The world's greatest conflict. Review of France and America 1788 to 1800, and history of America and Europe 1800 to 1804

Preface

The world's greatest conflict is the struggle for and against good government. Our Revolution established independence, but it did not settle our government; that grand work was later. We had one State (Vermont) outside the Union, and thirteen commonwealths but loosely connected. They were not firmly united.

Popular rule of a great combination of States with varying interests and habits was not yet accomplished. To do it properly demanded an invention — a new mechanism. The American system in which a clearly expressed Constitution, interpreted by an independent judiciary, defines, limits and overrules all executive power and all legislation, prevents aggression by or against the Government, and guarantees the rights of every person, however humble, is the greatest of all inventions; the grandest achievement of human intellect.

Republics had already existed ; they are of ancient origin — even steam and steam machinery existed before James Watt. But those old republics compare with the modern system now used in both Americas, Great Britain, France, Australia and Switzerland, as does the rude steamboat of Blasco de Garey of blessed memory with that great Inman steamer, the City of New York.

Our best statesmen were then students of statesmanship — seekers for a system to secure individual liberty and equality and the certainty of legal remedies, and yet to restrain license, protect person and property, to

IV PREFACE.

surely punish crime, and to debar any part of the people from invading the rights of any other part. It was not perfect — it has been several times amended.

Lack of precedent rendered American government in the times of Washington, Adams and Jefferson, more crude and much more difficult than to-day, when laws, practices and expectations of State legislatures and courts are better affiliated.

Our form of government and those of Great Britain and France are not due to any one man, but are the work of self-made nations who are willing to make the mutual concessions always necessary to any good government. The vital principle of success is consent to peacefully abide the decisions of the majority — a failure to obey which barred from success the first French Revolution.

Great Britain has now a free popular government so far as its House of Commons, and that House controls the Ministry. Members are elected by manhood suffrage in a form of balloting better guarded against fraud than in most States and countries. But prior to the first " Reform Act " of 1832, only a few persons chose the members ; few men were voters.

Great Britain has a constitution, though it is still not one compact document; but its Magna Charta and its many acts of Parliament and long ages of judicial decisions. Since 1789 Great Britain has made more real progress than in many previous centuries ; it is one of the most progressive of nations.

France, Italy, the two Americas, the British colonies, the educational system of Germany, and the Swiss cantons have immensely advanced.

PREFACE. V

The whole civilized world is more humane, more enlightened ; there exists in people and in governments far less of hatred, of malignancy ; the standards of public and private honor are higher than a hundred years ago. The world is vastly indebted to men and w^omen who have labored to make our race better and happier. Retrospect shows that they have accomplished great good in the improvement of manners, morals, intelligence, charity, in the betterment of public institutions and of private habits. The world grows better. The peoples are learning that the more they uphold, aid and comfort the intelligent teachers of religion, honor, honesty and kindness, the less are they likely to need force ; the more Sunday-schools and day schools, the less policemen ; and it follows that the more international courtesy, the less liability to w^ar. The more obedience to the fifth chapter of Matthew, the less need of armies ; the more they secure fraternal, generous and humane habits and principles, the more they honor God and their country.

No nation should be judged to-day by what it was two generations ago. It is an age of progress, not equal in all nations, for some, notably in the increase of standing armies, have retrograded.

If we wish to learn the real lessons that history teaches we must lay aside our own bias — all our preconceived ideas — and examine history in the same impartial spirit with which a good juryman tries a cause in court by " law and evidence " ; we must make our verdicts by the holy law of good conscience and facts, "without fear or favor," even though it condemn our historical idols.

VI PREFACE.

