The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface.
• The Old Regime and the Revolution.
• Book First.
• Chapter I.: Contradictory Opinions Formed Upon the Revolution When It Broke Out.
• Chapter II.: That the Fundamental and Final Object of the Revolution Was Not, As Some Have Supposed, to Destroy Religious and to Weaken Political Authority.
• Chapter III.: That the French Revolution, Though Political, Pursued the Same Course As a Religious Revolution, and Why.
• Chapter IV.: How the Same Institutions Had Been Established Over Nearly All Europe, and Were Every Where Falling to Pieces.
• Chapter V.: What Did the French Revolution Really Achieve?
• Book Second.
• Chapter I.: Why the Feudal Rights Were More Odious to the People In France Than Any Where Else.
• Chapter II.: That We Owe “administrative Centralization,” Not to the Revolution Or the Empire, As Some Say, But to the Old Regime
• Chapter III.: That What Is Now Called “the Guardianship of the State” (tutelle Administrative) Was an Institution of the Old Regime.
• Chapter IV.: That Administrative Tribunals (la Justice Administrative) and Official Irresponsibility (garantis Des Fonctionnaires) Were Institutions of the Old Regime.
• Chapter V.: How Centralization Crept In Among the Old Authorities, and Supplanted Without Destroying Them.
• Chapter VI.: Of Official Manners and Customs Under the Old Regime.
• Chapter VII.: How the Capital of France Had Acquired More Preponderance Over the Provinces, and Usurped More Control Over the Nation, Than Any Other Capital In Europe.
• Chapter VIII.: That Frenchmen Had Grown More Like Each Other Than Any Other People.
• Chapter IX.: That These Men, Who Were So Alike, Were More Divided Than They Had Ever Been Into Petty Groups, Each Independent of and Indifferent to the Others.
• Chapter X.: How the Destruction of Political Liberty and Class Divisions Were the Causes of All the Diseases of Which the Old Regime Died.
• Chapter XI.: Of the Kind of Liberty Enjoyed Under the Old Regime, and of Its Influence Upon the Revolution.
• Chapter XII.: How the Condition of the French Peasantry Was Worse In Some Respects In the Eighteenth Century Than It Had Been In the Thirteenth, Notwithstanding the Progress of Civilization.
• Chapter XIII.: How, Toward the Middle of the Eighteenth Century, Literary Men Became the Leading Politicians of the Country, and of the Effects Thereof.
• Chapter XIV.: How Irreligion Became a General Ruling Passion Among Frenchmen In the Eighteenth Century, and of the Influence It Exercised Over the Character of the Revolution.
• Chapter XV.: How the French Sought Reforms Before Liberties.
• Chapter XVI.: That the Reign of Louis XVI. Was the Most Prosperous Era of the Old Monarchy, and How That Prosperity Really Hastened the Revolution.
• Chapter XVII.: How Attempts to Relieve the People Provoked Rebellion.
• Chapter XVIII.: Of Certain Practices By Means of Which the Government Completed the Revolutionary Education of the People.
• Chapter XIX.: How Great Administrative Changes Had Preceded the Political Revolution, and of the Consequences Thereof.
• Chapter XX.: How the Revolution Sprang Spontaneously Out of the Preceding Facts.
• Appendix.
• Of the Pays D’etats, and Languedoc In Particular.
• Note Referring to Various Passages In This Volume.
• Feudal Rights Existing At the Time of the Revolution, According to the Feudal Lawyers of the Day.
• Estimate of the Various Tenures In Use In France Before the Revolution.

CHAPTER VII.

HOW THE CAPITAL OF FRANCE HAD ACQUIRED MORE PREPONDERANCE OVER THE PROVINCES, AND USURPED MORE CONTROL OVER THE NATION, THAN ANY OTHER CAPITAL IN EUROPE.

IT is not situation, or size, or wealth which makes some capital cities rule the countries in which they stand; that phenomenon is caused by the prevailing form of government.

London, which is as populous as many a kingdom, has, up to this time, exercised no sovereign control over Great Britain.

No citizen of the United States ever supposes that New York could decide the fate of the American Union, nor does any citizen of the State of New York fancy that that city could even direct state affairs at will; yet New York contains as many inhabitants today as Paris did when the Revolution broke out.

Moreover, Paris bore to the rest of the kingdom the same proportion, so far as population was concerned, during the religious wars as it did in 1789; yet it was powerless at the former period. At the time of the Fronde, Paris was nothing more than the largest French city; in 1789 it was France.

In 1740 Montesquieu wrote to a friend, “France is nothing but Paris and a few distant provinces which Paris has not yet had time to swallow up.” In 1750 the Marquis de Mirabeau, a man of chimerical views, but occasionally profound in his way, said of Paris without naming it, “Capitals are necessities, but if the head grow too large, the body becomes apoplectic and wastes away. What will the consequence be if, by drawing all the talent of the kingdom to this metropolis, and leaving to the provincials no chance of reward or motive for ambition, the latter are placed in a sort of quasi dependence, and converted into an inferior class of citizens?” He adds that this process is effecting a silent revolution by depopulating the provinces of their notables, leading men, and men of ability.

