The Naked Socialist

by Paul B Skousen

  Class Differences: Not all Frenchmen enjoyed the same rights. The French caste system had three classes called the Estates. The First Estate was the clergy—probably because God was supposed to be first in everything.

  The Second Estate was the nobility—no doubt because they wanted to be first.

  And, the Third Estate was the peasants—as usual, the workers who did everything important but were always being listed last. In 1789, this Third Estate of peasants numbered 25 million, while the other two Estates totaled 275,000.

  But change was coming. It was a time when the French believed they could climb out from the ancient ways, become more modern, and overhaul the government, the economy, and even human nature. The pieces were all falling into place.

  About the Church ...

  The Catholic Church had been a ruling influence in France for centuries. It played a key role in public life by handling education, providing relief for the sick and poor, and was a rallying point for the discouraged and the spiritually downtrodden.

  Records indicate that the Church owned as much as a fifth of all the land. The clergy said church property was sanctified for God’s work, and therefore it shouldn’t, and wasn’t, taxed (however, the clergy were smart enough to give the king a “free gift” every so often to maintain the status quo).

  Forced Tithes: The Church collected tithes from all the people. This was enforced by the government like a tax, and brought in 183 million francs in 1789 ($780 million in 2012 dollars194). But things were not friendly for the non-Catholic. A Protestant, for example, could not be legally married, make a legal will, or register the births of his children.

  Clergy Profits: Huge sums of Church funds went into the pockets of the bishops, archbishops, and abbots. These fellows were not selected by the pope—they were the king’s buddies and were simply and officially appointed to the Church jobs. They didn’t do much for the Church or the people, and spent their time living off the king’s handouts. When the French Revolution began, the lower clergy, those who carried the heavy load of actually serving the people as originally intended, didn’t side with their higher-up leaders—and joined the people.

  The Caste

  As kings before him had done, King Louis XVI told his subjects that his authority came from God and he wouldn’t let anybody forget it. “The sovereign authority resides exclusively in my person. To me solely belongs the power of making the laws, and without depend-ence or cooperation. ...I am its supreme protector ... by the grace of God.”195 He also insisted on continuing that terrible taille, that direct land tax on the French peasantry and non-nobles, whereby he raised a sixth of the country’s entire income. Nobody knew how much money was gathered every year, but the sums were estimated to be in the tens of millions.

  All Power

  The king had power to arrest anyone at any time and throw him into prison, lock the door, and forget him. Such arrest orders were called lettres de cachet (sealed letters). These arbitrary orders were hated by medieval Europeans and were specifically outlawed in the Magna Carta (1215 A.D.). Some people were being locked away for a pamphlet they published or a speech they gave that offended the king or one of his groupies—and they were never heard from again.

  Checks and Balances

  Next to the king were the higher courts of law called the parlements. Not to be confused with English parliaments, the French parlements helped check the king’s edicts. The people insisted that any law the king issued had to be looked at by parlement—read, reviewed, understood, and registered. If not, the people argued, how could the king expect them to enforce a new law that conflicted with others, or simply made no sense?

  Protest Letters: When the parlements didn’t like a new law, they sent the king a “protest” explaining their objections. But that wasn’t all—they had the protest printed and distributed so the masses would support their opposition to the king’s tyranny. This kept the debate public and conveyed the idea that the king wasn’t as “all powerful” as he tried to act—that there were fundamental laws even he couldn’t break.

  Nasty Feudalism Remained: By 1774, the nobility class no longer enjoyed the power it retained during the prior 500 years. Nevertheless, some remnants of serfdom let these lords extract some time-honored dues from those who lived nearby or from inside the boundaries of what used to be their villas and manors.

  The dues included part of a peasant’s crops or a toll on animals driven past a lord’s home. The lord usually obligated the peasants to use his mill, oven, or wine press, and charged heavily for the privilege. And, any of the lord’s animals and birds that wandered onto peasants’ lands could not be hunted because those were his property.

  Not Very Poor? The commoners of the 1780s were not as down-trodden and miserable as some said. Thomas Jefferson reported in 1787 that the peasants in France had plenty to eat and were comfortable.196 An English traveler named Arthur Young reported that the country people had prosperity and were contented.

  If Not Poverty, Why Then a Revolution? The reason the peasantry finally rose up in a revolution in 1789 wasn’t necessarily because of their impoverishment. They finally rose to a level of education, understanding, and freedom where they realized that they simply didn’t have to take it anymore.

  They rejected the old ways, those remnants of serfdom that still haunted their culture. They resisted the nobility’s continued attempts to act the part of common robbers, skulking around to extract a portion of the harvest, or hiding in the trees to take a toll at a river crossing, or refusing to compensate for damage from His Lordship’s animals that might have ruined a commoner’s crops during a hunt.

