_Louis XVI.--The Great Revolution--Fall of the Monarchy_
Crowned vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless, pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would have taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers. Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were 30,000 beggars in Paris alone, and from 720,000 in 1700 the population had in 1784 decreased to 620,000. The penal code was of inhuman ferocity; law was complicated, ruinous and partial, and national credit so low that loans could be obtained only against material pledges and at interest five times as great as that paid by England. Wealthy bishops and abbots[157] and clergy, noblesse and royal officials, were wholly exempt from the main incidents of taxation; for personal and land taxes, tithes and forced labour, were exacted from the common people alone. No liberty of worship, nor of thought: Protestants were condemned to the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met the same fate. Authors and books were arbitrarily sent by _lettres de cachet_ to the Bastille or Vincennes. Yet in spite of all repression, a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in Paris was elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal doctrine that cut at the very roots of the old _régime_. "I care not whether a man is good or bad," says the Deity in Blake's prophetic books, "all I care, is whether he is a wise man or a fool." While France was in travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the futile king was trifling with his locks and keys and colouring maps, the queen playing at shepherdesses at Trianon or performing before courtiers, officers and equerries the _rôles_ of Rosina in the _Barbier de Seville_ and of Colette in the _Devin du Village_, the latter composed by the democratic philosopher, whose _Contrat Social_ was to prove the Gospel of the Revolution.[158] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary, self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the fire of an unquenchable hatred of their oppressors was kindled in his breast. Journeying on foot between Paris and Lyons, he was one day diverted from his path by the beauty of the landscape, and wandered about, seeking in vain to discover his way. "At length," he writes, "weary, and dying of thirst and hunger, I entered a peasant's house, not a very attractive one, but the only one I could see. I imagined that here as in Switzerland every inhabitant of easy means would be able to offer hospitality. I entered and begged that I might have dinner by paying for it. The peasant handed me some skim milk and coarse barley bread, saying that was all he had. The milk seemed delicious and I ate the bread, straw and all, but it was not very satisfying to one exhausted by fatigue. The man scrutinised me and judged by my appetite the truth of the story I had told. Suddenly, after saying that he perceived I was a good, honest youth and not there to spy upon him, he opened a trap door, descended and returned speedily with some good wheaten bread, a ham appetising but rather high, and a bottle of wine which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. He added a good thick omelette and I enjoyed a dinner such as those alone who travel on foot can know. When it came to paying, his anxiety and fears again seized him; he would have none of my money and pushed it aside, exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine what he was afraid of. At last he uttered with a shudder the terrible words, _commis, rats de cave_" ("assessors, cellar rats"). He made me understand that he hid the wine because of the _aides_,[159] and the bread because of the _tailles_,[160] and that he would be a ruined man if it were supposed that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although fairly well-off, dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his brow, and could only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as those he saw around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as well as affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous tax-farmers (_publicans_)." And Voltaire, that implacable avenger of injustice, in verse that rends the heart, has in _les Finances_, (1775), pictured a peaceful home ruined; its inmates evicted to misery, to the galleys and to death, by the cruel exactions of the royal director of the _aides_ and _gabelles_, with his _sergents de la finance habillés en guerriers_.