barefoot, eating nothing but coarse black bread, but
cherishing the little treasure in his breast on which
he builds so many hopes, he watches for the opportunity
which never fails to come. “In spite of
privileges,” writes a gentleman in 1755,[46]
“the nobles are daily being ruined and reduced,
the Third-Estate making all the fortunes.”
A number of domains, through forced or voluntary sales,
thus pass into the hands of financiers, of men of the
quill, of merchants, and of the well-to-do bourgeois.
Before undergoing this total dispossession, however,
the seignior, involved in debt, is evidently resigned
to partial alienation of his property. The peasant
who has bribed the steward is at hand with his hoard.
“It is poor property, my lord, and it costs
you more than you get from it.” This may
refer to an isolated patch, one end of a field or
meadow, sometimes a farm whose farmer pays nothing,
and generally worked by a métayer whose wants and
indolence make him an annual expense to his master.
The latter may say to himself that the alienated
parcel is not lost, since, some day or other, through
his right of repurchase, he may take it back, while,
in the meantime, he enjoys a cens, drawbacks, and
the lord’s dues. Moreover, there is on
his domain and around him, extensive open spaces which
the decline of cultivation and depopulation have left
a desert. To restore the value of this he must
surrender its proprietorship. There is no other
way by which to attach man permanently to the soil.
And the government helps him along in this matter.
Obtaining no revenue from the abandoned soil, it
assents to a provisional withdrawal of its too weighty
hand. By the edict of 1766, a piece of cleared
waste land remains free of the taille for fifteen
years, and, thereupon, in twenty-eight provinces 400,000
arpents are cleared in three years[47].
This is the mode by which the seigniorial domain gradually
crumbles away and decreases. Towards the last,
in many places, with the exception of the chateau
and the small adjoining farm which brings in 2 or
3000 francs a year, nothing is left to the seignior
but his feudal dues;[48] the rest of the soil belongs
to the peasantry. Forbonnais already remarks,
towards 1750, that many of the nobles and of the ennobled
“reduced to extreme poverty but with titles to
immense possessions,” have sold off portions
to small cultivators at low prices, and often for
the amount of the taille. Towards 1760, one-quarter
of the soil is said to have already passed into the
hands of farmers. In 1772, in relation to the
vingtième, which is levied on the net revenue of real
property, the intendant of Caen, having completed
the statement of his quota, estimates that out of 150,000
“there are perhaps 50,000 whose liabilities
did not exceed five sous, and perhaps still as many
more not exceeding twenty sous."[49] Contemporary
observers authenticate this passion of the peasant
for land. “The savings of the lower classes,