Much that has passed as history or material for history is badly defective because distorted from fact by the vindictive party feelings, in fashion to a much later period. False sentiments, party hates, a disposition to have and to worship an idol, a blind following of mistaken leaders, have too often usurped the place of honest, manly conscience in judging of the characters of men and measures of history, especially of that so recent that men are still living who heard the thunder of all Europe's cannon as it closed around France, or have been active partisans of men then living. The statements of facts that bear hardest upon leading characters in this book, and in one that must follow it, are proven by documents found among their own papers, and by testimony of their own friends and intimate contemporaries, and confirmed by other ample evidence. For one to palliate or excuse a public crime or wrongful measure because of the eminence or leadership of the perpetrator, would be to wrong one's own conscience and to aid in demoralization of public opinion.

H. B.

The World's Greatest Conflict.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THE American and English Revolutions were made to defend rights, the French to obtain them. Religion favored the former, but injured the latter. The immorality of the higher French clergy, who were all nobles, in contrast with the morality of the common priests, disgusted the people and excited them toward revolt.

American and British parliaments rank above the executive power; the French parliaments were almost powerless ; the king alone was power. " I am the State ! " said the imperious Louis.

In proportion to the degree of misrule are, usually, the excesses of revolt. French kingly misrule was terrible ; revolt was therefore terrible.

Insurgents who have nothing to lose, destroy property ; men to whom life is of little value, commit bloodshed freely. The kings and nobles made the people poor, and by rendering their lives of little value to themselves, qualified them for bloody and destructive revolt.

England presents a striking contrast ; in revolution since 1832, its great change has, nevertheless, been peaceful and beneficent, because the people had the means to progress peacefully. In 1774 this means was denied to France. All the people, even the nobility, were out of power. Then only Great Britain, Switzerland and Holland had limited rulers. All else was absolute monarchy. France in many provinces was under diverse laws and customs ; some had little parliaments, others had none. The king's "Intendents" ruled over many sections and extorted all possible taxes, legal and illegal.

Every person was either a noble or a plebeian ; no middle class existed ; of twenty-five millions of French, one hundred and fifty thousand nobles held all the valuable places in church, state and army. The only taxes they paid were a five per cent, on crops ; all other taxes and tithes were extorted from plebeians. Offices, honors, titles and tolls, the king sold or donated to favorites.

It is an error of writers to claim that the workingmen of France read Rousseau and Voltaire ; most of them could not read at all ; they toiled and starved ; absentee landlords spent the rents in Paris and drained the farm country of cash.

In 1788-89 skilled mechanics earned twenty-six sous a day, women twenty sous ; bread was three sous a pound.*

II

IT was a fine May morning in the year 1774. Everybody was glad. Louis the Fifteenth was dead. He had been a bad king.

Not a mourner followed to the tomb L'roi

at St. Denis. Paris, long angry, long estmort:- repressed, threw up its eight hundred " abasi'roi. thousand hats, caps and bonnets, hugged itself, sang merrily, danced, and jeered that lonely royal funeral that galloped through the streets.

The fifteenth Louis had lived sixty-four years ; he had been king fifty-nine years, and had led a gay and wicked life. France suffered frightfully from this bad king's badness.

His death was the best act of his life. It gave Parisians the merriest day they had seen for years.

Louis the Fifteenth had boasted of being the best cook in France. Far better for the French had he been born only a cook ; he was worthless for anything else.

It was on May 10, 1774, that Louis was so gracious as to die. On May 10, 1770, just four years before, there had been solemnized a famous wedding.

The bridegroom was a big, ill-mannered, abrupt, awkward, ill-humored * and decidedly dull boy of less than sixteen years.

Boys are usually bright and can talk ; but this boy bridegroom had both poverty of mind and of speech. He was also very timid and very lazy. He had a coarse way of moving and of walking ; he lacked both grace and graciousness. Poor deficient boy ! Nature had made him unfitted for a career ; and Fate had caused him to be born to be a king. It was deplorable.

The young bride was unwisely selected for a French queen. Her Austrian birth invited French criticism and she was but a romping, ignorant f girl of fourteen and a half years.

This boy and girl were not in love ; they were not attracted to each other ; each was averse to the other. Their nations, characters, tastes, habits — everything were different and opposite.