  Weary of the Slave Society: In short, the whole country was tired—tired of the absurd and abusive laws, rules, and customs of top-down regimentation, of thievery and control, of oppression and domination. Those relics of the old system that perpetuated the seven pillars of socialism would no longer be tolerated—the French wanted them gone. Helping to push things along were some great thinkers who came forward.

  Great Thinkers Set the Stage

  Voltaire (1694-1778) was a popular reformer whose writings unified the cause of freedom and rebellion in France. Understanding Voltaire is understanding France before their revolution. He had no patience or sympathy for the old traditions and wore out his quill exposing absurdity after absurdity in the existing norms. His prolific ways spanned the written word in published editorials, histories, plays, dramas, romances, letters, and more—reaching out to all levels of society where he put forth his persistent question, why not freedom?

  Voltaire was no atheist, but the Catholics and Protestants he attacked accused him of it, and of corruption and hypocrisy. He credited God for all things wholesome and good—as a good deist would—but his creative pen lobed fireballs at the worldly religions that showed themselves bent on greed, power, and gain.

  He somehow missed or at least he avoided acknowledging the centuries of good works by the Church, and instead focused on ridiculing them for their tragic lapses. The French commoners loved his writings.

  Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) did a great job stirring discontent. His famous little pamphlet, The Social Contract, boldly declared it is the people who should make the laws because it is the people who must obey them. France’s first constitution in 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizens, included Rousseau’s doctrine: “Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.”197

  Montesquieu (1689-1755) pointed out how Englishmen kept control over their limited monarchy with a clever idea called separation of powers. The English, Montesquieu observed, had three powers in government—Parliament making the laws, the king executing them, and the independent courts enforcing them. France would be strong-er, Montesquieu reasoned, if these three functions were removed from the same individual’s hands, as the
English had done, and spread out to check one another’s powers and choices.Taxes and the Science of Political Economy

  When Louis XVI took the throne in 1774 as a young 20-year-old, with his beautiful wife Marie Antoinette, he was anxious to turn around the financial mess in which the country was buried. The chicanery of prior monarchs had plunged the country deeply into a fiscal nightmare.

  However, poor Louis XVI had to keep up appearances, too.198 And, deal with a host of corruptions. For example—

  Staff: The on-site military retinue of the king included 9,050 people. His civil household numbered around 4,000. The palace at Versailles also kept on the payroll 150 pages, 128 musicians, 48 physicians and assistants, 383 officers of the table, and 198 persons to wait personally upon the king.

  New Baby: When the queen delivered little Princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, the royal couple negotiated a compromise with the royal court that the one-month-old child could be adequately cared for by only 80 persons.199

  “Homes”: The king had a dozen residencies always kept in readiness. These had 1,857 horses, 217 vehicles, and 1,458 men in livery. Marie Antoinette’s stables in 1780 had 75 vehicles and 330 horses.

  Weekly Allowance: The cost of these extravagances was at least $120 million a year in adjusted 2010 dollars. Pensions to the king’s courtiers cost another $120 million a year.

  Favoritism: The upper class enjoyed benefits that others did not, such as being exempted from high taxes, and being spared the horrific and unequal methods of tax collection.

  Self-Defeating: The interior tariffs that villages charged each other had long paralyzed free trade among districts and cities.

  Greed: Kings of the past had bought support from the upper clergy, and their meddling in the market was slowing the economy. The opulence was very one sided—while the king lived the lavish lifestyle, his people were arrested for hoarding food, even during times of plenty. The fiscal mess brought various economists to Versailles, begging on bended knee for the king to please stay out of the people’s private market. They begged for laissez faire—(French: “leave it alone”). Louis XVI Listened. The king wasn’t totally detached from his country’s economic crises, and looked for smart people to help him get things righted again. He summoned the ablest economist in the land, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and made him controller general to clean up the mess. Turgot made a good stab at things and even induced the king to abolish the guilds (this lasted only a short time). But the privileged class won the day and undermined Turgot until he was fired in May, 1776. And then came—

  Next Minister: Jacques Necker took over as minister of finance in 1776. He sought to calm the troubled financial waters by making the taille more fair to all citizens, and arranged to borrow vast sums to help France support the Americans in the War for Independence against the British. Necker’s undoing was publishing for all to see the great secret of France’s financial condition that he delivered to the king in 1781. It wasn’t so much what the report said that caused the problems, but that he also had the information publicly printed and widely distributed. It told how much was raised from the hated taille and the salt tax, and how much the king lavished on himself, his court, and his friends. Necker was promptly fired. And then came—

  Next Minister: Charles Calonne in 1783. He is the man credited/accused of precipitating the great reforms that led to the French Revolution in 1789.Calonne was a lavish spender, also known as Monsieur Déficit for that obvious reason. After settling into his new job and looking at the books, he realized France was in deep trouble, mostly because of the help it gave the Americans. How was that to be handled? The country had no means to borrow more—everyone was taxed to the hilt—so just what was this powdered-wig dignitary to do?

