The French Revolution and the Rise of Napoleon

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF NAPOLEON

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Theodore Flathe

Translated by John Henry Wright

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

BOOK I. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

BOOK II THE RISE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF NAPOLEON

BY

THEODORE FLATHE,

LATE EMERITUS PROFESSOR AT ST. AFRA, MEISSEN, AUTHOR OF THE HISTORY OF SAXONY, HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION AND OF THE REVOLUTION, 1815-1851, ETC.

TRANSLATED UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF

JOHN HENRY WRIGHT, LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, SECOND SERIES

VOLUME XVI

OF

A HISTORY OF ALL NATIONS

BOOK I. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

CHAPTER I.

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INTRODUCTION.

EVER SINCE LUTHER BROKE THE authority of the church of the Middle Ages, which had been so long dominant in every sphere of human thought and action, a movement, intellectual and spiritual, has been in progress, which permits itself neither to be permanently checked by restrictions imposed from without nor limited by arbitrarily drawn bounds. Once set free from implicit faith in traditional authority, the human mind began to put to the test all that came within its ken, and to look no longer to revelation for an answer to the questions constantly arising, but to the verdicts of its own judgment. Philosophy burst asunder the fetters of dogma, and took possession of the throne from which it had driven theology. As men’s attention was directed more and more to the natural, instead of to the supernatural, new fields, before undreamed of, disclosed themselves for investigation. With unparalleled boldness and certitude science traced out for itself the immutable principles that were to guide it for all time. No sooner had Newton demonstrated that one rule of law pervaded the universe, than the various sciences began to emerge from their isolation and to unite in one all-comprehensive system. English thinkers were the first to apply, with unsparing rigor, the newly discovered criticism to religion as well as to the state, and, in substituting easily understood conceptions for the unfathomable mystery of faith, became the founders of a natural religion; while, in setting up the inherent and inalienable rights of man in opposition to the divine right of kings, they inaugurated a new era in the political development of mankind.

This mighty and universal movement seemed, in the eighteenth century, to strive to recover by redoubled ardor the ground which it had lost in the seventeenth. What had hitherto been only theory began to be converted into practice. A consciousness of strength, never felt before, permeated the spirits of men. Now that they had passed the years of childhood, religion seemed to many a guide to be dismissed, that they might follow only the light of reason. To the people of Germany, amid the fields covered by the ruins of their political life, a literature began to unfold itself, un warmed, indeed, by the beams of princely favor, but having its roots deep down in the native vitality of the race, and worthy to take its place by the side of the literatures of the most advanced nationalities. The noble conception of religious toleration came to antagonize the desire for supremacy of the Roman, as well as of every other, church; the night of fanaticism and superstition began to recede before the dawn of science and morality, and the claims of privilege to melt away before the mild breath of humanity. Among the monarchies of Europe it was the youngest and the smallest that first ventured to realize in practice the modern ideas. In sharpest contrast to the self-idolatry of Louis XIV., the Hohenzollerns transmuted princely power into duty toward state and people. Frederick the Great was the founder of enlightened absolutism, and soon the example of the great Prussian so wrought on princes and statesmen—in Roman as well as in German lands, in Catholic as in Protestant—that the dawn of a new era announced itself throughout all Europe.

Step by step, and, though by no means uniformly, yet without pause, this process of discarding the outworn and replacing it by the new seemed to progress. But, ere the century reached its close, the political world of Europe was driven from its path of peaceful development. The shock that produced this catastrophe came from France. In this land the claims of the new era were so irreconcilably antagonistic to the constitution of the state, of the church, and of society, that the attempt at reform was here scarcely begun before it ruined or annihilated all existing conditions.

The original causes leading to this issue reach back to the time when the French monarchy, while establishing national unity, absorbed all other political powers into a pure absolutism. After the pride of the feudal nobility had been humbled by Richelieu and compelled to submit implicitly to the authority of the monarch, Louis XIV. was able to make his personal will the supreme and sole law of the land. A court of unexampled splendor, in which the sacred person of the king was separated from every other mortal, gave to this monarchy almost the semblance of a theocracy. One thing, however, this despot did not understand: namely, how to imitate other distinguished princes in being not only the ruler, but also the father of his people, and in blending his own interests with theirs and justifying his assumption of the conduct of every matter of supreme importance by the results he attained for them. Absolutism, in his case, by surrounding itself with the halo of a deity, carried in itself its own punishment, not only because it was subject to arrogance, arbitrary caprice, and selfishness, but also because, resting, as it did, on no legal foundation, it appeared in the light of a perpetual usurpation to all who found themselves robbed of their share of power.