When the exit of the bad old Louis the Fifteenth had caused this spontaneous popular festival, and every one was feeling happy, this unloving and not very lovely wedded pair made their debut on the great political stage of France as King Louis the Sixteenth and Queen Marie Antoinette.

Whenever you have on your hands a very vicious elephant, and luck suddenly exchanges him for a worthless donkey, what do you do ? Why, you rejoice greatly ; you are exceeding glad for the loss of that big, bad brute. You hurrah without wait-

* Martin, Vol. II. p. 280. ~ t Thiers, Vol. I. p. 227.

ing to learn that your new donkey is very stupid, very awkward, very lazy, very much worse than useless ; that really as a nuisance his merit is second only to that of the now discarded vicious elephant.

Such was the French situation.

Each order stood alone ; nobles, clergy, and " third estate " each had interests adverse to the other two, each was divided against itself. The nobles were luxurious and licentious ; the higher clergy, some of whom disbelieved, lived in rich excess, while the honest common priests in poverty soothed the sick and the mourning, and married, baptized, and buried the poor.

The king and his favorites imprisoned, exiled, confiscated at will. Innocence was not safe, property was not safe, life was not safe ; Louis was apt to break over his own laws, to oppress his people.

The great nobles were courtiers, hated by country gentlemen, and abhorred by France ; they bought, sold or held offices in the church, the state, the army and navy ; they drew unearned pensions and many royal gifts of cash wrung from working people. Even the seats in the Paris parliament were sold for life by the king.

The king made laws ; parliament merely '* registered " them. If it refused to register the king could come in person and compel registry.

In 1800 it was the fashion for sovereigns to be half-witted or insane. But in 1774, it was quite otherwise, when Catherine the Second of Russia, Frederic the Second of Prussia, Maria Theresa of Austria, Joseph the Second of Germany, and Charles the Third of Spain were ruling.

Louis the Sixteenth was himself ill-tempered, selfish, ]azy ; his wife was of ill-mannered ignorance, and made scandal by frolicking with doubtful characters in Versailles woods ; both of them were of very narrow minds and should early have perceived that they were never made to reign. Marie Antoinette could not endure Louis' dullness, and he, when but sixteen, preferred an anvil and hammer to the society of his young wife. Not till years after marriage did any love exist between them.

Americans have too generously credited Louis with friendly aid to America. This credit is due to France, but not to Louis. Louis opposed it ; he only yielded when French public opinion coerced him into war with England. Britain was the hereditary enemy of France ; she had, by the war which ended in 1763, despoiled France of Canada, Cape Breton, and most of the French Indies.

Louis was a champion blunderer. His first and greatest blunder was in being born at all, his second in being born to be a king, his third in accepting from Austria a wife when Austria had just humiliated France in a long war. That wife had a singular genius for displeasing the French.

In examining the strange and now famous career of this fateful and untalented pair, we wonder that Louis did not omit so unfit a marriage, perceive his own very marked worthlessness, resign the crown, marry some suitable very dull damsel, and live a dull life as became his stupid disposition. Even foolish Charles the Fourth of Spain was wise enough to abdicate (1808), and live in private and happy luxury ; even fool Philip of Spain {1788) had the good taste to be an outright idiot, and as such was set aside to spend his life in hunting just as Louis wanted to hunt. Louis ought to have been as wise as these two champion fools.

We do not wish to be -deceived : let us look at the real Louis the Sixteenth uncolored by fancy. Let us try this case by the evidence, and by the laws of common justice and fairness, applying the same rules of right and wrong to king and commoner. If the results differ from that derived from former historical reading let us blame only the facts ; let us quarrel with the acts and the persons who made them, not with the conclusion.

Profligacy had run riot ; morality was deranged ; royal mistresses had ruled France. So disgusted with wicked Louis the Fifteenth were the French that they hailed with delight the accession of stupid Louis the Sixteenth, even with Marie Antoinette ** the Austrian."