The foregoing chapters have explained pretty fully the causes of this phenomenon; the reader’s patience may be spared their repetition here.

The Revolution did not escape the notice of government, but it only viewed the fact in its bearing on the capital, whose rapid increase seemed to presage increased difficulties of administration. Numerous royal ordinances, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, endeavored to check its growth. The monarchy steadily concentrated in Paris all the national life of France, and yet desired to see Paris remain small. People were forbidden to build new houses, or were bound to build them in the most costly manner, in the worst localities. But each successive ordinance admitted that, notwithstanding its predecessors, Paris had increased steadily. Six times did Louis XIV. exert his omnipotent will to check the expansion of the city, but each effort was a failure; the capital expanded in spite of decrees. Its power swelled even more rapidly than its volume, which was due less to its own exertions than to events beyond its walls.

For, simultaneously with its extension, the local franchises of the rural districts were fading away, all symptoms of independent vigor were vanishing, provincial characteristics were being effaced, the last flicker of the old national life was dying out. Not that the nation was growing sluggish; on the contrary, it never knew a more active time; but the only mainspring of movement was at Paris. One illustration, chosen out of a thousand, may make this plainer. I find reports to the minister on the book business, in which it is stated that, during the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were large printing-offices in many provincial cities, but that now there are no printers to be found, and no work to be done. Yet it is not to be questioned but there were far more books printed at the close of the eighteenth century than during the sixteenth. The secret is, simply, that mind had ceased to radiate from any point but the centre; Paris had swallowed up the provinces.

This preliminary revolution was fully accomplished before the French Revolution broke out.

The famous traveler, Arthur Young, left Paris a few days after the assembling of the States-General, and before the capture of the Bastille; he was struck with the contrast between city and country. In Paris, all was activity and noise; political pamphlets appeared in such quantities that ninety-two were counted in one week. “I never saw such a fever of publishing,” said he, “even at London.” Outside of Paris he could find nothing but inertia and silence; no pamphlets, and but few journals. The provinces were roused and ready to move, but not to take the initiative; when the people met, it was to hear the news from Paris. Young asked the people of each city what they purposed doing. “Their answer was always the same, ‘We are but a provincial city; you must go and see what they are going to do at Paris.’ These people,” he adds, “dare not hold an opinion till they know how it is received at Paris.”

Surprise has been expressed at the remarkable ease with which the Constituante assembly destroyed at a blow provinces in some cases older than the monarchy, and parceled out the kingdom into eighty-three distinct sections, as if it had been virgin soil in the New World. Europe was not prepared for any such act, and viewed it with surprise and horror. “This is the first time,” said Burke, “that men have so barbarously torn their country to pieces.” It did look as though they had torn living bodies, but in reality they had only dismembered corpses.

At the very time that Paris was becoming all-powerful, another noteworthy change was taking place within its borders. It had long been a city of trade, business, and pleasure; it now became an industrial and manufacturing city. This change gave it a new and formidable character.

It had long been inevitable. Even in the Middle Ages Paris had been the most industrious, as it was the largest city of the kingdom; latterly, the distance between it and its rivals had increased. Arts and industrial energy followed the government. As Paris became more and more the arbiter of taste, the only centre of power and of art, the focus of national activity, the manufacturing life of the country gradually concentrated itself there.

Though I place, in general, but little reliance on the statistical tables of the old regime, I believe it may be safely asserted that during the sixty years which preceded the French Revolution, the number of workmen at Paris was more than doubled, though the whole population of the city during the same period only increased one third.

Independently of these general causes, peculiar motives attracted mechanics from all parts of France to Paris; and when they came, they lived mostly together, and ultimately monopolized whole wards. The burdens laid on mechanics by the fiscal policy of the government were lighter at Paris than in the provinces; nor was it so easy any where as there to obtain the freedom of a trade-company. Residents of the suburbs of Saint Antoine and of the Temple enjoyed peculiar privileges in this respect. Louis XVI. enlarged still further the prerogatives of the Saint Antoine suburb, in the design of collecting an immense number of operatives there, or, as that unfortunate monarch phrased it, “being desirous of showing a new mark of our favor to the workmen of the Saint Antoine suburb, and relieving them from burdens which are alike injurious to their interests and to the freedom of trade.”

Toward the period of the Revolution the number of factories, manufactures, and blast-furnaces had become so great at Paris as to alarm the government. Industrial progress had aroused strange fears in the mind of officials. A decree of council in 1782 declares that “the king, fearing lest the rapid increase of factories should lead to so large a consumption of firewood as to deprive the city of its proper supply, prohibits the establishment of new works of this kind within fifteen leagues of the capital.” No one suspected the real danger to be apprehended from the agglomeration of workmen.

It was thus that Paris became the mistress of France, and thus that the army that was to master Paris was mustered.

It is generally admitted nowadays, I believe, that administrative centralization and the omnipotence of Paris have had much to do with the fall of the various governments we have had during the last forty years. I shall have but little difficulty in proving that the ruin of the old monarchy was in a great measure due to the same causes, and that they exercised no small influence in bringing about that revolution which was the parent of all the others.