been infinitely worse. The cause lay deeper. It lay in a social revolution which was already complete, and which the Crown refused to recognise.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the institutions of France had drifted into a condition of which history perhaps can afford no parallel. The aristocratic corporations of the Church, the law, and the land, whose influence the Crown for its own purposes had so often used and abused, were losing every particle of vital force; and the Monarchy found itself burdened and overborne by the weight of the great classes upon whom in times past it had leaned for support. The history of its last forty years is the history of a series of spasmodic efforts to rise to the grandeur of its great position: and the continual frustration of those efforts through the stolid egotism of the privileged orders.

Why was it, it may be asked, that what had once been an inexhaustible source of strength had become a fatal element of weakness? The cause is to be found in a social revolution which had been silently proceeding for nearly a century. Ever since the time of Colbert, the middle classes, the class of tax-farmers, merchants and manufacturers, had been increasing rapidly in wealth and importance. It was not the mere growth of a bourgeoisie; it was the rise of a new society, whose leaders were ready to sow their wealth in the garden of art and letters. So it was that while lordly ineptitude upon the field of battle made the French Government a byword in Europe, the name of France was rendered illustrious by bourgeois triumphs in literature and the arts.

Coincident with the rise of the middle class was the declining influence of the Church and the Nobility. For fifty years the Church had been engaged in one of the most despicable party fights which history records; its most successful men were witty libertines, who officiated at the unhallowed sacrament of the "petit souper," and whose only belief in heaven or earth was in the redeeming virtues of a cardinal's hat. The nobles were despised by the best among them. They were hopelessly sunk in debt; and those whose magnificence paid no interest were subsisting on pensions dispensed by favourites and wrung from wretches who fed on grass and had no stomach for resistance. The nobles were outshone by the farmers-general; the Church had ceded her empire to the "Philosophes"; while financier and "philosophe" were the social and intellectual leaders of a great society whose growth was transforming the aspect of France.

Had Fortune dealt as kindly with the Bourbon House as she had lately done with the failing Hapsburgs: could she have given to France in Louis XV. the latest and greatest of her kings, the Revolution might have been undreamed of, and the Bourbons absolute to this day. Such a man would have discerned the tendency of events: he would have thrown himself into line with it.[435] He would have sent his nobles beyond the Rhine, with a mission to die or to justify their existence; he would have crushed with an iron hand the pretensions of the Church; and turning Versailles into a national museum, he would have transferred his Court to the Louvre or the Tuileries, nor would he have allowed it to be surpassed in brilliance by the salons of the farmers-general.

By putting himself at the head of the new France, he might have renewed the tradition of the French Monarchy. Such might have been the work of a great King; but the Great King reviewed his squadrons on the plain of Potsdam, and devoted to France but a passing jest; and she was left to the guidance of one of the most pitiable and mean of men, who could do no more than watch

"C'est la déportation qui constitue principalement l'esclavage; nul n'est facilement esclave dans son pays."—"Considérations" (1784).

the clouds and predict the bursting of "Le Déluge."

Effort to avert it there was none. Versailles displayed perhaps as strange a combination of pomp and vanity as was ever known in the history of the world. It retained the profusion, without the dignity, of the Grand Age; and public affairs went as they could while incapable nobles and dissolute Churchmen exchanged the shuttle of an endless intrigue. In tradition and spirit it was utterly alien from the new society. But one representative of the rising classes won her way into the charmed circle; she entered the Court as Madame d'Etioles; but before long the wife of the farmer-general was lost in Madame la Marquise de Pompadour. In public affairs the blindness was equally insensate. The King consented to trail his ermine in the slush of ecclesiastical quarrels; and such men as Tencin were the rulers of France, while Voltaire was reduced to crave the favour of some obscure lieutenant of police. When at last a man arises who will not take Madame's gifts, but will consent to copy her music, and who will not accept a hundred louis for work worth a dozen francs, he is spoken of as some strange kind of wild animal, "un original d'une nouvelle espèce," in Madame's own words.[436] And meanwhile the silver-tongued "bourreau" went on correcting his proofs—of the "Contrat Social"—and inditing the charter of those great classes which the French Monarchy continued to ignore.

No man had cherished more fondly than d'Argenson his hopes of Louis XV., and none had been more cruelly disappointed. He acknowledged at last that the Monarchy could not save itself; he would have tried to save it in spite of itself. His method was the only possible one. Flinging aside, like a damaged tool, the decrepit organisation of the privileged orders, he would have called in the assistance of that great people who held the future in the hollow of their hand. He would have given them power by their own efforts to redeem the vices of the Government, and to free that Government from the vesture of privilege and tradition which clung to it like the shirt of Nessus. For the two-fold evil from which France was suffering, his scheme provided a double remedy. The people had no power to demand good government; the Crown, burdened as it was by the privileged orders, had scarcely the power to afford it. D'Argenson would have given the people the necessary power: he would have given the Crown the necessary freedom: and he would have left it to the patriotism of the nation and the good sense of the King to restore prosperity to their common country.

D'Argenson's constitution died with him, and he who will may call it a dream.

It is a pity that such dreams are not more frequent.