VI. 1790. designs, the kingdom was distributed into new divisions, CHAP. called departments, which were nearly equal in extent and population. Eighty-four of these comprehended the whole kingdom of France; each department was divided into districts, and each district into cantons, which last usually embraced five or six parishes. A criminal tribunal was established for each department, a civil court for each district, a court of reference for each canton. Every department had a council of administration, consisting of thirty-six members, and an executive council, composed of five. The district had its council and direc- April 1790. tory organised in the same manner. The purpose of the canton was electoral-not executive; the citizens united there to elect their deputies and magistrates; the qualification for voting was a contribution to the amount of three days' labour. The deputies elected by the cantons were intrusted with the nomination of the representatives in the National Assembly, the administrators of the department, those of the district, and the judges in the courts of law. To secure still further the control of the people, the judges were appointed only for three years; after which their appointment required to be renewed by the electors-a pernicious state of dependence, even more dangerous when upon a sovereign multitude than iii. 260, 278, an arbitrary prince, inasmuch as the latter is permanent, Mig. i. 98, and may find his interest or that of his family injured 99.- Toul. by deeds of injustice, whereas the former is perpetually i. 196. Mafluctuating, and influenced neither by a feeling of respon- Stael, Rév. Franç. i. sibility, nor by any durable interest in the consequences 375. of iniquity.1 1 Hist. Parl. 430, 439. i. 172. Th. dame de 12. regulations, This decree arranged the rights and limits of the rural districts; another settled the powers and privileges of Municipal the inhabitants of towns. The administration of cities and elective was intrusted to a general council, and a municipality franchise. whose number was proportioned to the population they contained. The municipal officers, or magistrates, were named directly by the people, and were alone authorised VI. CHAP. to require the assistance of the armed force; and as they were appointed by universal suffrage, the whole civil 1790. authority of the kingdom was thenceforward at the command of the people. There were neither officers nor judges appointed by the crown, nor any resident noblesse or proprietors to oppose their mandates. Domiciliary visits, searches, imprisonments, informations of suspected Hist. Parl, hostility to the Revolution-all were at the command of iii. 328, 335, these executive committees of the majority. Whoever Deux Amis, resisted or counteracted them, found himself engaged Mig. i. 99, alone in a contest with the whole civil and military power of the State, based upon the concurrence of an overwhelming superiority of members. 1 415, 417. iii. 329, 352. 100. Th. i. 196. 13. The execution of these decrees was the most importVast effects ant step in the history of the Revolution: they were a practical application of the principle recognised in the of these changes. Rights of Man," that all sovereignty flows from the people. By this gigantic step, the whole civil force of the kingdom was placed at the disposal of the lower orders. By the nomination of the municipality, they had the government of the towns; by the command of the armed force, the control of the military; by the elections in the departments, the appointment of the deputies to the Assembly, the judges to the courts of law, the bishops to the church, the officers to the national guard; by the elections in the cantons, the choice of magistrates and local representatives. Every thing thus, either directly or by the intervention of a double election, flowed from the people; and the qualification for voting was so low as practically to admit every ablebodied man. Forty-eight thousand communes, or municipalities, were thus erected in France, and exercised, concurrently and incessantly, the rights of sovereignty; 100 Th hardly any appointment was left at the disposal of the Lac.vii. 339. crown. After so complete a democratic constitution, iii. 336, 350. it is not surprising that, during all the subsequent 2 Mig. i. i. 97, 196. Deux Amis, changes of the Revolution,2 the popular party should have VI. acquired such irresistible power; and that, in almost every CHAP. part of France, the persons in authority should be found supporting the multitude, upon whom they depended for their continuance in it. 1789. 14. citement in This great change however, was not brought about without causing the most violent local discontents. It General exshocked too many feelings, and subverted too many the proestablished interests, not to produce a general excite- vinces. ment. Divisions as ancient as the time of the fall of the Roman empire; parliaments coeval with the first dawn of freedom; prejudices nursed for centuries; barriers of nature incapable of removal; political aversions still in their vigour were all disregarded in this great act of democratic despotism. Remonstrances accordingly were sent in on all sides, and in many districts serious disturbances arose, especially in Brittany and Languedoc. But the protests of the provinces, the resistance of the local parliaments, the clamour of the states, could neither deter nor arrest the National Assembly. A change greater than the Romans attempted in the zenith of their power, and such as the vigour of Peter, the ambition of Alexander, never dared to contemplate, was successfully achieved by a popular