Then there were seigneurial privileges by which noble landlords exercised control over manorial courts and over hunting rights and by which they enjoyed such droits as droits de colombier, which ensured that their pigeons were fed at their tenants’ expense, and banalitès which ensured them a monopoly of the local corn mill, wine press and oven. These feudal rights, demanded with ever-increasing severity, were often farmed out to lawyers and other experts who squeezed as much profit as they could out of them, who were constantly discovering forgotten droits, reimposing obligations, appropriating common lands, planting trees along the edges of peasants’ fields and expelling them from forests. The ‘feudal reaction’, as it came to be called, naturally increased the peasants’ resentment against the social order which made such impositions possible, and which imposed upon them, and upon them alone, the obligation to draw lots for service in the militia.
The nobility were not, however, a unified force, except in their not unjustified belief that their order, by encouragement and patronage as well as by the exertions of some of their members, had made France the most civilized country on the continent of Europe. There was once a time – some considered that the time had not passed – when the nobleman chose to suppose himself the heir of the Frankish invaders, and that the commoner, so far beneath him, was the descendant of those Romano-Celtic peoples, timid and unwarlike, whom his ancestors had conquered. The nobleman had, in fact, been a member of the noblesse d’épée who followed the King to war and, as a feudal landowning class, helped him to rule the country in peace. But in more recent times this could no longer be maintained. The Kings of France had not only created a new aristocracy, the noblesse de robe, by granting hereditary titles to their Ministers and other useful servants, but had sold these titles, together with public offices, to rich and socially ambitious members of the bourgeoisie. Daughters of these newly ennobled bourgeois families, bringing with them large dowries from their fathers, had married into less well-off families of the noblesse d’épée, while matches were also made between the noblesse d’épée and the noblesse de robe. Some of the more ancient families, particularly those of the noblesse de court, continued to look down upon this new aristocracy from whom they were still distinguished by being allowed certain privileges denied to the noblesse de robe such as full membership of the Order of the Holy Spirit, whose blue ribbon the King habitually wore.
Sharp as distinctions were between certain jealous families of the noblesse d’épée, the noblesse de robe and the noblesse de court, the distinctions between the rich and poor nobility were, of course, far sharper still. The nobility as a whole, numbering some 400,000 people in all – about half of whom had acquired their noble status within the previous two centuries – owned about a fifth of the land in France, twice as much as the Church. But, whereas some nobles owned thousands of acres which brought in immense incomes, and some increased their fortunes by speculating on the Stock Exchange, by investing in industry or by developing their estates, others lived and worked on small farms which provided them with the barest of meagre livings. And from these small and often ramshackle farms there was little chance of escape into more profitable enterprises, all but a few of which, such as the glass industry and maritime commerce, were traditionally closed to noblemen. Nor could they escape into the army where – despite the Comte de Saint-Germain’s decree that the price of commissions should be reduced every time they changed hands so as to attract officers of birth rather than fortune – commissions were usually reserved for gentlemen who could afford to maintain themselves in style.
Many noblemen, in fact, were far less well off than the increasingly prosperous urban middle class whom they considered quite as great a threat to their privileged existence as royal absolutism. Yet most of the bourgeoisie – whether in business or in the professions, manufacturers or merchants, doctors or lawyers – were for the most part anxious to break down the barriers that excluded them from aristocratic preserves rather than to destroy the aristocracy that had brought those preserves into existence. For centuries, as Professor Lefebvre has said, ‘the bourgeois, envious of the aristocracy, had aimed only at thrusting himself into its ranks…This ambition was not extinct…Bourgeois of old stock were frankly proud of their lineage, careful not to form an improper marriage…Nothing was more pronounced than the ordering of ranks in this bourgeois society. The wife of a solicitor was called “Mademoiselle”, the wife of a councillor was “Madame” without dispute, and the wife of a barrister was usually saluted with the same title. Distinctions no less fine were placed between the doctors and the surgeons; the former had entered the bourgeoisie; the latter were knocking at the gates. In short, the bourgeoisie, looked down upon by the high born, copied them as best they could. It has therefore often been thought surprising that this class whose spirit was far from democracy, should have been so imprudent, in attacking the aristocracy, as to strike at the very principle of social hierarchy itself. But the bourgeoisie had its reasons. The abolition of the legal hierarchy and the privilege of birth seemed to it by no means incompatible with the maintenance of a hierarchy based on wealth, function or calling.’ The limitations imposed upon the talents of the bourgeoisie, particularly upon those of ambitious lawyers, were to make them the aristocracy’s most formidable opponents.
If the grievances of the middle classes were social rather than economic, the poorer people in the towns were more concerned about money. It is impossible to generalize about France as a whole: in the late 1780s Bordeaux was a thriving port which to Arthur Young seemed far more prosperous than Liverpool, whereas the silk industry in Lyons was passing through a period of severe depression with over half its looms at a standstill. Yet it does seem evident that French trade and industrial production were generally expanding, even though manufacturing processes were for the most part antiquated with very few factories using steam, and with mines so dependent upon manual labour that coal production was only one-twentieth that of England. But while wages were slowly rising they failed to keep pace with the more rapidly growing rate of the cost of living, and industrial unrest was becoming common. Most master craftsmen and their journeymen still remained on friendly terms: after all, they usually lived under the same roof, sharing the same interests, and, as Professor Hampson has put it, ‘when food prices rose the journeyman was more disposed to blame the baker, the farmer and the speculator in foodstocks than to demand higher wages’. All the same, master craftsmen were trying to perpetuate ‘their own privileged position at the expense of their journeymen and to confine recruitment to their own families. The journeymen’s attempts to organize themselves and to resort to strike action found the Government on the side of the masters and the municipal authorities – royal edicts prohibited the association of workmen for collective bargaining…The urban population was therefore a prey to deep internal divisions, with some of the wealthier merchants aspiring to become large-scale industrialists, the master craftsmen and journeymen united in resisting the pressure to reduce them to a mere proletariat’ but at the same time sometimes at loggerheads with each other.