At the close of the eighteenth century there was hardly any part of Germany in which serfdom was completely abolished.^{d e} Generally speaking, peasants still formed part of the stock on lands, as they had done during the Middle Ages. Nearly all the soldiers in the armies of Maria Theresa and Frederick were absolute serfs.

In 1788, the general rule with regard to German peasants was that they should not leave the seigniory, and if they did that they should be brought back by force. They were subject to dominical courts, and by them punished for intemperance and idleness. They could not rise in their calling, or change it, or marry without leave from their master. A great proportion of their time was given up to his service. Seigniorial corvées were rigorously exacted, and absorbed, in some places, three days of the week. The peasant rebuilt and kept in repair his seignior’s house, took his produce to market, served him as coachman and messenger. Many years of his youth were spent in domestic service on the manor. A serf might obtain a farm, but his rights of property always remained inchoate. He was bound to farm his land under his seignior’s eye, according to his seignior’s directions; he could neither alienate nor mortgage it without leave. He was sometimes bound to sell the produce of his farm, sometimes forbidden to sell; he was always bound to keep his land under cultivation. His estate did not wholly pass to his children; a portion went to the seignior.

I have not groped through antiquated laws to find these rules ; they are to be found in the code drawn up by Frederick the Great, and promulgated by his successor just before the French Revolution broke out.^f

Nothing of the kind had existed for many, many years in France. Peasants came and went, bought and sold, wrought and contracted without let or hindrance. In one or two eastern provinces, acquired by conquest, some stray relics of serfdom survived; but it had disappeared every where else; and that so long ago, that even the period of its disappearance had been forgotten. Elaborate researches of recent date establish that it had ceased to exist in Normandy as early as the thirteenth century.

But of all the changes that had taken place in the condition of the French peasantry, the most important was that which had enabled them to become freeholders. As this fact is not universally understood, though it is so important, I shall dwell upon it briefly.

It has been commonly believed that the subdivision of farms began with and was caused by the Revolution. All kinds of evidence establish the very reverse.

Twenty years before the outbreak, agricultural societies deplored the subdivision of farm lands. About the same period Turgot declared that “the division of estates was so general that a property barely sufficient to maintain a family was often parceled out among five or six children, who were consequently unable to support themselves by agriculture alone.” A few years later, Necker observed that the number of small rural estates had become immense.

A few years before the Revolution a steward of a seigniory informed his employer, in a secret report, that “estates are being subdivided so equally that the fact is growing alarming: every body wants to have a piece of this and a piece of that, and farms are incessantly split into shreds.” What more could be said of our own time ?

I have myself taken infinite pains to reconstruct the cadastres, so to speak, of the old regime, and I have occasionally succeeded. The law of 1790, imposing a land tax, devolved upon each parish the duty of preparing a schedule of the estates within its limits. Most of these schedules have disappeared. I have, however, discovered them in some villages, and I find, on comparing them with our modern rolls, that the number of landed proprietors was formerly one half and sometimes two thirds of what it is now; a surprising fact, as the total population of France has, since that time, increased more than twenty-five per cent.

Then, as now, a sort of mania for the acquisition of land pervaded the rural population. A judicious contemporary observer notes that “land is selling above its value, owing to the rage of the peasantry to become landowners. All the savings of the lower classes, which in other countries are lodged in private hands or invested in public securities, are used for the purchase of land in France.”

None of the novelties which astonished Arthur Young on his first visit to France appeared to him so striking as the infinite subdivision of land among the peasantry, who, he estimated, held among them one half the landed property in the kingdom. “I had no idea of such a state of things,” he writes more than once; nor, indeed, could he have, for no such phenomenon existed beyond the frontiers of France or their immediate neighborhood.

There had been peasant proprietors in England, but they were, even then, growing rare. In Germany, too, there had been, from time to time, in every section of the country, free farmers owning portions of the soil.^g The oldest German customs recognized a freehold peasantry, and embraced curious regulations regarding land held by them; but the number of such landholders was always small, and their case an exceptional one.

The only portions of Germany where, at the close of the eighteenth century, the peasantry were landholders, and comparatively free, were those which bordered on the Rhine ;^h and it was in the Rhenish provinces that the French revolutionary fever developed itself first and raged most fiercely. Those portions of Germany which resisted the Revolution the longest were those where neither freeholds nor rural liberty had made their appearance; a significant fact.

It is, then, a vulgar error to suppose that the subdivision of property in France dates from the Revolution. It began much farther back. It is true that the Revolution was the means of bringing into market the Church property and many of the estates of the nobility ; but it will be found, on examination of the sales (a task which I have occasionally had patience to perform), that the bulk of these lands passed into the hands of persons who held land already, so that no great increase in the number of landowners can have taken place. They were already, to use the ambitious but accurate expression of M. Necker, immensely numerous. ⁱ

The Revolution did not divide, it freed land. All these small landowners were bound to render various feudal services, of which they could not get rid, and which gravely impeded a proper development of their property.

