VIII. feudal institutions or upon the noblesse. He could only CHAP. do this by large levies of money; but he shrunk from the only mode in which this was feasible,-the summoning of the several orders, and demanding their assent to increased taxation. The state of England, the humiliation of Edward the Second, and the straits to which even Edward the Third was brought, deterred rather than tempted the French monarch to have recourse to such a policy. The consequence was, that the king had no military force at his disposal, and no permanent resources equal to supply it. The tyranny of the French crown was thus without solid substance or basis, and in this it also resembled the Pope's, being an affair of opinion and a jurisdiction of awe. When it was examined closely, it ceased to command respect. The despotism commenced by Philip Augustus, advanced by St. Louis, and completed under Philip the Fair, was by many centuries premature. These monarchs sought not merely to curb and regulate the feudal power of the aristocracy, but to destroy and dispense with it altogether, and to substitute great functionaries after the Byzantine system. The attempt failed utterly, and the consequence was that the country sunk into a kind of transitional state, its feudal organisation weakened and destroyed, whilst no other could be framed to replace it. And thus in war it became powerless, and in administration lapsed into anarchy. Its princes were mere spoliators, and its courts of justice were but shambles. The communes, far from gaining rights, were left at the mercy of the king's lieutenants during a vigorous reign, or that of the renascent aristocracy under a weaker one. In this boasted reign of legists and equality, the lower grades of society, instead of being aided to rise to a level, or to a nearer level, with those above them, were in fact stopped in their progress. The sales of fiefs or noble land to roturiers or wealthy men of the middle CHAP. classes, which had been so general in the time of the crusades, now ceased. Then the tenure of such land during three generations ennobled the possessor; now it became ruled that the land did not confer noblesse, and that if a roturier came to possess it, the lord lost his feudal dues, and the crown its feudal service. Thus, the absorption of the more eminent of the middle class into the ranks of the upper ceased; and with it ceased the rise of the lower class, and the elevation of the serf to become a colon or rent-payer. When the wealthy citizen bought an estate, he introduced a higher degree of cultivation he wanted corn, not parks. He broke up the soil (from whence the name of roturier); and he did this by making the serf a tenant, paying cens, and by helping him at first to do so. But when the wealthy class ceased to acquire land, there was no possibility or incentive for the serf to become other than he was. Philip the Fair and Louis Hutin drew up, indeed, very fine edicts, in which it was announced that all men were born free, and that all serfs might make themselves so on payment. But the serfs had now no one to pay for them, and they remained deaf to the offer of their emancipation, which was a mere verbal flourish of lawyers ignorant of that for which they legislated. The enormous increase of the power of the Crown in these reigns cannot therefore be looked upon with unmingled satisfaction; nor was the sacrifice of feudal privileges and independence to the power of royalty profitable to either the nation or its inferior classes. The feudal state is naturally that of nations sparse in population, and compelled to assume military organisation, with nothing but the land to support it. The necessary grades and subordination of an army are thereby imprinted upon the soil and upon the people. But from the narrow and exclusive laws of such a system, a nation spontaneously bursts; and it ought to be able to do so without an effacement of the higher VIII. ranks, or the prostration of the whole people, after CHAP, oriental fashion, before the throne of a despot. In the feudal system, and in feudal rights, existed the germ of rustic organisation, of the growth and knitting of the limbs and provinces of a great kingdom, without retrograding to that mere civism of antiquity which ignored the rustic population, and enslaved it, or to the centralised system of the Byzantine Empire, which allowed neither life nor freedom to the provinces. To the wise use, respect, and preservation of the salutary principles of feudalism, England owed its Great Charter, its Parliament, its right of voting its own taxes, of each man being tried by his peers. France lost these boons, and flung away these chances, principally by the premature sacrifice of feudalism, and by the absorption of all political right in the Crown. French writers, however, estimate the loss of freedom as a trifle, provided the upper classes, which attract envy, are pulled down. Unfortunately the French aristocracy were not in this sense humbled. They were allowed to keep all the advantages and privileges which could create envy and cause inequality, without retaining those which might have enabled them to resist, control, and save royalty. The best attributes of aristocracy were indeed abrogated by the policy of Philip, but the worst remained behind, and were perpetuated by their posterity. Yet even this error and this crime of royalty—its assumption of absolute power-is applauded, because it produced the unity and grandeur of the French monarchy: establishing an unbroken rule from the Mediterranean to the Northern Ocean, driving the German behind the Alps and the Rhine, the English beyond sea, and making the French monarch the first in dignity, in influence, and in power. The unity of France, however, might have taken place, or been accomplished, at far less cost of human life and human freedom. The VIII. CHAP. South might have been joined to the north by princely intermarriages and common accord, without the horror of the Albigensian war, and the destruction of southern creeds, liberties, literature, and civilisation. There was no power or prince, either in Italy or Spain, that could have competed with the king who reigned in Paris, for the possession of the south; and affinity of tongue and habits would have sufficed to produce adjunction of territory. Had there been established in France a limited and free monarchy, under which the commercial ranks and the middle as well as the noble orders could have held their place and preserved their privileges, the great popular and prosperous territory of Flanders would no doubt have rallied as readily as Gascony or Normandy to a capital so near and a prince so great. But the despotic intolerance of the French monarchs, with the rapacity of its agents and of the centralised system, disgusted the Flemings, and curtailed France of what was then its natural development. The monarchy, though repelled from Flanders by its tyrannical character, and compelled to restore Guienne by shame and a wish to conciliate England, still made notable acquisitions in Philip's reign. The territories of the family of Lusignan (De la Marche), between La Rochelle and the Garonne, completed the French territory in the west. The last counts had mortgaged their lands, and Philip took this pretext to seize them and exclude collaterals. Lyons, though but a city, was well worth a province for its substance and its wealth. Franche Comté, apparently secured by the marriage of its coheiresses to the French princes, proved to be another acquisition which the alienation of Burgundy at a later period defeated. The tendency of the monarchy was evidently to extend and consolidate itself in the south; so much so that its estates were henceforth more often summoned to meet on the Loire than on the Seine. Royalty, however, seemed anchored in VIII. Paris, by the wealth of its citizens*, by its parliament, CHAP. and (not least) by its university, which had grown in European and paramount repute, and which indeed threatened to rival, in philosophy and in dogma, that authority† which parliament had usurped in a judicial, and royalty in a political sphere. The tax-book, or list of taillages, of the city of Paris under Philip the Fair, has been preserved and published. The rich Lombard merchants paid each from 100 to 114 livres, equal to 2657 livres or francs of the present day. As the taille was one fiftieth of a man's revenue, that of Grandruffe, the highest tax-payer of Paris, must have been 130,000 francs, which, considering the relative value, in purchase, of money then and at the present day, was enormous. †The most remarkable instance of this occurred some years later, when Pope John the Twenty-second promulgated certain doctrines which seemed to limit the privileges enjoyed by the saints in heaven. The Sorbonne rebelled against this depreciation of the objects of universal reverence, if not worship. The Pope was stigmatized as heretic, and his fallible Holiness was obliged to bow to the infallible Sorbonne of Paris. |