The War of Wars Read Free Page B

aristocracy, had aimed only at thrusting himself into its ranks. More than once he had succeeded, for a great many nobles descended from ennobled bourgeois. This ambition was not extinct. The Rolands put themselves to much trouble to get themselves recognized as nobles; the Derobespierres cut their name in two; Danton spelled his as d’Anton; Brissot, son of an innkeeper of Chartres, blossomed forth as Brissot de Ouarville, or still more fashionably, de Warville. Such were the marks of gentility. Bourgeois of old stock were frankly proud of their lineage, careful not to form an improper marriage. Officeholding and the professions established among them a hierarchy of which they were exceedingly jealous . . .
    Since at best only a small number of bourgeois could enjoy the advantage of becoming nobles, the rest of them wound up by execrating what they envied without hope. The exclusiveness of the nobility in the eighteenth century made the ascent even more arduous than before, especially when the nobles tried to reserve the most distinguished public employments for themselves. At the same time, with increasing wealth, the numbers and the ambitions of the bourgeois continued to mount. Sacrifices willingly made for the education of their children were meeting with disappointingly little reward, as the correspondence of Sieyès with his father testifies, and still better the examples of Brissot, Desmoulins and Vergniaud. The young Barnave wrote, ‘The road is blocked in every direction.’ Throughout the century government administrators had expressed alarm at the spread of education, and even in the Year III (1795) Boissy d’Anglas was to fear that education would result in forming ‘parasitic and ambitious minorities’.
    With the doors shut, the idea arose of breaking them down. From the moment when the nobility laid claims to being a caste, restricting public office to men of birth, the only recourse was to suppress the privilege of birth and to ‘make way for merit’. Pure vanity played its part, we may be sure; the most insignificant would-benoble nursed the wounds of his injured pride at the mere sight of the social distance above him. Among bourgeois of diverse kinds was forged a link that nothing could shatter – a common detestation of the aristocracy.’
    The bourgeoisie put its emphasis on earthly happiness and on the dignity of man; it urged the necessity of increasing the former and elevating the latter, through the control of natural forces by science and the utilizing of them to augment the general wealth. The means, it was believed, consisted in granting entire freedom to investigation, invention and enterprise, for which the incentive was to be personal gain, or the charm of discovery, struggle and risk. The conception was dynamic, calling upon all men, without distinction of birth, to enter into a universal competition from which the progress of mankind was to follow without end. The ideas appeared in a confused way in the France of the Renaissance; subsequently Descartes inaugurated a new humanism by opening up a magnificent perspective, the domination of nature by science; finally, the writers of the eighteenth century, encouraged by English and American influences – here we must note Voltaire, the encyclopaedists, the economists – set forth with spectacular success the principles of the new order, and the practical conclusions that it seemed fitting to deduce.
    The works of these writers strengthened oral propaganda in the
salons
and
cafés
which multiplied in the eighteenth century, and in the societies of all kinds which were founded in great numbers – agricultural societies, philanthropic associations, provincial academies, teaching institutions like the Museum at Paris, reading rooms, Mesmerist societies where the magnetism put in vogue by Mesmer was experimented with an, finally and above all, Masonic lodges, brought over from England in 1715.
    As the Abbé Sieyès so pithily put it: ‘What