Let us now look at the other side of the picture, and we shall see that these same Frenchmen, who had so many points of resemblance among themselves, were, nevertheless, more completely isolated from each other than perhaps the inhabitants of any other country, or than had ever been the case before in France.

The fact is, that as by degrees the general liberties of the country were finally destroyed, involving the local liberties in their ruin, the burgess and the noble ceased to come into contact with public life.

The system of creating new nobles, far from lessening the hatred of the roturier to the nobleman, increased it beyond measure; it was envenomed by all the envy with which the new noble was looked upon by his former equals.  For this reason the tiers etat, in all their complaints, always displayed more irritation against the newly ennobled than against the old nobility.

In the eighteenth century the French peasantry could no longer be preyed upon by petty feudal despots.  They were seldom the object of violence on the part of the government; they enjoyed civil liberty, and were owners of a portion of the soil.  But all the other classes of society stood aloof from this class, and perhaps in no other part of the world had the peasantry ever lived so entirely alone.  The effects of this novel and singular kind of oppression deserve a very attentive consideration.

This state of things did not exist in an equal degree among any other of the civilised nations of Europe, and even in France it was comparatively recent.  The peasantry of the fourteenth century were at once oppressed and more relieved.  The aristocracy sometimes tyrannised over them, but never forsook them.

In the eighteenth century a French village was a community of persons, all of whom were poor, ignorant, and coarse; its magistrates were as rude and as contemned as the people; its syndic could not read; its collector could not record in his own handwriting the accounts on which the income of his neighbour and himself depended.

Not only had the former lord of the manor lost the right of governing this community, but he had brought himself to consider it a sort of degradation to take any part in the government of it.  The central power of the state alone took any care of the matter, and as that power was very remote, and had as yet nothing to fear from the inhabitants of the villages, the only care it took of them was to extract revenue.

A further burden was added.  The roads began to be repaired by forced labour only—­that is to say, exclusively at the expense of the peasantry.  This expedient for making roads without paying for them was thought so ingenious that in 1737 a circular of the Comptroller-General Orry established it throughout France.

Nothing can better demonstrate the melancholy fate of the rural population; the progress of society, which enriches all the other classes, drives them to despair, and civilisation itself turns against that class alone.