336 Chapter XIV
Such appeals to an historic constitution should remind the reader of the pro-
tests in the Hapsburg empire against the reforms of Joseph II. The appeals to
harmony, order, place, and the divine government of the world, reinforced by warn-
ings against efforts of the human mind, may remind him also of Edmund Burke. I
have already, in discussing Burke, pointed to the extraordinary lack of proportion
that he could show. Small matters sent him into soaring outbursts on the nature of
human society and of man’s position under God. It may be doubted whether this
was either very good religion or very good conservatism. The same may be said of
the Parlement of Paris. It equated a week of peasant labor on the roads with the
very essence of the French monarchy, the constitution, the prerogatives of birth,
the Three Orders, and divine justice.
The parlement likewise defended the craft gilds and trade associations against
Turgot’s efforts to suppress them. Some of its arguments sound strangely modern,
or rather express that resistance to modernity still found in twentieth- century
France: to abolish these protective associations “would put the small businessman,
the most likely to be crushed by competition, between two equally extreme and
ruinous alternatives, either to abandon at a loss a business he can no longer carry
on, or to run the risk of bankruptcy if he remains in it.”^7 Of more immediate im-
portance was the fact that the parlement, in defending the gilds, did so by defend-
ing the whole hierarchic and corporate structure of French society. The cause of
the gilds became the cause of the Three Orders; the rights of the commoner be-
came the rights of the noble. When the government proposed to open a military
school at Auxerre for noble and non- noble youths alike, the parlement objected to
this also. Since noble and non- noble had in fact for centuries attended the same
civilian schools, the argument had to be carefully qualified; and what the par-
lement professed to fear was that for young men of the commercial class to receive
a specifically military training, designed for the nobility, would confound the three
orders. “Each estate has its own occupations, ideas, duties, genius and manner of
life, which should not be adulterated or confused by education.”^8
Neither in the royal corvée, nor in the gilds, nor in the school at Auxerre did
members of the parlement have any material, direct, or personal interest. Upkeep
of the principal roads from tax funds would not perceptibly increase their taxes,
nor did the gilds directly concern them, nor was there any novelty in army officers
of bourgeois birth. What concerned them was the principle of the thing, or the
drift of events that they perceived in every specific proposal. They had developed a
defensive, even an obsessive, frame of mind on the matter of rank and order. It was
too early, in 1776, for the American Revolution to have had any influence in
France, but the whole literature of the philosophes and économistes, the attempts
made by the royal government itself for a generation, and the actual abolition of
the parlements in 1771, had made them hypersensitive on every concrete issue.
They were aware that Turgot’s real ideas went far beyond the proposals that he
submitted. They were not mistaken if they thought that the essence of French law
and society might come into question. Thus pressed, they assumed an offensive or
7 Ibid., 371.
8 Ibid., 392.