THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Lecture Delivered by Mr. Milligan Hogg, Barrister, in St. Sepulchre's School-room.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 58, 12 July 1884, Page 5

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Lecture Delivered by Mr. Milligan Hogg, Barrister, in St. Sepulchre's School-room.

Thk subject T have chosen for this paper is the French Revolution. I bvc m'ivIuI r because it stands conspicuous u~ uit a.c and mott t-triking landmark in the path of human development. If you take a bird'seye view of the Hold of history you will perceive that there is no human society which is actually at a standstill. All are either growing or declining. In each institutions are either expanding or contracting. But among societies which are expanding progress is not by any means regular ; some are ahead of others, and ono takos years to work out what another will violently accomplish in a few months. At the present time we see mankind, led by a vanguard of Europeans, travelling along certain lines to an unknown end called Civilisation. Nobody can tell exactly what civilisation is, but every Europeanlydescended person thinks ho has it, and stigmatises those who are not as he is barbarous. I believe that civilisation consists in bringing people together into dense j societies so a^ to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number ; in other words, it is the constant intensifying of sympathy and the persistent suppression of ideas of selfishness, isolation, and retribution. Until the French Revolution the object of Governments was to prevent mankind Hying apart into petty isolated cities, states and tribes, and to weld them into the nations we at present know. But with the Fiench Revolution commenced a new era of social politic?. Henceforth the business of Governments will be rather to sweep and garnish the nation w ithin than to protect it from foes without and maintain its Okvn integrity. You w ill think it strange in the face of fc!ie atrocities and odious passions begotten by the French Revolution to hear me declare thai" its mission was a. high and holy one, and that it was the natural outcome of the Gospel of Christ. It was civil battle, in which two parties grappled at one another's throats, striving to decide which of them should give the law to men's minds. The king and aristocracy wished to monopolise the sweets of civilisation, the bulk of the nation strove to atsprt, and did assert, its right to participate in the fruits of a civilisation which they had been mainly instrumental in rearing. The old watchword was "Inequality," the new one "Less Inequality " in those things which make this complex life a\ e are all helping to perpetuate enjoyable. Inasmuch as you owe no small portion of your present happiness to the efforts of the French Revolutionists, you should understand the nature of the bloody drama in which they played their parts. Here in Auckland you do not know what it is to cringe to a so-callel "superior," you do not kuow what it is to be hungry, you do not know what it is to be cold and miserable. Conditions are tolerably equal, nature is genial, and land is plentiful in proportion to population. But nowhere in Europe do all these conditions co-exist, and still less did they co-exist there before the French Revolution. In some parts of Europe people often encounter cold, and must do so for all ages, but millions are enduring misery owing to false social arrangements ; and even in England there are relics of that servility "with which the less fortunate encountered the more fortunate before the French and American Revolutions brought it into discredit. The most superficial evidence ot this servility remains in the practice of touching the hat by inferiors (so called) to superiors, who perhaps barely nod in return. In my boyhood, poor worn-out old peasants would do this in country lanes to well-dressed passers-by, whose only possible claim to estimation in the mind of the devotee must have been their fine clothes.

What Provoked the Revolution. I will now lead you a piece of Thackeray, showing what European society was like before the French : — "As one riewsEuropethroughcontemporary books of travel during the early part of last contury the landscape is awful. Wretched wastes, beggared and plundered, half-burned cottages, and wretched peasants gathering piteous harvests. Gangs of such tramping along, with bayonets behind them, and corporals with canes and cat-o'-nine-tails to flog them to barracks. Hard by, but far away from the roice and brawling of the citizens and burgers, is the king's or prince's palace, shut in by woods from the beggared country — tho enormous, hideous, gilded, monstrous marble palace, where the prince is, and the Court, and the trim gardens, and huge fountains, and the forest where the ragged peasants are beating in the game." He then describes how within these sacred precincts the elect hunt during the day and gamble, flirt, or drink at night. Then he goes on -.—"Beyond the trim-cut; forest vistas misery is lying outside, hunger Is stalking about the bare villages, listlessly following precarious husbandry, ploughing ' Btony fields with starved cattle, or fearfully taking in scanty harvests. Then the j prince, his mistresses, and his satellitescan Court be more splendid, nobles and j knights more gallant and superb, ladies more lovely ? A grander monarch or a more miserable, starved wretch than the peasant, his subject, you cannot look upon. Let us bear both these types in mind if we wish to estimate the old society properly. Remember the glory and the chivalry? Yes ! remember the grace and the beauty, the splendour and the lofty politeness. But round all that royal splendour lies a nation enslaved and ruined. The people are robbed of their rights, communities laid waste, faith, justice, commerce, trampled upon and well nigh destroyed. Nay, in the very centre of royalty itself what horrible stains and meanness. In the first half of last century this was going on all Europe over." Things are better now, most so in France, less so in England, and still less so in Germany and Russia. The fact is that a hundred years ago every considerable European country was dominated by a king, a nobility, and a clerical hierarchy, who ate up all the good things for the privilege of misgoverning the people. These had no voice in governing themselves, and got nothing but labour and wounds as their heritage in the fortunes of the nation. France was the first people to rise and protest against this injustice. It had kings who professed to govern, but in reality did nothing but lead lazy, dissolute lives, build palaces, wage ruinous and useless wars, and scandalise respectable people. It had nobles who gathered at the royal palaces to toady the king's ministers for licenses to bleed the public, who squandered the revenues of their country estates in frivolity and licentiousness, and who believed their sole mission was to enjoy themselves when they were not cutting one another's throats or the throats of the king's enemies. In novels you read a great deal about these fellows. They were profuse, gorgeous in dress, courageous, alternately superb or brutal in their manners. They walked about with an arrogant assumption of superiority towards all but the monarch, and behaved as we should now consider like tyrants and like cads, Their notion of fun

