The Tuileries taken by the populace on the 10th August, 1792 Arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes Frontispiece HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CHAPTER I. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL STATE OF FRANCE BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. History, like every thing in nature, exhibits a regular, uninterrupted series of causes and effects. The latter, growing up in their. turn into causes, produce new generations of effects, and thus the chain is prolonged to infinity. In relating the events of any particular period, it is therefore necessary, in order to the due appreciation of those events, that the historian should at least glance at anterior circumstances of which they are results. If it is desirable that this course should be followed in treating of ordinary subjects, it must be imperatively required by a theme of such surpassing interest and importance as the French revolution, the point from which the History of our Times naturally sets out; more especially as that revolution has itself proved the fertile mother of changes and convulsions, the shocks of which have been felt over half the globe. To afford the reader a clearer insight into the primary causes of those stupendous events, which might well claim for the era VOL. I. B embraced by the plan of this work the name of "The Marvellous Age," I shall place before him a rapid sketch of the state of France at the period when this history commences. In ancient times, France, like the other states of Europe, was governed by a barbarous aristocracy, the members of which were feebly united by the authority of a series of kings possessing neither power nor influence. The nobles enjoyed privileges entirely royal within their own territories: they made peace and war; they coined money; they judged without appeal; their vassals were their slaves, whom they bought and sold with the lands. The inhabitants of the towns, though freemen, were poor and depressed, depending for protection upon some tyrannical baron in their neighbourhood. At length, however, through the progress of the arts and industry, the cities and towns rose into considerable importance, and their inhabitants, together with the freemen of low rank residing in the country, were considered as entitled to representation in the states-general of the kingdom under the appellation of tiers-état, or third estate ; the clergy and the nobles forming the first and the second. In process of time, the sovereign having made himself despotic, the meetings of the states-general were discontinued. This absolute authority of the crown was acquired by skilful encroachments, by daring exertions of prerogative, and by the aid of a powerful military force; but, though the monarch was absolute, the nobles and the ecclesiastical hierarchy retained their feudal privileges. Previously to the revolution, the kingdom of France was never reduced to one uniform mass. It was composed of many separate provinces, acquired some by marriage, some by legacy, and others by conquest. Each province retained its ancient laws and privileges, whether political or civil, agreeably to the capitularies or conditions by which they were originally acquired. Thus, in one part of his dominions, the French monarch was a count, in another a duke, and in others a king; the only bond that united his extensive realm being the strong military force by which it was overawed. Each province had its barriers, and the intercourse between one province and another was often more restricted by local usages than that of either with a foreign country: Some of the provinces, as Bretagne and Dauphiné, had even the right of assembling their provincial states periodically, but these formed no defence against the power of the court. The clergy, amounting to eighty thousand, formed the first estate of the kingdom in point of precedence. Besides a revenue derived from tithes of 130 million livres, the possessions of the church embraced nearly half of the land in France. The high benefices, being in the gift of the king, were conferred almost exclusively on members of noble families, who, like their relatives, passed their lives in Paris and at Versailles, intriguing for favour and offices of state, and consuming the produce of their rich benefices in temporal dissipations and pursuits. The inferior clergy, on whom devolved all the practical duties of the profession, meanwhile toiled in obscurity, with little chance of preferment, scarcely elevated in rank or comfort above the peasantry composing their flocks. It is not surprising that a large proportion of the labouring clergy, as well as the lower classes of the people in general, should envy the highborn. dignitaries, whose enormous wealth, and whose lives spent in idleness and luxurious indulgences, formed so strong a contrast with their own condition. The clergy were exempt from taxation. The crown had, however, of late years, been attempting to break through this privilege; but the clergy had compromised with it by a free gift of about a million sterling every five years. The nobility, nominally the second, but, in reality, the first order in the state, comprised about 150,000 individuals. All situations of importance in the state, the church, the army, the court, or the law, were exclusively enjoyed by nobles; hence men of fortune and men of talent invariably purchased a patent of nobility when they possessed the means of doing so: but this practice gave rise to a division in the aristocracy, which prevented them from taking any common measures for their safety; the great families being more jealous of the parvenus, the nobles of recent creation, than of the roturiers, the commoners, themselves. The title descended to all the children of the family, but the property to the eldest son alone: great numbers of them were consequently dependent upon the favours of the court. They considered the useful and commercial arts as dishonourable, and even the liberal professions as beneath their dignity, disdaining to intermarry into the families of those who were engaged in them. The nobles in general were rapacious landlords in the provinces, that they might appear in splendour at court and in the capital. There, immersed in intrigue, sensuality, and vanity, their characters had become frivolous and contemptible. The nobles, like the clergy, were exempted from several of the most oppressive imposts, but it is an error to suppose that either class was wholly free from taxation. They were both subject to the indirect taxes which constituted in France, as they do in other countries, so large a proportion of the public revenue; but the nobility paid the capitation-tax and the vingtième, or twentieth penny, sometimes amounting together to four shillings in the pound: as did the clergy also in the provinces annexed by conquest to the kingdom, |