God made Louis the Sixteenth for a small tinker, a mender of pots and pans ; heredity defied God's design and made him a king. He was one of those good-for-nothings, such as every one has seen, presuming without dignity, assuming without ability, undecided except when it is folly to decide, and then foolishly tenacious. Praised for good intentions, his career does not sustain it. Nature denied him capacity to be a great roue like his grandfather Louis the Fifteenth, or his grandfather's great-grandfather Louis the Fourteenth.

His queen, badly brought up, was impolite among the polite French ; she was tactless and frivolous; she was neither dignified nor elegant; she indulged caprice and levity ; her habits hardly left her reputation free from scandal,*

Her mother, the Austrian Empress, Maria Theresa, severely chided her for light habits. f

Louis allowed his two brothers to keep very costly households at the nation's expense. His tax system was so wasteful that when France paid forty-one million livres, only twenty-three millions reached the king. Tax gatherers got the rest.

Louis called the old courtier, Maurepas, for advice. That cunning man assumed to be prime minister. "Not that," replied Louis. "Then I will show you how to be king without a minister," responded the old fraud, and he kept the chief

* Martin. t Maria Theresa, Letters.

place till his death in 178 1. He was a witty, charming, trivial old humbug.

With Maurepas came Madame, his wife. That good creature knew more than her husband. She had a heart. Her memory should be cherished. She chose for Controller of Finance the great liberal statesman, Turgot.

Her husband and the king opened wide their eyes in surprise. Should a king choose Turgot the half republican for a royal minister .-*

It was of no use to object. The good Madame said it ; she put down her small foot ; she ruled her husband. She required him to require the king to do it. It was done; enter Turgot, 1774.

A woman knows much about spending money. She knows much, too, of saving it. The best investment a man can make is a good woman. Madame Maurepas was worth to France one thousand times her weight in gold coin ; one hundred thousand times her weight in husbands like hers. Had she been sovereign of France, and Louis a tinsmith, then would the tremendous explosion of France, that shook the world, have omitted itself. Justice and honor would have ruled.

Madame required M. Turgot to do the unheardof justice in France of allowing any one who desired to make goods to freely make them, and any one who had anything to sell to sell it. This seems very simple. But the most profound statesmanship of France had not reached it. The privilege to make, to haul, to buy, to sell, were all owned as monopoly. The right to carry a load of wheat to market, the right to cross a river, the right to make even a plow was owned. If you were poor and a peasant, you must pay for your "privileges." You must pay, to those to whom kings have given these rights, their own prices to use their mill to grind your corn, to press your grapes, to use their oven to bake your bread. And you must pay taxes till for very hunger you and your loved ones wish yourselves dead.

Turgot's policy was : no bankruptcy ; no increase of taxes ; no loans ; no royal gifts of the nation's money ; reduction of royal expenses ; economy ; reform. Louis promised it all. Promising was his forte. He was a bad performer.

Turgot wanted to remove odious taxes and have but one single, equal tax laid alike on all. He wanted free manufacture, free commerce, and no crippling of labor.

France was astonished. France was suspicious of Turgot. What a policy ! France held up its hands. Allow a man to raise wheat and sell it without paying the king for the privilege ! Allow a woman to make butter or linen and not pay the lord of the manor for that right ! Bar the king from taking your money and giving it to Monsieur the prince or Madame the courtesan ! Stop the starving of millions of peasants ! Stop the king from giving as Louis the Fifteenth in five years gave to the fair but frail du Barry one hundred and eighty million livres. The nobles opposed such reform.

Each man waited the king's orders. Law regulated nothing ; no one originated ; lack of system or of justice stifled public spirit ; neither nobles nor people were expected to keep order ; that was the king's business ; * each sought his own escape from tax.

Large owners held two thirds of all the land ; small owners one third, but wild game for the nobles' benefit must go at large, though they destroyed the crop on which depended the peasant's bread. Severe edicts forbade hoeing and weeding lest the brooding partridges be disturbed. The nobles and king owned all the game. Tenants must pay toll for bruising buckwheat between stones.