Yet this apparently unlimited autocracy was hemmed in and hampered on all sides by the claims and privileges of other powers. The independence of the church remained almost untouched. While the States-General had not been summoned to meet since 1614, and while not even ten of the nobles could assemble to consult regarding their interests without express permission of the king, the clergy continued to hold regular convocations, and drew from their landed property and tithes more than 200,000,000 livres a year. Yet the nobility still maintained an eminent position, and this not so much because, in some provinces, they, in the form of provincial estates, still retained the power of ratifying and allotting new taxes and of voting gifts to the king, as well as a certain measure of self-government, but rather because they had become changed in their nature. Ever since they had been converted by Louis XIV. into a court nobility, living in close contact with the sovereign, they drew without ceasing from this source of grace and favors, of gifts and pensions, and were never weary in improving their advantages for the acquisition of ever greater and more lucrative privileges. The nobles had secured for themselves exemption from taxation wholly or partially. From the most oppressive taxes, especially the taille, they were entirely free; of the capitation-tax they paid but little, and the more eminent the man, the greater was the indulgence in its exaction. From all employment by the state, save only in the army and diplomacy, the noble held himself far aloof; work implying subordination and obedience was inconsistent with the seigniorial traditions of feudal independence. The provincial governorships, positions of the highest dignity and most lucrative, came to be regarded as prerogatives of the nobles, but the real administration of the offices lay in the hands of intendants, commonly plebeian parvenus. The intendant was in every province the sole and direct executor of the ordinances issuing from the highest department of the government—the royal council—and this made him an object of detestation alike to the nobility, who were thus deprived of their power, and to the common people, who groaned under his tyranny. Through these intendants and the officials subordinate to them the central government exercised a tutelary authority over every matter, even the most trivial.

That which the kings of France had won in this way, they cast away in a great measure in another way. With the view of emancipating themselves from dependence on grants from the estates, they had, since the end of the fifteenth century, created a large number of useless offices for the sole purpose of selling them as hereditary possessions. The higher their needs, the greater became the abuse. Not only was a cumbrous and complicated state machine thus called into existence, but, in order to increase their price, these venal offices were declared to exempt their holders from taxation, so that, alongside of the nobility by birth, there arose an official nobility of the bourgeoisie, privileged like the other. Offices and office-holders alike thus came to be regarded as nuisances. In the same way the crown had lost all influence on the composition of the fifteen Parlements, all of whose judicial positions were put up for sale and declared hereditary. In addition to this, from the time when the kings sought the support of the Parlements in their conflict with the feudal nobility and with their aid set aside the States-General, the highest of these courts—the Parlement of Paris—had possessed the privilege that no ordinance should have legal force till it was enrolled in its register. As a consequence the judicial rights of the Parlements were exposed to attacks from the crown. Not only could the king by appearing in person (the so-called bed of justice) compel the registration of an obnoxious ordinance, and, by a lettre de cachet, imprison any refractory man of quality or troublesome writer for any length of time, but it required only a royal order to withdraw a case from the regular judges and submit it to the intendant or to the royal council. To the cities, also, Louis XIV. had sold the right of choosing their magistracies, and, as these bodies developed into irresponsible oligarchies, a door was opened here also to the arbitrary encroachments of the supreme power.