assembly, a few months after its first establishment, a memorable proof of the force of public opinion, and the irresistible power of that new spring which general information and the influence of the press had now, for the first time, brought to bear on public affairs. In parcelling out France into these arithmetical divisions, the Constituent Assembly 1 Deux treated it precisely as if it were a conquered country. Amis, iii. Its patriots realised for its free inhabitants, what the Mig. i. 100. Roman historian laments as the last drop of bitterness 336, 337. in the cup of the vanquished.1 * Acting as conquerors, * "Non ut olim universæ legiones deducebantur, cum tribunis et centurionibus, et sui cujusque ordinis militibus, ut consensu et caritate Rempublicam afficerent: sed ignoti inter se diversis manipulis, sine rectore, sine affectibus mutuis, quasi ex alio genere mortalium repente in unum collecti, numerus magis, quam colonia."-TACITUS, Annal. xiv. c. 27. 340, 352. Lac. vii. CHAP. they imitated the policy of the harshest of that cruel VI. 15. franchise. age, 1790. At the same time, the right to the elective franchise Lowering of for the primary assemblies was fixed at twenty-five years the elective of and the contribution of a marc of money, or the value of three days' labour. By the law, the qualification to be eligible for the electoral assemblies was somewhat higher-it was a contribution of ten days' labour : for the National Assembly it was fixed at an imposition of a marc of silver, and the possession of some property. In practice, however, the latter condition soon came to be disregarded, the choice of the people being held to supersede every other qualification. The election of members of the legislature took place by two degrees: the electors in the first instance, in their primary assemblies, choosing the delegates who were to appoint the legislators, and they in their turn selecting the deputies for the Assembly. It was calculated that this system of suffrage introduced 4,290,000 electors to the rights of citizens in France. Universal suffrage would have given 352, 354. six millions, the same number who were capable of beariii. 430, 432. ing arms in the kingdom. The world had never yet seen Mich. Hist. so prodigious a multitude of men invested with the prac 1 Deux Amis, iii. Hist. Parl. Th. i. 197. de la Rév. i. 159. tical administration of affairs. It is not surprising that its effects were unprecedented in human annals :1 so un "The policy of such barbarous victors," says Mr Burke, "who contemn a subdued people, and insult their inhabitants, ever has been to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country in religion, policy, laws, and manners; to confound all territorial limits, produce a general poverty, crush their nobles, princes, and pontiffs; to lay low everything which lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people under the standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the manner in which their ancient friends to the rights of mankind freed Greece, Macedon, Gaul, and other nations. If their present project of a Republic should fail, all securities for a moderate freedom fail along with it: they have levelled and crushed together all the orders which they found under the monarchy: all the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed, insomuch that, if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in France, under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth."--BURKE'S Consid., Works, v. 328, 333. VI. 1790. bounded were the visions which the acquisition of those CHAP. novel powers spread among the people, that the marriages in France increased a fifth in 1790-a change which, followed as it immediately was by general and acute distress from the universal feeling of insecurity which prevailed, ultimately tended in a fearful degree to increase the violence of the Revolution.* 16. effects of These two measures, the division of the kingdom into departments, and the prodigious degradation of the Lasting elective franchise, rapidly proved fatal to freedom in these France. The latter brought up a body of representatives changes. in the next Assembly which overturned the throne, and induced the Reign of Terror and the despotism of Napoleon; the former, by destroying the influence of the provinces, and concentrating the whole authority of the state in Paris, had left no power existing capable of withstanding the weight, whether in popular, monarchical, or military hands, of the capital. It was not thus in old France. For sixteen years Paris was occupied by the English, and an English monarch was crowned at Rheims; but the provinces resisted and saved the monarchy. The League long held the capital; but Henry IV., at the head of the forces of the provinces, reduced it to submission. But since the separation into departments, the extinction of provincial courts and assemblies, and the concentration of all the authority of the state in the metropolis, every thing has come to depend on its determinations, the ruling power at the Tuileries has never failed to be obeyed from the Channel to the Pyrenees; and the subjection of France to the mobs of StChamans, Paris has become greater than that of the Empire was to 82. the Prætorian bands.1 Before this great change had taken place, the Assembly * "Au milieu des fédérations, allait se multipliant la fédération naturelle, le mariage; serment civique, serment d'hymen, se faisaient ensemble à l'autel. Les mariages-chose inouïe ! - furent plus nombreux d'un cinquième en cette belle année d'espérance."-MICHELET, Histoire de la Révolution, ii. 204. 1 Vicomte sur la Rév. |