  Calonne by-passed the parlements200 and went straight to the king with a proposal to fix things. He would reduce the taille, equalize the salt and tobacco taxes, create free trade, correct the abuses of the guilds, start a universal land tax, allow the sale of church property, and last but not least—force the nobility and privileged classes to give up their exemptions and start paying taxes like everyone else. That’s where the fight started.

  Calonne knew the parlements wouldn’t go along so he schemed with the king to bring important people in church and state together as a representative body to give their stamp of approval. This group was called the Notables.

  The Notables were all of the upper classes and seemed willing to help bail out the nation from looming bankruptcy. However, when they heard Calonne’s plan, they didn’t trust him and refused to go along. So, naturally, the king fired Calonne.

  The king tried to make the reforms himself and sent them to the parliaments to be registered as law. Those fellows refused to consider the king’s idea unless he would call an assembly of all three Estates, the Estates General, to take charge and really fix things with full representation from all the people.

  The King’s Ministers Light the Fuse

  The king agreed, but then the evil ministers of the king threw a monkey wrench into the whole mess: they started maneuvering for a way to remove the ability of the parlements to review all the king’s decisions. This would let the king make law by simple royal edict with no check or challenge to worry about.

  The parlement of Paris was the first to hear of this scheme, and they rose up in anger. Word quickly spread to the provinces. Fear and doubt spread—would the king and his ministers actually make laws for the entire realm, and ignore the special political privileges that were granted to some provinces, privileges that went back centuries as conditions for their joining with France? It was unthinkable!

  Estates General: With rumblings of alarm rolling through the kingdom, the king decided the only way out was to go ahead and call the Estates General and let them duke it out.

  The year was 1789. The last time the Estates General had been assembled was way back in 1614. No one knew exactly how the meeting should go. The group was made up of hundreds of delegates, but each was supposed to vote together as a bloc, as an Estate. Each bloc had one vote—a vote by the clergy, a vote by the nobility, and a vote by the commoners. Naturally, the commoners felt outnumbered. No matter what happened, the commoners could be outvoted 2 to 1 every time. To make it more unfair, there were clergy and nobility who sided with the commoners, but their votes didn’t matter so long as the majority of their blocs wanted it this way or that.

  One Man, One Vote: Realizing the “old way” was creeping back into this political process. The commoners demanded “one man, one vote” of all the delegates.

  After six weeks of haggling and being outvoted, the commoners grew impatient and refused to meet. They reconvened at an indoor tennis court building, took an oath to remain until a constitution was created, and declared themselves the “National Assembly.” It was an amazing and long overdue restoration of power to the people that made them the first modern representative assembly in continental Europe.

  The king was eventually forced to concede authority to the new national body and told the other two Estates to go join the whole. But Louis XVI wasn’t happy with the loss of control and power, and considered dissolving the Assembly and sending everyone home.

  The Ministers Throw Another Wrench: As if things weren’t tense enough, the king’s ministers advised the king to beef up his personal guard “just in case.” If he was going to dismiss the Assembly, chances of an uprising were pretty high, and he should be prepared with more troops. The king agreed and summoned more soldiers.

  When the people of Paris saw the king’s private troops receiving reinforcements, they panicked. What was he up to? Without arms, how could they protect themselves if shooting began? They knew where the arms were—the Hôtel des Invalides—and decided to take action and grab the guns. They mustered a large group and rushed the building, forced their way in, and gathered up 30,000 muskets—but they had no powder or shot.

  Storming the Bastille: The Paris mob was now more than 8
,000, and believed there was a cache of 30,000 pounds of powder holed up in the Bastille. They pushed at the gates for admittance and a gun fight broke out. About a hundred persons were killed before the governor capitulated and opened the gates. The mob attacked the defenders, freed seven poor souls still imprisoned there, and killed the governor and the guard. With weapons and ammunition, the demolition of the hated Bastille was next on the list.

  And so began the first blow for freedom on July 14, 1789.

  Word of the revolution in Paris spread through France. In other cities, similar acts took place as the peasants took control of their futures by rising up against the tyranny of the nobility, the feudal lords, and the corrupted clergy.

  In hundreds of villages, people gathered at the commons or the parish churches and voted to stop paying feudal taxes. They turned on the old regime and burned their castles, thus destroying official records showing any obligation of money or servitude.

  As news of a general revolution reached Paris, the National Assembly was emboldened to action. They moved forward with confidence and passed their first important reforms:

  They abolished serfdom and feudalism.

  The lords, nobility, and independent provinces had to surrender their ancient privileges. Even the exclusive right of the nobility to hunt was abolished—now anyone could hunt.