But the nobles were shut out not only from the government, but even from any exercise of authority over the dependents on their estates. This loss of influence naturally rendered residence on their estates distasteful to them and strengthened the magnet that drew them to the court, there to revel in pleasures and honors, and to be fed by the king at the expense of the public. While the English peer dwelt at stated intervals among his tenants and took a personal interest in their welfare, for the French noble there was no harder punishment than to be relegated by the sovereign to his estates. With this estrangement between the nobles and the peasantry was closely associated another main evil that afflicted France—namely, the perversity of its whole system of rural economy. The seigniors were known to their tenants only by the burdens they heaped on them—the corvêe, the game laws with their rigorous enactments, the right of pasturage, the privilege of keeping myriads of doves, multifarious imposts in money and natural products, the right to a share of their wine, grain, fruit, etc. Either the lands were tilled by métayers who, as a rule, paid the half of their gross produce, and who, owing to the exceeding smallness of their holdings, earned only the scantiest living, or the seigniors’ dues were farmed out to bailiffs who treated the peasants with merciless severity. To the nobles the maintenance of every one of their privileges became ever more important in proportion as they became poorer. Nothing contributed more to this economical decadence than the law of primogeniture, by which the eldest son took two-thirds of the estate, and the remaining members only one-third. In time the estates came to be very much subdivided, and, as class prejudice forbade every industrial occupation, no resource was left the aristocrat but new alienations and more rigorous enforcement of his privileges.

The French peasant was all the more sensitive to this system of oppression, in that he enjoyed more freedom than his compeers in other lands, especially in Germany. Serfdom was all but extinct, but the peasant proprietors, owing to the burdens passing with the land, were condemned to lives of penury and misery. To this we have to add the fact that the state imposed the heaviest burdens not on those most able to bear, but on those least able to resist. It relieved the rich and crushed down the poor. The frightful taille, the capitation-tax, the tax of a twentieth, the impost in place of the corvée, and the indirect taxes swallowed more than half of the peasant’s meagre earnings. The gabelle compelled, by severe penalties, everyone above seven years of age to purchase annually seven pounds of salt. It was strictly forbidden to manufacture salt from sea-water. These burdens were made all the heavier by the unreasonably merciless mode of exaction. Where the taxes were not farmed out to financial corporations, the quota falling to a province was assessed on the separate communes, every individual of which as his turn came was bound to act as collector, and as such to be answerable for the full amount of the quota, not only with his whole property, but with his personal freedom. The dread that he who was this year the assessor might the next year be himself the assessed made the collectors indulgent to the influential and proportionally severe on the defenceless. With the farmers of the taxes wealthy individuals, and even whole communes, were able to come to terms, so that they no longer had to pay taxes. As if all this were not enough, the state, in the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV., began to burden the village communes with forced labor in the construction of royal highways, and this expedient was found so convenient that it was extended to all possible public works. The government, moreover, in its anxiety to secure cheap bread for the turbulent masses of the cities, so hampered the husbandman by internal tolls and prohibition of exports, that it became impossible for him to find a fair market for his grain. Ever wider stretches of arable land were left uncultivated; in the most fertile wine districts thousands of acres lay untilled, for the produce did not pay for the labor. In 1750 it was estimated that one-fourth of the arable soil was lying desolate.

In the cities the burdens were so allotted that they fell almost exclusively on the lower classes. The reckless multiplication of guilds, from which the state had made dishonorable profit by selling them special privileges, shut out such artisans as had naught but deft hands from every avenue to advancement. One main inducement that attracted skilled workers from all parts of the land to Paris was that here they could more easily slip from under the yoke of guild-privileges. As in this respect, so in every other, the capital was the polypus which drew to itself the life-blood of the whole body politic. Whatever considered itself among the élite in any sphere strove to get there. But the more brightly the light streamed out from Paris, the darker lay the shadows over the rest of the land. The more Paris grew to be the centre of intellectual and material delights, the more intolerable the seigniors and prelates found a sojourn in the secluded, uncultured provinces. The government sought to check this growth of Paris, not comprehending that in it there came to light only a symptom of the evils of their own system and of the whole structure of French society.

A centralized bureaucracy, absolute and arbitrary, capricious, and everywhere honeycombed by favoritism; a system of red tape without principle or consistency; a parasitic nobility; the most iniquitous allotment of burdens and privileges; a people long wont to let its fate for weal or woe be determined from above—such was the condition of France up to 1789. Thoughtful and sympathetic men, like Boisguillebert and Marshal Vauban, already in the beginning of the century, pointed out that the equal distribution of burdens was the only preventive of the evils they saw impending.

