This work has received the GREAT GOBERT PRIZE from the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the French Academy.

No......

SEVENTY-five copies priNTED.

1776.

THE CORVÉE. - TRADE CORPORATIONS.

337

Louis was at this moment wholly under the influence of the comptroller-general, and Maurepas began seriously to fear that the King would escape him.

The parliament continuing to disobey, the King summoned it to Versailles, March 12. Philosophy and progress turned against the old abuses the forms which had been the usual weapons of despotism and fiscal oppression. The bed of justice was this time, to use the expression of Voltaire, a bed of benefi

cence.

The parliamentary orators, nevertheless, used a language which would scarcely have suited the worst days of Louis XV. After the keeper of the seals had feebly set forth the measures to which he lent his coöperation despite himself, the first president replied by a bombastic harangue, in which he depicted the gloomy sadness diffused everywhere, the people in consternation, the capital in alarm, and the nobility plunged in affliction. The tax substituted for the corvée was "ruinous if made as heavy as was necessary, and insufficient if this was not done."

The tax pretended to be ruinous to the privileged classes was light, apparently, to the unhappy roturiers! "This edict deals a new blow to the natural franchises of the nobility and the clergy," said the first president.

To derive privileges from natural right exceeds the bounds of absurdity!

The first president continued by declamations against the other edicts, even more perfidious than violent, and addressed to outside opinion; showing the subsistence of the Parisian people endangered by the abolition of the police of grain, all public order destroyed by the abolition of trade wardenships, and the redemption of the abolished posts overburdening the finances and leading to bankruptcy. The advocate-general Séguier surpassed the head of his company. He strove to establish, by a theory borrowed from the physiocrats themselves, that, the landed proprietor already paying all the taxes in the end, he would be ruined by a new burden; and complained that this tax confounded the nobility and the clergy with the rest of the people. The only reasonable objection made by him to the edict on the corvée, a thing, moreover, inconsistent with his first argument, was, that, as commerce profited by the roads as well as landed property, it should also be made to pay its part. He concluded by demanding that the roads should be made by the army. As to the trade-wardenships, he affirmed that these shackles, these fetters, these prohibitions, so

much decried, were precisely what constituted the glory, the safety, and the vast extent, of French commerce. He strove to terrify the King by the fantastic picture of the universal ruin which would follow the fall of the trade corporations. An unbridled independence, succeeding the regulated liberty (what liberty!) possessed by the nation, would inevitably destroy commerce, manufactures, and agriculture itself! He consented to admit, however, that the corporations were not without abuses, and that there was room for some reforms. He invoked in pathetic terms the glorious memories of St. Louis, Henri IV., Louis XIV., and Colbert, the principal authors, he said, of the regulation of manufactures. A single just idea was submerged in all this medley, the necessity of insuring the integrity of manufacture.1

The registration was proceeded with. While the parliament was depicting the people in consternation, the working-men, intoxicated with delight, were driving over the city in hackneycoaches filled to overflowing, thronging the taverns of the suburbs, with songs of mirth such as old Paris had never heard, and blessing liberty and its author with inexpressible joy. The peasants themselves, so slow to comprehend the good that it was sought to do them, but so persevering in pursuing the hope once discerned, began to be profoundly agitated. In the classes less directly favored by the measures of the government, all who were not blinded by interest or prejudice could not but be affected by the preambles of these edicts, breathing such generous confidence, such noble ardor for goodness and truth, and such active and communicative goodness. Public opinion became hourly enlightened. A very opportune publication placed the parliament in flagrant contradiction with the past. An extract from its registers was printed, showing that when Henri III. in 1581, with a purely fiscal aim, instituted trade wardenships and masterships in a great number of towns in which they did not exist, the parliament resisted this innovation for two years; and that a bed of justice was required to establish the wardenship system, as one was now required to overthrow it. The prayers of the StatesGeneral of 1614, so favorable to the cause of the freedom of manufactures, might also have been quoted in behalf of the edicts.2

1 See the official report of the session, ap. Anc. Lois françaises, t. XXIII. 2 Mém. de Bachaumont, t. IX. p. 78. Mercure hist., t. CLXXX. p. 318. Two days before the bed of justice (March 10), a royal declaration had restricted the burials which were customary in the churches and the cloisters, and prescribed the enlargement of the cemeteries, or their removal beyond the walls of the towns. The parlia ment itself had rendered an analogons decree with respect to Paris as early as 1765;