THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



26S 



cultivating their land, and finding shelter beneath the 

 justice and peace" that characterized the luminous 

 reign of Henry IV., were closed as with the hand of 

 blood, and sealed with the ominous seal of blood, when 

 the assassin's steel sought and found the heart of that 

 great monarch, and plunged France into chaos. The 

 good systems of culture instituted by Serres, and pa- 

 tronized by the king, were swept away ; and the re- 

 sources they had been the means of creating and hus- 

 banding were exhausted by the follies of Louis XIV. 

 Then came war with all its terrors. The war of succes- 

 sion — the defeats of Blenheim, Ramilies, &c. ; the seven 

 years' war — the loss of fleets and colonies — all produced 

 their cruel effects ; but such an eye as Napoleon's 

 could not fail to discern a much more influential cause 

 of decay in the severing of those bonds which had long 

 bound together the nobility with the rural population. 



As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century 

 Henry IV. complained that the nobles were quit- 

 ting tlie rural districts. In the eighteenth century 

 there did not remain in the rural districts any of 

 the gentry except those whose means compelled them to 

 remain there, who, being exempt from the heavy pres- 

 sure of taxation, shared neither the grievances nor the 

 hardships to which the miserable peasantry were ex- 

 posed. The kings of France lost no opportunity of 

 separating the nobility from the people. They were 

 afraid of them, and, wishing to attract them to court, 

 sought to effect their purpose by restricting their powers 

 in their several districts ; so that, when they were com- 

 pletely dispossessed of their political rights under Louis 

 XIV., when freedom had disappeared — when, in fact, 

 they had been reduced to ciphers, where they had 

 formerly exercised the power of lordship in the most 

 plenary fashion — this emigration of the nobles increased. 

 Rural life was rendered distasteful to them. 



Richelieu, the crafty minister of Louis XIV,, sig- 

 nificantly says to one of the intendants — a class of men 

 who were employed by the Government to destroy the 

 influence of the nobles in the rural districts, and gra- 

 dually to succeed to their functions — " Do the gentry of 

 your province like to stay at home or to go abroad ?" 

 The intendant laments that the gentry of his province 

 '' like to remain with their peasants instead of fulfilling 

 their duties about the king." This was replied from the 

 province of Anjou, afterwai'ds La Vendee ; and these 

 country gentlemen who refused, as the intendant stated, 

 to fulfil their duties about the king, were the only 

 country gentlemen who defended the monarchy of 

 France, and died fighting for the crown. This distinc- 

 tion they owed to the fact that they retained their hold 

 over the peasantry, the peasantry with whom they were 

 blamed for wishing to live. 



The middle classes, yielding to the same influence, 

 fled to the towns. So notable was this fact, that all 

 contemporary writers upon the state of society previous 

 to the French Revolution show that a second generation 

 of rich peasants was a thing almost unknown. No 

 sooner did a farmer make a little money than he took 

 his son from the plough, sent him to the town, and 

 bought him an appointment. Since the cause has 

 vanished, we are told that the effect continues ; for even 

 to this day may be discovered a very evident aversion, 

 in the French husbandman of our own times, for the 

 calling that has enriched him. 



The noxious spider of centralization had woven the 

 thread of its web over all France, and lay gorging at 

 Paris the produce it drew from N. and S., and E. and 

 W., consuming all, and returning none. 



The peasant was then isolated ; tenfold more lonely 

 and more desperate than in the fourteenth century. 

 He was then under the bonds of feudalism ; but he had 



the rough sympathy and protection of bis oppressors, 

 whereas in the eighteenth century he found himself 

 equally oppressed, and totally bereft ot sympathy. 

 The notable saying of Montesquieu, " It is not fertility, 

 but liberty, which cultivates a country," received a 

 remarkable illustration then — an illustration which is 

 the more pointed by the fact that France was no longer 

 exporting to England ; but England, benefiting by a 

 representative Government, and the agricultural pros- 

 perity which increased under it, had become the garden 

 of Europe, and, besides feeding her own vastly- 

 increased population, could supply France with cereals 

 to the value of £40,000,000. 



An English poet, in 1 750, contrasting the blessings of 

 England with the oppression under which Europe was 

 languishing, says — "Liberty reigns here in the hum- 

 blest cottage, and brings with it plenty." Addressing 

 England, he exclaims, "Thy fields abound in riches, 

 the possession of which is secure to the contented la- 

 bourer !" 



The Marquis d'Avgenson wrote thus in 1739, five 

 years before his appointment as Minister of Foreign 

 Affairs: — "The real evil, that which undermines the 

 kingdom, and cannot fail to bring ruin upon it, is that 

 at Versailles — they shut their eyes too much to the dis- 

 tressing state of things in the provinces. In my own 

 day I have observed a gradual decrease of wealth and 

 population in France. We have the present certainty 

 that misery has become general to an unheard-of de- 

 gree. While I write, in the midst of profound peace, 

 with indications, if not of an abundant, at least of an 

 average harvest, men are dying around us, like flies, of 

 want, eating grass. The Duke of Orleans lately laid 

 before the Council a piece of bread, which we got for 

 him, made oi ferns ; in placing it upon the king's table, 

 he said — ' Sire, here is what your subjects live 

 upon !' " 



Under this worst form of absenteeism the rents of 

 the land diminished, and the extravagance and reckless- 

 ness of the court increased. To provide the means for 

 this lavish expenditure the peasantry was coerced. The 

 taille — a most oppressive tax, the primary object of 

 which was to purchase recruits, so as to dispense the 

 nobles and their vassals from military service — fell upon 

 and obliged the French peasantry to become ostensible 

 paupers, for the sake of evading its crushing weight. 

 When Richelieu's maxim, that " want was the only se- 

 curity against idleness and rebellion," had become law, 

 and the people had, by the addition to their other 

 wrongs, been compelled to mendicity by forced labour 

 — labour in lieu of taxes — there was a great calm. This 

 calm d slu ded the rich, who, having nothing no w in comm on 

 with the poor — for now they were beyond the hearing of 

 their sorrows — commenced to compliment the great 

 financier of the day, and to discourse on the virtues of 

 the common people, till themselves and their foolish 

 hopes were shocked and shivered by the contrast of '93. 

 Napoleon I. , then, analyzing the sources of this terrific 

 ruin , commences synthetically the work of reclassification . 

 "Agriculture," says he, " is the soul and basis of the 

 empire ;" " Industry is the comfort, the happiness of 

 the population;" " Foreign commerce, the superabun- 

 dance, the good employment of the other two." 

 " This latter is made for the two first ; not they for it." 

 To this scheme for political new birth, he adds the 

 climax — ''And the foundation of this structure must be 

 laid in the cement of Liberty !" — in the translation of 

 which sentiment, however, we have regarded more the 

 spirit than the letter. 



Now, the extent to which Napoleon I. was able to 

 execute his own design, it is not within our purpose to 

 state. He is no more. " But," says the Emperor 