By corvee they were forced to build roads without pay, but they must pay when they used these same roads. Land was subdivided till what was needed for one was used by six.f

Turgot wanted to remove ruinous burdens. His plan included schools ; it would have allowed villagers to apportion their taxes ; to care for the poor ; to choose local deputies, who should choose deputies of provincial assemblies ; who should send deputies to a General Assembly of France.

It was a great plan, quite at variance with

* Young's Travels. t Turgot.

Rousseau. Most writers date the Revolution from May 5, 1789, when the States-General met. But Turgot's advent began the Revolution in 1771. Later, Turgot saw that a workman's ability to work is property and should have property protection. He wanted reform by royalty, not against it.

Adam was not more surprised at Eve's appearance in Eden than was France at Turgot's new ideas. Great was Madame Maurepas for bringing Turgot to the front.

Louis recalled the old Paris parliament, he harassed and embittered it, and then tried to force it to be his servile tool. But, if resistance is possible, submission to insult is not human nature. Louis's insults spurred it to opposition, and thus he himself inaugurated the great struggle.

Royal extravagance was great ; king, queen, princes and courtiers squandered the nation's money. Royalty counteracted Turgot's reforms ; the nobles, high clergy, and tax farmers were Turgot's foes.

To royal and noble extortion, was added in 1774-75, bread scarcity. Hunger caused riots. The people were suffering, starving. Turgot reduced the grain tax, but hunger drove the people wild. He gave public work, but hunger increased. He offered premiums for imports of wheat, but kings had given away the right to haul it or to make bread ; monopolists checked relief to starving France.

Suffering drove the people to frenzy. Mobs destroyed stores of grain, because it was kept from them. The people were very hungry, very angry, very raving, but who will not rave when the children starve .'* Necker attacked Turgot's policy. It was said that wheat was not lacking, but the king's law for its distribution.

A hungry mob invaded Versailles (May 2, 1775) ; they shouted to Louis for bread. He tried to address them. They refused to listen. Dishonest Louis foolishly tried to appease them, not at his expense, but that of merchants ; not by buying bread for charity, but by an arbitrary discount of the price of bread. It was not a reduction of price that the penniless wanted, it was bread itself ; but Louis had neither the kindness to feed them nor the justice to protect Paris. His act sent the mob to Paris to pillage the bakers' shops. Turgot, not Louis, quieted the riot. Then Louis decreed the old price, and the Paris Parliament headed opposition. Louis ordered it not to meet. It did meet, and placarded Paris with requests that the king provide cheaper bread.

The people sided against Louis. They justly blamed him for dear bread. His reduction of price flew all over France, without the retraction. Mobs seized bread at prices that ruined merchants ; or they took it for nothing. France was in a great spasm of rioting. Louis brought an army to Versailles, but for what he did not know.

Turgot required him to give energetic orders, but dishonest Louis tried to nullify these orders ; other and better men suppressed the extensive insurrections. Turgot proclaimed that enough grain existed ; that the price was not for the king, but for demand and supply to regulate, and the clergy were angry that he required them to read this proclamation from their pulpits. Pamphlets, ballads, caricatures of Louis, the Queen and Turgot abounded.

Louis wanted money. He always wanted money. Had he been as rich as an American railroad king he would still have lacked money.

He pretended to reduce the royal expenses. He did so only on days when he had no money. The first receipt of taxes again inflated them. He had two brothers. Monsieur who believed nothing, and d'Artois, a great rowdy, who believed everything. These two kept hotel for the court, at the people's expense, with board but without those disagreeable things board bills.

Turgot wanted the coronation to be at Paris instead of at Rheims. It would save eight million livres. He wanted to omit the king's oath to exterminate heretics. Louis dared not. So to Rheims the king went and took the oath, and spent the money that would have bought a great quantity of bread for his starving subjects.

The high clergy petitioned Louis to deny to Protestants the right of meeting, marriage, and the teaching of their own children. If Protestants would persist in having children they must be taught to be Catholics.