was to dig thoir elbows into the ribs of respectable citizens or knock their hats over their eyes, because by law the citizen could not retaliate with impunity. Even the imperfect records of daily occuronccs in those times show us that thoy had far less humanity for a peasant than an American planter had for his slave, and that to take a pop shot at a man shingling a r /- >of or run i n.irbcr through for ill shaving you, or i i o wantonly over a common person w ho co.i'dn't get out of the May, were ordinary incidents of aristocratic life, for which a pardon could easily be procured. Such croaj tures are not now to be met with in France. England suffers from a much milder typo, but in Russia something similar can still be found. Thoy were grandiose and varnished barbarians, and the only power capable of keeping them in order was that of a moneylender or a mortgagee. The king or prince and his nobles were not, however, the only classes who lived at the expense of the nation without, as lawyors say, affording valuable consideration in return. There was also the clergy of the established religion. As were the noblesse who plundered the people and cringed before their ruler, so were- the clergy. There were poor clergy as there were poor nobles, who lived pinched and self-denying lives, and many of whom tried to do good in their own feeble way ; but this type had no influence at Court or in the misgovernment of the country. It was the prelates, who paid no taxes, and had in their disposal the revenues of rich rural and town properties bequeathed to the Church by pious founders. They were just as much Courtloafers, debauchees, suckers of the nation's heart-blood as the nobles, without possessing the nobles' readiness to fight thoir country's battles. So in France, a hundred years ago, these three privileged classes of ruler, nobles, and prelates lived upon the public, and held most of the land. Out of exactions called taillos, droits de seigneur, gabelles, corvoes, they reared costly buildings. These, like the Pyramids and the Colosseum, soothe and awe the ignorant tourist, who knows not that they are dumb witnesses of past oppression. The stones remain, but the agonies of those whose"poverty was wantonly aggravated to erect these wonders have found no such lasting monument. If the cruelty, the extortion, and the iilent extermination of their fellows which were perpetrated by the feudal classes in Europe could be expressed in statistics, the slaughterings and confiscations visited upon the French section of them cannot be deemed more than a meet atonement for their selfishness. In days when there was no daily press and irrepressible reporting to lay the rod of publicity upon their backs, they smote the people in a hole-and-corner manner. If the people rose and retaliated, they stamped them down with a cruel and an iron heel, and then hired Court historians to chronicle a distorted account of the uprising. The French Revolutionists were not more ruthless than the king, nobles, and clergy had been in their hey-day ; but the blaze of modem journalism shone upon the Revolutionists, while the atrocities of the feudal classes were more remote, and the truth about them more difficult to ascertain. It is defective records, and not the absence of defects, which makes classical and feudal times look so rosy and romantic and modem times so prosy and out of joint.

