The Aristocratic Resurgence 335
servant, who had in mind a general reconstruction of the French government and
economy. He wished, for example, to temper the royal absolutism by associating
the administration with the country, through provincial assemblies in which
property- ownership, not legal class, should be the basis of representation. He also
desired the toleration of Protestants, and their admission to all offices and occupa-
tions. On these larger matters of church and state he kept discreetly silent. His
troubles arose over points of detail, designed mainly to loosen up the French eco-
nomic system so as to increase national income and so raise government revenues.
In particular, he proposed certain incidental tax reforms, internal freedom of the
grain trade, abolition of craft gilds, and conversion of the corvée royale, the labor
services of peasants on the royal highways, into a money tax to be paid by land-
owners of all classes alike. He drafted Six Edicts, which the Parlement of Paris
refused to accept.
Of all these proposals, that concerning the corvée royale should have been the
most innocuous. The corvée was performed only a few days in the year, and only by
peasants who lived near the royal highways. It was by no means vital to the social
structure of the country, and was in fact only fifty years old. The Parlement of Paris
nevertheless not only refused to countenance its abolition, but drew up a sweeping
remonstrance, which it took care to publish. Issued in 1776, four months before
the American Declaration of Independence, it was a kind of declaration of inde-
pendence of the French noble order. Indeed, in the same year, as if to show that
anyone could use such language, the Estates of Brittany also insisted on their “im-
prescriptible and inalienable rights.”
“The first rule of justice,” according to the Parlement of Paris in this declaration
of 1776, “is to preserve for everyone what is due him, a fundamental rule of natural
right and of civil government, and one which consists not only in upholding rights
of property but in safeguarding rights attached to the person and born of preroga-
tives of birth and estate.” It was very dangerous, “under an appearance of human-
ity,” to establish among men “an equality of duties,” to destroy social distinctions,
“to overturn civil society, whose harmony rests only on that gradation of powers,
authorities, preeminences and distinctions which holds each man in his place and
guarantees all stations against confusion.
“This order... takes its source in divine institutions; infinite and immutable wis-
dom in the plan of the Universe has made an unequal dispensation of powers and
genius.... It is this law of the Universe which, despite efforts of the human mind,
maintains itself in every empire and supports the order by which it subsists.
“What dangers then there are in a project produced by an inadmissible system
of equality, whose first effect would be to confound all orders in the state by im-
posing on them the uniform burden of a land tax!
“The French monarchy, by its constitution, is composed of several distinct and
separate estates. This distinction of conditions and persons originated with the Na-
tion; it was born with our customs and way of life.”^6
6 Remontrances du Parlement de Paris contre les edits... presentées en mars, 1776 (Amsterdam,
1776). Reprinted in J. FIammermont, Remontrances du Parlement de Paris, 3 vols. (Paris, 1898), III,
278 –79, 2 8 7.