France. A number of grand seigniors and prelates
figure in the agricultural societies, compose or translate
useful books, familiarize themselves with the applications
of science, study political economy, inform themselves
about industries, and interest themselves, either as
amateurs or promoters, in every public amelioration.
" Never,” says Lacretelle again, “were
the French so combined together to combat the evils
to which nature makes us pay tribute, and those which
in a thousand ways creep into all social institutions.”
Can it be admitted that so many good intentions thus
operating together are to end in destruction? —
All take courage, government as well as the higher
class, in the thought of the good accomplished, or
which they desire to accomplish. The king remembers
that he has restored civil rights to the Protestants,
abolished preliminary torture, suppressed the corvée
in kind, established the free circulation of grains,
instituted provincial assemblies, built up the marine,
assisted the Americans, emancipated his own serfs,
diminished the expenses of his household, employed
Malesherbes, Turgot and Necker, given full play to
the press, and listened to public opinion[63].
No government displayed greater mildness; on the
14th of July, 1789, only seven prisoners were confined
in the Bastille, of whom one was an idiot, another
kept there by his family, and four under the charge
of counterfeiting[64]. No sovereign was more
humane, more charitable, more preoccupied with the
unfortunate. In 1784, the year of inundations
and epidemics, he renders assistance to the amount
of three millions. Appeals are made to him
direct, even for personal accidents. On the
8th of June, 1785, he sends two hundred livres to
the wife of a Breton laboring-man who, already having
two children, brings three at once into the world[65].
During a severe winter he allows the poor daily to
invade his kitchen. It is quite probable that,
next to Turgot, he is the man of his day who loved
the people most. — His delegates under
him conform to his views; I have read countless letters
by intendants who try to appear as little Turgots.
“One builds a hospital, another admits artisans
at his table;"[66] a certain individual undertakes
the draining of a marsh. M. de la Tour, in Provence,
is so beneficent during a period of forty years that
the Tiers-Etat vote him a gold medal in spite of himself[67].
A governor delivers a course of lectures on economical
bread-making. — What possible danger is
there for shepherds of this kind amidst their flocks?
On the king convoking the States-General nobody had
“any suspicion,” nor fear of the future.
“A new State constitution is spoken of as an
easy performance, and as a matter of course."[68]
— “The best and most virtuous men
see in this the beginning of a new era of happiness
for France and for the whole civilized world.
The ambitious rejoice in the broad field open to
their desires. But it would have been impossible
to find the most morose, the most timid, the most
enthusiastic of men anticipating any one of the extraordinary
events towards which the assembled states were drifting.”