Growth of the Revolution. Forty years before the French Revolution took place Lord Chesteriield, an English peer with the characteristic vices of the French nobility, visited France and predicted what \va? coming. The prodigal, profligate, and irresponsible rule of king, nobles, and prelates, had begun to grow distateful to the people. It was not because the yoke bore heavier than formerly, but because the printing press was bringing the minds of men together, and showing them tho cruelty and injustice of the system under which they had so long been content to groan. It is a curious fact, which venemous abusers of the French Revolution never explain, that, whereas the peasantry were ragged and starving for a century before it, no such misery is to be seen in France nowadays, though the population is greater by ten millions. Hear w hat Lady Wortley Montague tells of them 70 years before the Revolution : — " I think nothing so terrible as objects of misery . . . and all the country villages of France show nothing else. While the post horses are changed the whole town comes out to beg with such miserable starved faces and thin tattered clothes, they need no other eloquence to persuade one of the wretchedness of their condition. This is all the French magnificence until you come to Fontainbleau, where you are showed 1,500 rooms in the King's hunting palace." So even an aristocrat like Lady Montague accustomed to over-bear and exact respect from the peasant class in her own country is shocked at the condition to which France had been reduced. The blood of these poor peasants had been poured out like water on the fields of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet by Louis XIV. in his cruel attempts to aggrandize himself at the expense of his neighbours. But the pamphleteer, the journalist, the scientist, and the author were rising to put an end to this tyranny. Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, Rosseau, and others were creating a public conscience through the medium of the press. Could the princes, the nobles, or the prelates have safely crushed some of these men, they would have done so in the beginning: but England, Holland, Switzerland, and Prussia afforded them secure vantage points from which to conduct their operations. Men in France and elsewhere began to look one another in the face and ask each other if such things as these writers reprobated could be. A wider field for comparison was laid open to the human mind, which it was clearly evident the old dictates of authority could not cover. The electrical thrill of reason and of feeling began to pass from person to person, and men took courage to think and judge for themselves. Louis XIV. died 73 years before the Revolution. He left France exhausted by wanton wars and profitless enterprises. His successor, Louis XV., did nothing but eat, drink, and lead the life of a man oi pleasure, leaving his favourites and mistresses to misgovern the country. He died just 110 years ago, cursed by the rising spirit of public discontent. His successor was that Louis XVI. of unfortunate memory, who, with his [wife, Marie Antoinette, were discrowned and decapitated in the conflict provoked by the oppressive system ot which they were the soul. They were not vicious ; they were not cruel ; they were perfectly willing to let other people be comfortable, and wept at the sufferings of their subjects : but they formed part of a system and a class, and without encroaching upon this system and destroying the privileges of this class, it was impossible to purge the realm of France of the accumulated evil of centuries. The nobles, knowingthatany re form meant a curtailment of their unearned prerogatives, insisted in putting forward the monarchy as a stalking horse wherewith to stem the current of change, and this current, on being continuously obstructed, swelled up into an angry whirlpool of revolution, which tossed or tore to pieces those who came within its influence. Forty years later the English aiistocracy, warned by the fate of their French brethren, escaped a similar fate by yielding with very

bad graco to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1S32. Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette reigned fifteen years before their position began to be assailed. During these years the Government of the country was growing ever more needy and more incapable. Tho Giovernmont had been absolute for centuries. No representatives of tho pooplo were over collected to lay beforo tho throne the wants and wishes of tho nation. The only deliberative body was the Assembly of the Notables, which represented tho interests of tho privileged classes, and which acted mox-e solfishly and tyrannically than even the Kings Minister's in any matters affecting the welfare of the people. It was a matter of hard ca?h which brought the old absolute regime into difficulties, and compelled it to call representatives of the Commons together to help in the Government. The exchequer was empty, and by none of tho old timo ■ honoured mothods could the tax - gatherers of tho king replenish it. Tho nobles and clergy, although they had largo estates, were mere locusts and drones. They paid nothing-, and, in addition to spending thoir own rents and revenues, wished to live upon the revenues which the King drew from Ms people. This was too heavy a price to give for maintaining a lot of idle persons to help the King misgovern the country.

