The Ancien Régime. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ There are those among them who, like one section of the old French noblesse, content themselves with mere complaints of “the revolutionary tendencies of the age.”  Let them beware in time; for when the many are on the march, the few who stand still are certain to be walked over.  There are those among them who, like another section of the French noblesse, are ready, more generously than wisely, to throw away their own social and political advantages, and play (for it will never be really more than playing) at democracy.  Let them, too, beware.  The penknife and the axe should respect each other; for they were wrought from the same steel: but the penknife will not be wise in trying to fell trees.  Let them accept their own position, not in conceit and arrogance, but in fear and trembling; and see if they cannot play the man therein, and save their own class; and with it, much which it has needed many centuries to accumulate and to organise, and without which no nation has yet existed for a single century.  They are no more like the old French noblesse, than are the commercial class like the old French bourgeoisie, or the labouring like the old French peasantry.  Let them prove that fact by their deeds during the next generation; or sink into the condition of mere rich men, exciting, by their luxury and laziness, nothing but envy and contempt.

      Meanwhile, behind all classes and social forces—I had almost said, above them all—stands a fourth estate, which will, ultimately, decide the form which English society is to take: a Press as different from the literary class of the Ancien Régime as is everything else English; and different in this—that it is free.

      The French Revolution, like every revolution (it seems to me) which has convulsed the nations of Europe for the last eighty years, was caused immediately—whatever may have been its more remote causes—by the suppression of thought; or, at least, by a sense of wrong among those who thought.  A country where every man, be he fool or wise, is free to speak that which is in him, can never suffer a revolution.  The folly blows itself off like steam, in harmless noise; the wisdom becomes part of the general intellectual stock of the nation, and prepares men for gradual, and therefore for harmless, change.

      As long as the press is free, a nation is guaranteed against sudden and capricious folly, either from above or from below.  As long as the press is free, a nation is guaranteed against the worse evil of persistent and obstinate folly, cloaking itself under the venerable shapes of tradition and authority.  For under a free press, a nation must ultimately be guided not by a caste, not by a class, not by mere wealth, not by the passions of a mob: but by mind; by the net result of all the common-sense of its members; and in the present default of genius, which is un-common sense, common-sense seems to be the only, if not the best, safeguard for poor humanity.

      1867

      LECTURE I—CASTE

      [Delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.]

      These Lectures are meant to be comments on the state of France before the French Revolution.  To English society, past or present, I do not refer.  For reasons which I have set forth at length in an introductory discourse, there never was any Ancien Régime in England.

      Therefore, when the Stuarts tried to establish in England a system which might have led to a political condition like that of the Continent, all classes combined and exterminated them; while the course of English society went on as before.

      On the contrary, England was the mother of every movement which undermined, and at last destroyed, the Ancien Régime.

      From England went forth those political theories which, transmitted from America to France, became the principles of the French Revolution.  From England went forth the philosophy of Locke, with all its immense results.  It is noteworthy, that when Voltaire tries to persuade people, in a certain famous passage, that philosophers do not care to trouble the world—of the ten names to whom he does honour, seven names are English.  “It is,” he says, “neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Boyle, nor Spinoza, nor Hobbes, nor Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr. Collins, nor Mr. Toland, nor Fludd, nor Baker, who have carried the torch of discord into their countries.”  It is worth notice, that not only are the majority of these names English, but that they belong not to the latter but to the former half of the eighteenth century; and indeed, to the latter half of the seventeenth.

      So it was with that Inductive Physical Science, which helped more than all to break up the superstitions of the Ancien Régime, and to set man face to face with the facts of the universe.  From England, towards the end of the seventeenth century, it was promulgated by such men as Newton, Boyle, Sydenham, Ray, and the first founders of our Royal Society.

      In England, too, arose the great religious movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and especially that of a body which I can never mention without most deep respect—the Society of Friends.  At a time when the greater part of the Continent was sunk in spiritual sleep, these men were reasserting doctrines concerning man, and his relation to his Creator, which, whether or not all believe them (as I believe them) to be founded on eternal fact, all must confess to have been of incalculable benefit to the cause of humanity and civilisation.

      From England, finally, about the middle of the eighteenth century, went forth—promulgated by English noblemen—that freemasonry which seems to have been the true parent of all the secret societies of Europe.  Of this curious question, more hereafter.  But enough has been said to show that England, instead of falling, at any period, into the stagnation of the Ancien Régime, was, from the middle of the seventeenth century, in a state of intellectual growth and ferment which communicated itself finally to the continental nations.  This is the special honour of England; universally confessed at the time.  It was to England that the slowly-awakening nations looked, as the source of all which was noble, true, and free, in the dawning future.

      It will be seen, from what I have said, that I consider the Ancien Régime to begin in the seventeenth century.  I should date its commencement—as far as that of anything so vague, unsystematic, indeed anarchic, can be defined—from the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and the peace of Westphalia in 1648.

      For by that time the mighty spiritual struggles and fierce religious animosities of the preceding century had worn themselves out.  And, as always happens, to a period of earnest excitement had succeeded one of weariness, disgust, half-unbelief in the many questions for which so much blood had been shed.  No man had come out of the battle with altogether clean hands; some not without changing sides more than once.  The war had ended as one, not of nations, not even of zealots, but of mercenaries.  The body of Europe had been pulled in pieces between them all; and the poor soul thereof—as was to be expected—had fled out through the gaping wounds.  Life, mere existence, was the most pressing need.  If men could—in the old prophet’s words—find the life of their hand, they were content.  High and low only asked to be let live.  The poor asked it—slaughtered on a hundred battle-fields, burnt out of house and home: vast tracts of the centre of Europe were lying desert; the population was diminished for several generations.  The trading classes, ruined by the long war, only asked to be let live, and make a little money.  The nobility, too, only asked to be let live.  They had lost, in the long struggle, not only often lands and power, but their ablest and bravest men; and a weaker and meaner generation was left behind, to do the governing of the world.  Let them live, and keep what they had.  If signs of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were feverish, factitious, temporary—soon, as the event proved, to droop into the general exhaustion.  If wars were still to be waged they were to be wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for the mightiest invisible interests of man.  The exhaustion was general; and to it we must attribute alike the changes and the conservatism of the Ancien Régime.  To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism, and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has set forth in a book which I shall have occasion often to quote.  To it is owing, too, that longing, which seems to us childish, after ancient forms, etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities diplomatic, legal, ecclesiastical.  Men clung to them as to keepsakes of the past—revered relics СКАЧАТЬ