The brilliancy and glories of the reign of Louis XIV. hid from view the sores eating deeper and deeper into the body politic; but when the former ceased to dazzle, the latter were more acutely felt. The more the monarchy lost in personal dignity, the more fertile became the government in violent and dishonorable devices for relieving itself from its difficulties, and the more frequently and the more bitterly did the people feel themselves deceived. The regency of Philip, Duke of Orleans, with its boundless prodigality, its cynical irreligiousness, and shameless licentiousness, worked the moral bankruptcy of the monarchy. From the days of Law’s fraudulent financial schemes, people had begun to watch public affairs more narrowly, and to criticise them in a more suspicious spirit. During the personal rule of Louis XV., the crown, sullied by the debaucheries of its wearer, became an object of contempt and abhorrence. The shipwreck of France’s influence and prestige abroad dealt the finishing blow to all respect for the ancient form of government. The miserably conducted Seven Years’ War cost the nation not only its colonies, but its name, as a military power.

The more the court of Versailles estranged itself from all consciousness of duty toward the people and state, the nearer to perfection did it carry the art of a social life, in which every natural emotion and every true feeling was choked out by conventional ceremonial and show. The king was the glass of fashion and mould of form for all about him. His manner of life left him scarcely an hour a day for business of state, but his lever was a solemn act performed with all the scrupulous formality of a church ceremony, and called daily for the services of a hundred nobles. The life of the courtiers and of the higher classes generally, all of whom aped court manners, was similarly one of busy and artificial frivolity, in which studied form took the place of reality; superficial wit, of knowledge; free-thinking, of faith; coquetry, of true passion; and sensual pleasures, of work. Even the children could not be early enough initiated into the art of gallantry. All earnest feeling and sense of duty were banished from these circles that had nothing to do but play and amuse themselves, and regarded it as an arrangement of nature that the great should enjoy, and all others toil for them. Vice was not merely permissible; it was an accomplishment, and must appear in the garb of elegance. Conjugal love was an offence against bon ton; conjugal fidelity, an absurdity. Men and women strove to outdo one another in extravagance and wantonness.

It is vain to ask what the church did to elevate man from this sink of corruption, and to suggest to him higher conceptions of life. The Jesuitical ethics, which were dominant in the court from the days of Louis XIV., had nothing to say against the immorality of society, so long as the supreme claims of the church were left unmolested. Among the prelates of the eighteenth century there is not one who could be placed by the side of a Bossuet, a Massillon, or a Fenelon. Dearly did the French nation pay for its inability to enter upon a renewed spiritual life, as those Germans had done who accepted the Reformation. For the French, religion remained a mere matter of externals, and rapid transitions from unbelief to bigotry or the reverse, or a superficial conjunction of both, had to serve as their equivalents for a true

The office abdicated by the church was eagerly assumed by philosophy. The craving for proof and analysis, once awakened, received a special stimulus from the unnatural conditions existing in the state and society, and led to theoretical investigations to determine what the state and society essentially were, and how they must be constituted so as to be in accord with justice and reason. Writers, without rank, office, or wealth, became not only the most influential but the only politicians of their time; and undertaking, as they did, to guide and to voice public opinion, they maintained for a long time the position occupied in free countries by party leaders.

The only question was, whether these writers possessed the qualifications requisite for such an office. Assuredly not, so far as accurate acquaintance with existing conditions was concerned. Not one of them thought it worth his while to inform himself concerning the actual machinery of government, the wants and wishes, the views and fancies of the people in their various grades, or to seek a remedy for the evils afflicting France through investigation of their causes. From the writings of these men we derive not the most meagre scintilla of information in regard to the real condition of the French people. The schools in which they had studied were those of abstract philosophy and the exact sciences. From these they borrowed their methods and applied them, without modification, to the science of politics. But although natural science had reached its conclusions through experiment and observation, these apostles had this essential defect, that they altogether ignored experience and actual facts. That which was going on before their eyes and taking its place in history refused positively to conform to an abstract formula. They preferred to adopt conclusions based on data evolved by pure ratiocination; that which did not tally with these—and that was pretty much all existing conditions—was simply not worthy of consideration. Their efforts were not directed, therefore, to reforming the government of France where it needed reforming, but to creating an ideal state system which should be applicable everywhere and to all men. They aimed at being not statesmen, but world-reformers. What they lacked in political experience was made up by the incontestability of their faith in themselves and the infallibility of pure reason. Hence the claim of the new teaching to unconditional acceptance and the enthusiasm with which its prophets announced the coming millennium. It was a revelation, and, with the authority of such, it preached the dawn of the age of reason. Hence, too, its enmity toward the church, which set herself up as an authority over that individual reason to which alone it appealed.

