BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
comprising the merchants, the members of the learned professions, multitudes of men of letters, and, of course, all the peasantry, as well as all the working-classes in the towns. The members of the third estate were in many cases as wealthy, as learned, as polished in manners, as the members of the favored classes, but they were not permitted to share in the privileges and exemptions reserved by law for the clergy and the nobility. And as for the peasants and artisans, they were, in the main, simply ignored, even by multitudes of those who themselves were counted as belonging to the third estate.
Upon the poorer classes of France the burdens of existence pressed heavily. Throughout the country the lot of the peasantry was pitiful, even though the serfdom of central and eastern Europe was practically unknown. Upon them fell the duty of keeping themselves and their families alive, while at the same time they carried the load of taxation from which the privileged upper classes were mainly exempt. With no opportunity for self-improvement they became sodden and hopeless. It is true that many French peasants, by thrift and incessant toil, had accumulated considerable wealth, particularly in land, but they were none the less subjected to trivial yet exasperating annoyances that reminded them of their lack of legal equality with their titled neighbors, who were sometimes poorer than themselves. The country districts were shamefully neglected by the government, which drained them of money and of men and gave little or nothing in return.
Many of the towns, we may note, were relatively prosperous, particularly in the generation just preceding the Revolution, but the small villages and rural hamlets were too often wretched collections of filthy hovels occupied by half-starved peasants, brutalized by want and by excessive toil.[1]
How all this affected the tourist is obvious. He found little to attract him to the country districts, where the miserable condition of the peasantry made comfort difficult
14
- ↑ Cf. De Tocqueville, The Old Régime, p. 155.