That these services were onerous can not be questioned. Still, the very circumstance which it would seem ought to have lightened their burden rendered it intolerable. A revolution scarcely less radical than that which had enabled them to become freeholders had released the peasantry of France, alone out of all Europe, from the government of their rural lords.

Brief as is the interval which divides us from the old regime, and often as we see persons who were born under it, it seems already lost in the night of time. So radical was the revolution which has intervened, that it appears to have perished ages ago, and to be now buried in obscurity. Hence there are but few persons who can give a correct answer to the simple question —How were the rural districts governed before 1789? Nor, indeed, can any precise and. comprehensive answer be found in books, or elsewhere than in the official records of the time.

I have often heard it remarked that, long after the nobility had ceased to participate in the government of the kingdom, the rural administration remained in their hands, and the seigniors still governed the peasantry. This too looks like a misconception.

In the eighteenth century, all parochial business was transacted by functionaries who were not seigniorial agents, and who, instead of being chosen by the seigniors, were either appointed by the intendant of the province or elected by the peasantry. It devolved upon these officers to distribute the taxes, to repair the churches, to build schools, to convene and preside over parish meetings; to administer and superintend the expenditure of the funds of the commune; to institute or answer, on behalf of the community, all necessary legal proceedings. The seignior had lost not only the management, but even the supervision of these petty local matters. All parish officers were subject to the government or the central power, as I shall show in the following chapter. Nor did the seignior figure any longer as the king’s deputy in the parish. The execution of the laws, the assembling of the militia, the levying of the taxes, the promulgation of the king’s commands, the distribution of his alms, were no longer intrusted to the seignior. They devolved upon new functionaries. The seignior was in fact nothing more than a simple individual, isolated from his fellows by the enjoyment of peculiar immunities and privileges ; his rank was dinerent—his power no greater than theirs. The intendants were careful to remind their sub-agents that “the seignior is nothing more than the first peasant in the parish.”

The cantons exhibit the same spectacle as the parishes. Nowhere do the nobles, either collectively or separately, administer public affairs.

This was peculiar to France. Every where else, that striking feature of the old feudal system, the connection between the ownership of land and the government of its inhabitants, had been partially preserved. England was administered as well as governed by its chief landholders. In parts of Germany, such as Prussia and Austria, the sovereigns had contrived to shake off the control of the nobility in state affairs ; but they still abandoned the government of the rural districts to the seigniors, and even where they assumed to control, did not venture to supersede them.

In France, the only public department in which the nobles still had a hand was the administration of justice. Leading noblemen still preserved a right of jurisdiction over certain cases (which were decided by judges in their name), and occasionally issued police regulations for the use of their seigniories ; but their jurisdiction had been so curtailed, and limited, and overridden by the royal courts, that the seigniors who still enjoyed it viewed it rather as a source of income than as a source of power.

The other rights of the nobility had shared the same fate. They had lost their political significance, but their pecuniary value had been retained and occasionally augmented.

I am alluding now only to those tangible privileges which were known as feudal rights proper, as they alone affected the people.

It is no easy matter to point out what they actually were in 1789, for their number had been immense, and their diversity prodigious. Many had disappeared altogether. Others had undergone modifications, so that the words used to describe them were not easily understood even by contemporaries; they are necessarily full of obscurities for us. Still, a careful study of the writers on feudal law in the eighteenth century, and a searching inquiry into the various local customs, permits us to range the then existing feudal rights in a few leading classes, all others being mere isolated cases.

Seigniorial corvées were almost wholly disused. Many of the tolls on highways were either substantially reduced or abolished, though they were still met with in a majority of the provinces. The seigniors still levied a toll upon fairs and markets. It is well known that they enjoyed an exclusive privilege of hunting. Generally speaking, none but they could keep pigeons or own dove-cotes. The farmers were every where bound to carry their grain to the seignior’s mill, their grapes to his wine-press. Mutation fines—a tax paid to the seignior on every purchase or sale of lands within the seigniory—were universally in force. On all land, moreover, ground-rents (cents et rentes foncières ) and returns in money or kind were exacted from the proprietor by the seignior, and were essentially irredeemable. One single feature is common to all these various rules: all bear upon the soil or its produce; all are leveled at the farmer.

