The Explosion of 1789 359
The Assembly had no means of pacifying the peasants. It could not ask the King
to restore order by use of the army, which, if it could be used successfully against the
peasants, might be turned against the Assembly itself. The peasant intransigence
was embarrassing, because men of various classes were owners of manorial property.
On the whole, however, the peasants in destroying the manorial system were de-
stroying the economic foundations of the nobility. Peasant and bourgeois were at
war with the same enemy, and this is what made possible the French Revolution.
The Assembly decreed what it could not prevent. It “abolished feudalism” on the
famous night of the 4th of August. This extraordinary session was in part a parlia-
mentary stratagem, contrived by a radical minority group, and in part the work of
men overstimulated by the rush of events of the past few weeks, baffled by peasant
rebellion, and worn out by years of debate on the complexities and eccentricities of
intermeshing masses of special laws and privileges of all kinds, in which the peculiar
rights and advantages of persons, orders, estates, gilds, corporate bodies, provinces,
certain property owners, and certain taxpayers were incomprehensibly intermixed.
What was abolished, in this famous abolition of feudalism, was “feudalism” in its
eighteenth- century meaning: the seigneurial relationship between landlord and
tenant, the manorial forms of income and property, the differences between nobles
and commoners in taxation and in the penalties inflicted by law for the same of-
fenses, the immunities and liberties of provinces, and the confusion between public
authority and private position represented in varying ways by the gilds, the sei-
gneurial courts, and the institution of property in office.
All peasant obligations thought to have arisen from domination or lordship
were abolished outright. These included the vestiges of serfdom, such labor ser-
vices as remained, hunting rights or game laws favorable to the seigneurs, and the
seigneurial or manorial courts. Obligations thought to represent a historic form of
property were abolished with compensation. These included most of the payments
in money or kind that the peasant proprietors had actually made. In practice it
proved impossible to distinguish between the two kinds of “feudal dues,” and in
any case, as the Revolution continued, all compensation for such dues was abol-
ished in 1792 and 1793. On equality of taxation, in August 1789, there was no
longer any disagreement whatever. Provincial privileges were defended, for the
sense of regionalism was still strong, but Brittany, in many ways the most privi-
leged province, took the lead in the surrender of all provincial liberties. This was
because, as a result of the political troubles in Brittany, the delegation from that
province was composed of advanced revolutionaries of the Third Estate, and no
delegation of the Breton nobles had come to the Estates General at all. On the
gilds, which the Parlement of Paris had defended against Turgot, the Assembly
decreed that they should be thoroughly reformed if not suppressed. In putting an
end to property in office, the Assembly took on a huge addition to the public debt,
for the value of the eleven hundred abolished seats in the parlements, not to men-
tion other proprietary offices, was later set at half a billion livres. Since so much has
already been said of the parlements, it may be remarked here that somewhat over
400 of the parlementaires eventually received compensation, which they generally
converted from paper money into land; that about 140 received no compensation
because condemned to death in later years of the Revolution; and that about 400