A hundred years later Cornells Jansen, Bishop of Ypres, revived these questions.  Arnauld supported him.  The views had authority from Augustine and Chrysostom, but Arnauld was condemned.  The two establishments of Port Royal refused to sign the formularies condemning Jansen’s book, and they had on their side the brilliant pen of Pascal.  On the other were the Jesuits.  Pascal, in the “Lettres Provinciales,” made the Jesuits ridiculous with his incomparable wit.  The Jansenists were persecuted, but the persecution strengthened them.  But full of absurdities as the whole controversy was to an intelligent observer, the crown, the bishops, and the Jesuits were too strong for the Jansenists, especially when Le Tellier became the king’s confessor.  But the affair was not finally brought to a conclusion, and the opposing parties reconciled, till after the death of Louis.  Ultimately, Jansenism became merely ridiculous.  The fall of the Jesuits was to follow in due time.

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DE TOCQUEVILLE

The Old Regime

Born at Paris on July 29, 1805, Alexis Henri Charles Clerel de Tocqueville came of an old Norman family which had distinguished itself both in law and in arms.  Educated for the Bar, he proceeded to America in 1831 to study the penitentiary system.  Four years later he published “De la Democratie en Amerique” (see Miscellaneous Literature), a work which created an enormous sensation throughout Europe.  De Tocqueville came to England, where he married a Miss Mottley.  He became a member of the French Academy; was appointed to the Chamber of Deputies, took an important part in public life, and in 1849 became vice-president of the Assembly, and Minister of Foreign Affairs.  His next work, “L’Ancien Regime” ("The Old Regime"), translated under the title “On the State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789; and on the Causes which Led to that Event,” appeared in 1856.  It is of the highest importance, because it was the starting point of the true conception of the Revolution.  In it was first shown that the centralisation of modern France was not the product of the Revolution, but of the old monarchy, that the irritation against the nobility was due, not to their power, but to their lack of power, and that the movement was effected by masses already in possession of property.  De Tocqueville died at Cannes on April 16, 1859.

I.—–­The Last Days of Feudal Institutions

The French people made, in 1789, the greatest effort which was ever attempted by any nation to cut, so to speak, their destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had heretofore been from that which they sought to become hereafter.

The municipal institutions, which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had raised the chief towns of Germany into rich and enlightened small republics, still existed in the eighteenth; but they were a mere semblance of the past.