Tax farmers terribly oppressed France. So uncertain were Louis* taxes that none knew what sum they ought to pay. A mere tax clerk might decide. Laborers were responsible for laborers' taxes, so that the delinquents fell back upon those who could pay ; a great unfairness. Some of the taxes had no law. Such was the odious corvee (forced labor). Everything was arbitrary.

January, 1776, Turgot asked Louis to abolish corvee, to put the road tax on land, to let all land pay its share, to remove vexatious taxes from food, to make manufacturing free to all, to abolish the many useless offices that hamper trade and labor, to legalize Protestant marriages, and to reduce the monstrous expenses of the king's household. Against Turgot swarmed a host of holders of undeserved and unearned pensions, donations, privileges of which they had swindled France. But for the time Turgot had the ear of the king and Louis signed these edicts. It was easier for him to sign than to adhere.

Then the Paris Parliament rose in opposition. It held that feudal claims and the right to extort forced road labor were the property of nobles. Now that the wealthy land owners were to pay the road tax on land, they denounced it as ruinous, though they had long compelled the poor to pay it in labor without recompense.

In spite of all the extravagances of queen, court, and nobles, Turgot's ability had overcome the deficiency. Business revived, money became easier ; it dropped to four per cent. Turgot was on the high road to make France again prosperous.

But queen, nobles, and high clergy intrigued. Forged letters in his name were put into the mail. Louis was known to meanly violate the mails, to break seals. He stole letters, he got these forged ones. They were intended to provoke him to dismiss Turgot. The plot succeeded. The mail robber sent away his able minister.

Lack of business confidence, dullness, new distress followed the disastrous step.

The treacherous king restored the odious forced labor, retracted freedom to manufacture, restored old oppressions. The false Louis was laying up wrath against himself.

IIL

IN June, 1777, Necker became Controller of Finance. He was not made a minister because he was a Protestant. He borrowed freely and gave the appearance of prosperity. Necker. He abolished over five hundred sinecures. He tried to remove the tolls by which rivers and roads were obstructed. He obtained thirty million livres from the high clergy.

He abolished mortmain ; he freed the king's serfs ; the Jura monks refused to free theirs unless paid for them ; those monks had to settle with the serfs in the Revolution afterwards.

Necker abolished the compelling confession of guilt. (August 8, 1780.)

Necker astonished France and gratified it by pubHshing his Report of the finances. Such a Report was never before published in France. The effect was prodigious. It was light in fiscal darkness. It seemed like progress. It indicated lono-ed-for reforms. France believed it. France believed in Necker. It believed that exposure of faults meant that those faults would now be removed. Why publish an evil but to reform ? France saw in that Report twenty-eight millions in pensions, double that of the rest of Europe.* It saw gross inequalities. But it looked for better days.

That Report showed a surplus for 1781. The surplus appeared by omissions ; it was not real. But it helped the controller to a great loan.

But losers of sinecures, pensioned nobles and clergy, swindlers of France who feared reclamation, the king's two brothers who wanted unlimited freedom to spend the nation's money were all against Necker and equity.

Necker's loan furnished money for a year. He asked to be made a minister. Louis made the

* Martin. Vol. II. p. 450.

condition that Necker must renounce his Protestant religion. Necker manfully refused. He asked to have inspection of purchases for army and navy. Again Louis refused. Necker then resigned May 12, 1781. The trifling Louis never forgave Necker that his resignation was written on small paper without address or title.

Freed from the wholesome restraint of Necker's presence, Louis, only three days later, showed his own innate arrogance and injustice by decreeing that candidates for even the lowest army commissions must prove noble descent for four generations ! Nearly all the French were excluded ! Sons of persons ennobled three generations before were barred out. The same rule was practiced with applicants for clergy places.

By this insolent act, at once odious and useless, Louis dealt a severe blow to himself. It refreshed the anger of the army, the navy, the people, already aroused by his many acts of arrogance and treachery. It outraged the French people's sense of equity.

Louis restored many of the useless offices that Necker had aboHshed, and increased again the taxes of the poorer classes. They must pay for these restored sinecures.