It is seldom in the time of the generation in which they are propounded
that new theories of life and its relations bear their full fruit. Only
those doctrines which a man learns in his early youth seem to him so
completely certain as to deserve to be pushed nearly to their last
conclusions. The Frenchman of the reign of Louis XV. listened eagerly to
Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Their descendants, in the time of
his grandson, first attempted to apply the ideas of those teachers.
While I shall endeavor in this book to deal with social and political
conditions existing in the reign of Louis XVI., I shall be obliged to
turn to that of his predecessor for the origin of French thoughts which
acted only in the last quarter of the century.



CHAPTER I.

THE KING AND THE ADMINISTRATION.


When Louis XVI. came to the throne in the year 1774, he inherited a
power nearly absolute in theory over all the temporal affairs of his
kingdom. In certain parts of the country the old assemblies or
Provincial Estates still met at fixed times, but their functions were
very closely limited. The _Parliaments_, or high courts of justice,
which had claimed the right to impose some check on legislation, had
been browbeaten by Louis XIV., and the principal one, that of Paris, had
been dissolved by his successor. The young king appeared, therefore, to
be left face to face with a nation over which he was to exercise direct
and despotic power. It was a recognized maxim that the royal was law.
[Footnote: Si veut le roi, si veut la loi.] Moreover, for more than two