It is perhaps impossible to distinguish between what was characteristic of these men personally, and what of their age. In any case their influence was all the stronger because they gave voice boldly and explicitly to what was floating, indistinct and unexpressed, through the minds of the cultured world generally. To no one does this apply more truly than to Voltaire. No one else has ever exhibited, in a manner so masterly and incisive, the art of condensing into terse and easily carried sentences the grand discoveries and theories of the human intellect. That which made him especially admired was the spirit permeating all that he produced, so fully in accord with the taste, views and wants of that public for which alone he wrote. Œdipe, his earliest drama, owed its enthusiastic reception to its allusions to the circumstances of the times; his Henriade, completed under the impressions left by his involuntary sojourn in England, is a didactic poem on religious toleration; his Pucelle, an effective satire on bigotry and superstition. History served him only to expose, in the name of humanity, what evil had been brought into the world through despotism and priestcraft.

The war which Voltaire began with the weapons of wit and frivolity the younger generation continued with fiercer earnestness. The Encyclopaedia became the great mine of human knowledge emancipated from the shackles of tradition, whence the streams of materialism and atheism flowed into literature. It is especially strange to see a man like Montesquieu, a parlementary noble and so one of the privileged, carried away by this current, and in his Lettres Persanes criticising in a destructive spirit the actual conditions of France. Still more remarkable is it, that his later works, conceived in a more earnest spirit, should have become the armory whence the Revolution took more than one of its most effective weapons. Strictly regarded, his works no more deserve the title of historical writings than do those of Voltaire. The picture which he sketches in his renowned essay, On the Causes of the Greatness and of the Decline of the Romans (Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et de la Decadence des Romains), is not so much that of the Roman republic as of a monarchy limited by an estate of notables, i. e., the ideal of a parliament jealous of its political rights. From the profound ignorance of the French public in regard to all matters of history, it was not difficult for an adroit writer to lend to propositions the most erroneous the semblance of accuracy by appealing to so-called historical facts. Thus the doctrine expounded in his Spirit of the Laws (Esprit des Lois), in regard to the alleged division, in the British constitution, of the sovereignty into a law-making, an executive, and a judicial power, found such ready acceptance that it entered into the creed of all well-meaning patriots.

Rousseau was more extreme than either Voltaire or Montesquieu. The fundamental principle of his theory is that man is naturally good and happy, that civilization has made him vicious and wretched, and that through it the present condition of human society is one of progressive degeneration. The only, but the certain, cure for this is a return to nature. His premises were false, and his conclusions, consequently, erroneous; but, nevertheless, they operated to transform the world. His Smile delivered childhood from the perverting influence of education and restored to it its paradise. La Nouvelle Héloïse reinstated passion in its rights as opposed to the restraints and perversions of conventionality, and opened men’s eyes to the beauties of nature. In his Contrat Social he shakes the very foundations of the state and society.

Of these three men all the foremost spirits of the France of the next generation were the ardent disciples. Above all, the teaching of Rousseau, ungarnished with wit and satire, but stamped with all the earnestness of deepest conviction and promising a future bright with happiness, sounded to this race like the note of its redemption from the woes of the present. Condorcet looks forward to a time when the sun will shine only on free men, who recognize no other mistress than reason, when tyrants and their slaves, priests and their blind or hypocritical tools, will be found only in history or on the stage, and when men will trouble themselves about them only in order to watch for the first germs of superstition and tyranny . . . and smother them under the weight of reason. Thus, in contradistinction to the actual state, there sprang up in the fancy the vision of a state in which all should be simple and well-ordered, righteous and in accordance with reason; and this vision, being evolved from premises demonstrated with mathematical precision, claimed unconditional mathematical authority.