Commencement of tbe Revolution. The Revolution began by the King calling the nobles together and asking them to tax themselves. This proposal they rejected as an atrocious novelty ; little thinking that by thus acting they were preparing other novelties for themselves, such as the loss of their fortunes and their lives. It is clear that the onus of having provoked the angry passions of the people lies upon the nobles, who persistently hampered the King's Ministers in their mildest attempts at reform, llenco, instead of reform they got revolution. When tho King found that he could do nething with the privileged classes, he instructed his Ministers to call the States General. This was the old French Legislature which had been suppressed for 170 years. The people were to elect 600 members, the nobles 300, the clergy 300. Tho King summoned the States General to meet in May, 17S0, a^ Versailles, near Paris, and for six months beforehand, during the elections, France was on the tiptoe of expectation. Although there was great poverty, dearth, anddistressamongthepeasantry, and the roads were crowded with beggars, still the hearts of the people bounded with hope at the prospect of having a voice in the ventilation of their grievances. To a people who have been long abused and oppi'essed by those who have got upon the top of them, the prospect of having their say out upon the subject of their grievances must be pleasurable to an extent we are incapable of appreciating. We are so satiated with legislative action that we would almost pay our representatives to stay away. Now this shows the difference between our happy lot and that of theFrench before the Revolution, In May, 95 years ago, the nobles, clergy, and commons, came to the King's Palace at Versailles, near Paris. The eyes of all France were on their representatives to see how they would behave. The first move of the nobles and clergy was to insist upon each body sitting separately. By this method the two votes of the house of nobles and the house of clergy would overpower the single vote of the house of commons. But tho commons would not have this ; they requested that the whole twelve hundred of them should deliberate together. In that case the commons would have 600 votes to the 600 votes of the nobles and the clergy. As the nobles and clergy held aloof, matters were at a deadlock. The King thereupon entered, and after politely ordering the Commons to get to business, shut them out ofdoors. The Commons retaliated by meeting in a tennis court, and in tho presence of an enthusiastic crowd of spectators voted themselves the Constiuent Assembly of the people, whose business it was to redress grievances, declaring at the same time that their sittings should be perpetual until this object was secured. The King was cowed, and the clergy, accompanied by a few of the nobles, came over to deliberate in one body with tho Commons. Thus the people of France threw down the gauntlet to their former oppressors, and proceeded to call them to account. The leaders of the majority in this Constituent Assembly were not extreme Revolutionists or even Republicans. Some of them were young nobles ; their captain, Mirabeau, a man of strong intellect, massive will, and passionate eloquence, was himself a noble's son, and had an elder brother among the partisans of the nobles. Their bcait, ideal of Government was a constitutional monarchy like that of their English neighbours. But the Queen, Marie Antoinette, more active and more jealous of her royal privileges than her husband, hated the encroaching measures of the Assembly, entertained the most vindictive feelings for their advocates, and encouraged the nobles, clergy, and household officers to throw every possible impediment in the path of reform. Instead of judiciously and loyally coinciding with the inevitable changes ; instead of calling up the royal troops to carry them out, and to protect the Assembly from the Parisian mob who infested the galleries and often threatened the members, they did all they could to make matters worse. Thus did the Queen and the courtiers unconsciously provoke the storm which destroyed them, and not only themselves, but also many others who merely wished to lighten the burdens of the people without hurting the monarchy or depriving the nobles of their property. Through the folly of tho Court and the nobility, tho passions of the people were fanned to that point where compromise became impossible, and nought was left but to tear one another to pieces. The Constituent Assembly sat for two years and a-half . It took away hereditary titles from the nobles, but left them their property. It suppressed all abbeys, monasteries, and convents, and transferred their property to the State. It abolished all the old feudal exactions made by the nobles and clergy upon the people, and instituted a general system of taxation instead. Thus, in a few months, it did more to abolish privilege than the English people have done since the reign of Henry VIII. In England the hereditary peerage still exists, and certain light feudal dues are yet owing. Tho Constituent Assembly also declared that their King should not be called the King of France, but the King of the French, to signify he was elected by the people, and not entitled to rule as of divine right. But the privileged classes took alarm, and their disinclination to accept the new conditions irritated the people. Before their representatives had sat four month? the Parisian populace stormed the Bastile. It was the prison of the French monarchs — the embodiment of their tyranny. Within its gloomy walls many an innocent person had pined away — guilty, perhaps, of nothing more than having offended some great noble who had influence enough to procure a lettre de cachet consigning the victim to everlasting oblivion. In the country districts the peasantry whom Lady Mary Montague described, began, like the townspeople, to show vindictive feelings towarde those who had preyed upon them so long. Some of the nobles'

chateaux were stormed and guttod— the owners, in cases, not escaping with their lives. This alarmed the vest, and many emigrated over the French frontier into Germany, from whence they fomented dissatisfaction at the capital, and plotted to get foreign states to stifle tho growing liberties of their follow countrypooplo. Py thus _ forsaking their posts and conspiring against thoir native land, they rendered the mass of the Fronch nation rancorous and desperate. Even the moderate eonstitutionulibts knew that were themonarchy andnobility restored by foreign arms to their old superiority, many of them would be imprisoned for life or executed. At all events, the royalists threatened them with this, and they had no reason to suppose that the promise would not be punctually performed, did tho tide of revolution roll back. You see, therefore, that it was not in the power of any single person to draw up when the instinct of self-preserva-tion was dragging multitudes in such opposito directions. The blame lay not so much with those who were reaping the whirlwind as with thoso who had been sowing the wind for centuries before. (To be Continued.)