BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
yielded to the attraction that drew all France to Paris and the court of the king at Versailles.[1] In their absence their estates were managed by agents, who too often were unscrupulous and merciless.
But although as a class they had lost political power, the nobility enjoyed many special privileges and had vast influence at court and on the administration of government. Theirs was an unquestioned social position. They secured in the army and in the fleet the choicest places, which gave them large revenues and little to do. Some of the higher nobles had vast incomes from their estates and lived in extravagant luxury. But the nobility almost wholly escaped taxation.[2] They were free from the burden of the corvées, of compulsory military service, and of having soldiers quartered upon them. They had the privilege of selling their wine in the market thirty or forty days before the peasant; they could pasture their cattle in the meadows of the peasant; they could keep a host of pigeons that devoured the peasant's grain while he dared not kill or take them; they could claim a certain proportion of the peasant's grain or wine or fruit; and they could compel him to use the seignorial oven for baking his bread.[3] These survivals in the eighteenth century appeared increasingly irrational, since what had given rise to the privileges was no longer in existence. In short, as De Tocqueville remarks: "France was the only country in which the feudal system had preserved its injurious and irritating characteristics, whUe it had lost all those which were beneficial or useful."[4]
Moreover, admission to the ranks and privileges of the nobility could be secured by men of wealth who had no ancestral claims. This upstart aristocracy was despised by the ancient noblesse and doubly hated by the toiling masses. In England the aristocracy was one of the strongest bulwarks of the constitution and of the social order: in France it was a constant source of irritation and dislike and an invitation to revolution.
Below the privileged classes was the great third estate,
13
- ↑ "It is the taste in France, for all that can possibly afford it (and of course for many that cannot) to live in the capital. This is a most devoted friend to luxury, which necessarily begets poverty — and then dependence — it is therefore encouraged by the court." Letters concerning the Present State of the French Nation (1769), p. 145.
- ↑ They were not subject to the taille, and although they paid the capitation tax, this was comparatively unimportant, and very unequally imposed.
- ↑ Cf. Taine, The Ancient Régime, I, 25.
- ↑ The Old Régime, p. 246.
