The system of forced labour, by becoming a royal right, was gradually extended to almost all public works.  In 1719 I find it was employed to build barracks.  “Parishes are to send their best workmen,” said the ordinance, “and all other works are to give way to this.”  The same forced service was used to escort convicts to the galleys and beggars to the workhouse; it had to cart the baggage of troops as often as they changed their quarters—­a burthen which was very onerous at a time when each regiment carried heavy baggage after it.  Many carts and oxen had to be collected for the purpose.

IV.—­Reform and Destruction Inevitable

One further factor, and that the most important, remains to be noted:  the universal discredit into which every form of religious belief had fallen, at the end of the eighteenth century, and which exercised without any doubt the greatest influence upon the whole of the French Revolution; it stamped its character.

Irreligion had produced an enormous public evil.  The religious laws having been abolished at the same time that the civil laws were overthrown, the minds of men were entirely upset; they no longer knew either to what to cling or where to stop.  And thus arose a hitherto unknown species of revolutionists, who carried their boldness to a pitch of madness, who were surprised by no novelty and arrested by no scruple, and who never hesitated to put any design whatever into execution.  Nor must it be supposed that these new beings have been the isolated and ephemeral creation of a moment, and destined to pass away as that moment passed.  They have since formed a race of beings which has perpetuated itself, and spread into all the civilised parts of the world, everywhere preserving the same physiognomy, the same character.

From the moment when the forces I have described, and the added loss of religion, matured, I believe that this radical revolution, which was to confound in common ruin all that was worst and all that was best in the institutions and condition of France, became inevitable.  A people so ill-prepared to act for themselves could not undertake a universal and simultaneous reform without a universal destruction.

One last element must be remembered before we conclude.  As the common people of France had not appeared for one single moment on the theatre of public affairs for upwards of 140 years, no one any longer imagined that they could ever again resume their position.  They appeared unconscious, and were therefore believed to be deaf.  Accordingly, those who began to take an interest in their condition talked about them in their presence just as if they had not been there.  It seemed as if these remarks could only be heard by those who were placed above the common people, and that the only danger to be apprehended was that they might not be fully understood by the upper classes.

The very men who had most to fear from the fury of the people declaimed loudly in their presence on the cruel injustice under which the people had always suffered.  They pointed out to each other the monstrous vices of those institutions which had weighed most heavily upon the lower orders; they employed all their powers of rhetoric in depicting the miseries of the people and their ill-paid labour; and thus they infuriated while they endeavoured to relieve them.