The Aristocratic Resurgence 327
the Hapsburg monarchy, over three times those of Russia, Prussia, Spain, or the
Dutch Republic, and twenty- five times those of the United States federal govern-
ment in the 1790’s. France in 1794 was to put almost a million men into uniform,
a feat accomplished nowhere else until much later.
This huge country was no monolith. It was extremely diversified, and different
conditions obtained from one province to another. A few generalizations may yet
be made. The nobility, at the highest estimate, numbered 400,000 persons of all
ages and both sexes, so that, though numerous, it made up less than two per cent
of the population, in contrast to the four to eight per cent in Hungary and Poland.
There were not over 100,000 priests, monks, and nuns, a surprisingly low figure for
a Catholic country, for the proportion of clergy in Protestant England seems to
have been much greater. Clergy and nobility, as is well known, were legally the two
higher “orders.” No one knows the number of bourgeois, the word itself being hard
to define; but the aggregate population of the fifty largest towns was about
2,200,000. Where in Poland all the people in the fifty largest towns were less nu-
merous than the nobles, they were over five times as numerous as the nobles in
France. Only a fraction of townsmen could be called “bourgeois,” but on the other
hand, in France, a good many “bourgeois” lived in small villages or in the country.
The interpenetration of town and country was in fact one of the distinctive fea-
tures of French society. Lawyers, government employees, innkeepers, a few doc-
tors, retired soldiers, people drawing income from property, lived among the agri-
cultural population. Often there were family ties between townsmen and
countrymen. The latter might have matters of business that took them into town.
The peasants lived within a kind of manorial system, but there was little that re-
called personal serfdom. Peasants could be landowners, as landed property was
defined in the manorial context; and although most peasants owned either none or
not enough, there were a good many that owned enough land, and raised enough
of a crop, to be an embryonic rural bourgeoisie. There were wide variations from
region to region, but on a rough average for the whole country it is thought that
peasants owned over thirty per cent of the land, the nobles considerably less, the
bourgeoisie about twenty per cent, the clergy ten or less, and the crown the re-
mainder. The mighty barriers of Central and Eastern Europe between town and
country, or class and class, were worn down in France to fences that could be seen
across and even climbed. It was possible for ideas to circulate throughout rural
France with remarkable speed, and enough common ground existed for town and
country to react alike, and together, to an economic or political or psychological
stimulus. Causes of class conflict existed, but when France is compared with the
rest of Europe it is the extent of community that seems most important.
Large and complex, France enjoyed a qualitative preeminence also. It was the
most active center of the European Enlightenment. Its language was the most in-
ternational of all modern tongues. The French thought it natural to be imitated by
others; they had been imitated in the age of the Gothic cathedrals, and again in
the age of Louis XIV, and in the eighteenth century the upper classes of courts and
salons, and the intellectuals of academies and reading clubs, commonly looked to
France as a country from which much might be learned. The French Revolution
occurred in one of the most advanced centers of civilization. The same country