Nothing of this announcement reached that portion of the people pining in misery. All this literature had no word for them. It is a remarkable fact that it was precisely the highest of the land—the privileged classes—who most eagerly imbibed the poison that was to be so fatal to themselves. Blasé with pleasures and sick with ennui, they craved a new excitement. With all the volatility and excitability of the French character, they abandoned themselves to enthusiasm for philanthropy and fraternity, without letting themselves be for a moment disturbed in the comfortable enjoyment of their prerogatives, and without the slightest foreboding that these harmless speculations, these charming strokes of genius, these sentimental emotions, might one day be changed into political passion and actual deeds. Sweet simplicity, a rural life, and a renunciation of etiquette became the fashion. In reality all this was but a new form of coquetry destitute of any moral effect. The foulness of the world of fashion was whitewashed, but not purged away; all this sentimental interest for the common people—whom they pictured to themselves, after the moving delineations of a Marmontel, a Florian, and a Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, as innocent, sentimental, kindhearted, and grateful—was nothing but posing and affectation. It never once entered their minds to concern themselves about the actual condition of the wretched lower classes. Precisely in this age of enlightenment the means of public education and culture became less and less with frightful rapidity, and, while humanity constituted the question of the day, the cleft between the few thousands of the cultured and the utterly uncultivated masses became wider and wider.

But there were thinkers in France who did not always move in the cloud-land of philosophy, but put to themselves the question how the evils afflicting France could be remedied or lessened by practicable reforms. Among these a place of honor belongs to d’Argenson, a minister dismissed in 1747, and the first nobleman who, on principle, renounced the privileges of his order. In his essay entitled Reflections on the Government of France, he submitted propositions in regard to the improvement of agriculture, a new division of the kingdom into departments, and the abolition of the corvée with its abuses by giving over to the communes the control of the police, the maintenance of roads, the collection of the taille, the care of the poor, and even the administration of justice, so that the nobles would be driven to identify themselves with the nation and forego many of their privileges. Marvelous is his prophetic glance into the future. Anarchy, he writes, advances with giant strides. . . . A philosophical breeze blows hither from England; we hear the murmur of words like ‘Freedom,’ ‘Republic.’ . . . All ranks are dissatisfied—the soldiers disbanded since the peace, the clergy with their prerogatives encroached upon, the Parlements humiliated, the common people crushed down with imposts. . . . Everywhere there is inflammable material. From a riot the transition is easy to a revolt; from a revolt to a revolution.

About the middle of the century, Gournay, royal intendant of commerce, found that the industrial and business life of the people is ruled by laws not less fixed than those of the physical world, and recognized in the violation of these the source of the misery of the working classes as well as of the financial embarrassments of the state. Quesnay, the king’s physician, applied this discovery to agriculture, and, in seeking the cure for its decadence in its liberation from everything that impedes the labors of the husbandman or restricts him in finding a market for his produce, became the founder of the school of the Economists or the Physiocrats. While these men were hailing the approach of democratic despotism, which was to be omnipotent to recast the forms of society, socialistic theories (Morelly, Code de la Nature, 1755) came to light, which, in proclaiming the community of property, the right to employment, and the complete absorption of the individual by the state, wished to destroy society itself.

Those who were at the top of society heard nothing of the murmuring at the bottom. Even when danger began to make its first advances toward them, and the new ideas had descended from their salons into the parlors of the well-to-do middle classes, now conscious of their strength, their lips continued to overflow with words of rapture over the virtues of the people. But the growing equalization between these two classes in wealth and culture only made the barriers of caste, which the aristocracy still held up, all the more offensive, and discontent over their now unjustifiable prerogatives became blended with rancor against the government, which seemed only capable of working evil. When the minister Maupeou resisted the encroachments of the Parlement, and, banishing its refractory members from Paris, availed himself of the opportunity to make a general reform in the administration of justice, suspicion and dread of despotism saw in his measure only the hand of his patroness, the Countess du Barry, and surrounded the Parlement with the halo of martyrs for freedom. The suspicions seemed justified by the fact that this overthrow of the Parlement put the controller-general of finance, the hated Abbé Terray, in a position to increase the taxes and to perpetrate fraud. He abolished all the salable offices without compensation to the holders, and then, immediately multiplying the number of these positions, he again put them up for sale, to the great gain of the treasury. In such a period of misrule and arbitrariness, the conflict with the Parlement had the effect of