Clerical seigniors enjoyed the same advantages as their lay brethren ; for, though there was no similitude between the Church and the feudal system in point of origin, destiny, or character, and though they were never actually incorporated into one, they clung together so closely that they seemed incrusted one upon the other.^{k l}

Bishops, canons, abbés held feuds and seigniories in virtue of their ecclesiastical rank; convents were usually the seigniors of the village in which they stood.^m They owned serfs at a time when no other seignior in France did. They exacted corvées, levied toll upon fairs and markets, owned the only oven, the only mill, the only wine-press, the only bull in the seigniory. Besides these rights as seigniors, the French clergy, like the clergy elsewhere, levied tithes.

The main point, however, to which I wish to draw attention just now, is the fact that analogous feudal rights were in force all over Europe at that time, and that in France they were far less burdensome than in other parts of the Continent. As an illustration of the difference I may cite corvées, which in France were rarely claimed and slight, in Germany universally and rigorously exacted.

More than this, the feudal rights which roused most indignation among our ancestors, as being not only unjust, but inimical to civilization—such, for instance, as tithes, inalienable ground-rents (rentes foncières), interminable rent-charges, and mutation fines, which, in the somewhat forcible idiom of the eighteenth century, were said to constitute the “slavery of the land,” were all more or less in force in England. Many of them are still in full vigor, and yet English agriculture is the most perfect and richest in the world. The English people hardly notice their existence.

How did it happen, then, that these usages roused in France a hatred so fierce that it survived its cause, and seems as though it would never be extinguished ? The phenomenon is due partly to the fact that the French peasant was a landholder, and partly to his emancipation from the government of his seignior. Other causes co-operated, no doubt ; but, I take it, these were the main reasons.

Had the peasantry not been landholders, they would have paid no attention to many of the burdens laid by the feudal system on real estate. Tithes, which are levied on produce, interest no one but farmers. Rent-charges are immaterial to those who do not own land. Legal hindrances to the development of property are no serious inconvenience to those who are hired to develop it for others. And, on the other hand, if the French peasantry had still been governed by their seigniors, they would have borne with the feudal rights more patiently, for they would have viewed them in the light of a natural consequence of the constitution of the country.

Aristocracies, which possess not merely privileges, but actual power, which govern and administer public affairs, may exercise private rights of great magnitude without attracting much attention. In the old feudal times people looked upon the nobility as they now look on government: they bore its impositions for the sake of the protection it afforded. If the nobility possessed inconvenient privileges and exacted onerous duties, it secured public order, administered justice, executed the laws, succored the weak, managed public affairs. It was when it ceased to do these things that the burden of its privileges began to be felt, and its very existence became inexplicable.

Picture to yourself, I beg, the French peasant of the eighteenth century, or, rather, the peasant you see to-day, for he is still the same; his condition has changed, but not his character. Picture him, as the documents of the time depict him, so eager for land that he saves all his money to buy, and buys at any price. In order to purchase, he is bound, in the first place, to pay a tax, not to the government, but to some neighbors of his, who have no more authority, and no more to do with public business than he. Still he buys, and puts his heart into his land with his seed. The idea that this little corner of the vast universe belongs to him alone fills him with pride and independence. But the same neighbors pass along and compel him to work on their land without wages. If he tries to protect his harvest from the game, they prevent him. He can not cross the river without paying them toll. He can not take his produce to market and sell it till he has bought leave to do so from them; and when, on his return home, he wants to consume in his family the surplus of his produce—sown by his hands and grown under his eyes—he finds he must first send his grain to their mill to be ground, and to their oven to be cooked. The largest part of the income of his little estate goes to the same parties in the shape of rents, which can not be redeemed or got rid of in any way.

Let him do what he like, he can not but meet at every step of his life these same neighbors, who interfere with his enjoyments, impede his work, consume his produce; and when he has done with these, others, dressed in black, make their appearance, and sweep off the clearest part of his harvest. Picture, if you can, the condition, the wants, the character, the passions of such a man, and estimate the store of hatred and envy he is laying up in his heart!ⁿ

The feudal system, though stripped of its political attributes, was still the greatest of our civil institutions; ^o but its very curtailment was the source of its unpopularity. It may be said, with perfect truth, that the destruction of a part of that system rendered the remainder a hundred-fold more odious than the whole had ever appeared.

I must, at the outset, beg to be permitted to set aside those provinces known as pays d’états, which did actu-ually, or, at least, had the appearance of partially controlling the administration of their own government.

The pays d’états, situated at the extremities of the kingdom, contained barely one fourth of the total population of France ; and, with one or two exceptions, their provincial liberties were in a dying condition. I shall have occasion hereafter to return to them, and to show how far the central power had rendered them subject to the ordinary rules.²

I purpose to devote attention at present chiefly to those provinces which were styled, in administrative parlance, pays d’élection, though there were fewer elections there than any where else. They surrounded Paris on all sides...