THE MAGISTRACY

I see the same contrasts in the magistracy as in the nobility and the clergy. Beside magistrates of the old stamp, grave, austere, preserving the tradition and sentiment of duty, the consciousness of professional dignity, I encounter with regret epicurean and Voltairean magistrates, men of intrigue and pleasure, light, superficial, partisans of revolutionary ideas, preparing unawares the downfall of the throne as well as the altar, and not even suspecting the weight of the blows they are aiming at them. It is only in appearance that they uphold justice. In reality they are nothing but agents of dissolution. They do not even trouble themselves to be hypocrites. The same men who break Calas on the wheel and decapitate La Barre, place Voltaire’s _La Pucelle_ on the tables of their drawing-rooms, and are the guests and flatterers of materialists and atheists. If a book is condemned to be burned, the condemnation makes the magistrates who pronounce it smile. “Injunctions are decried,” says Bachaumont, “a witticism refutes a sermon, and if Parliament meddles with it, they glory in the honors of the burning. It is no longer a punishment, but an advertisement. Moreover, do not fancy that the executioner of lofty works has permission to throw into the fire the books whose names appear in the decree of the court. Messieurs would be very sorry to deprive their libraries of a copy of each of these works to which they have a legal right, and the clerk of the court substitutes for them some pettifogging parchments of which there is never any lack.”[4]

Those members of the judiciary who hold a middle rank between the higher nobility and the middle classes, who are rich, influential, and allied to the most powerful families in France; those great nobles of the robe each of whom has his little Versailles, a fine house between court and garden, and who are to the magistracy what the prelates are to the clergy; these parliamentary leaders gradually become the most redoubtable enemies of the monarchy. Louis XV. has them in horror. Ever since the time of Madame de Pompadour he has considered them his most dangerous enemies. “Those long robes and the clergy,” he said one day to the favorite, “are always at drawn swords; they torment me by their quarrels; but I detest the long robes far the most. My clergy at bottom are attached to me and loyal; the others would like to tutor me.... The Regent was much to blame for giving them the right to make remonstrances; they will end by ruining the State.”—“Ah! Sire,” remarked M. de Gontaut, “it is rather too strong for petty lawyers to overthrow.”—“You do not know what they are doing nor what they can do,” resumed the King; “it is an assembly of republicans. Enough of that, however. Things will last as long as I do.”[5]

Disorder exists already in the ruling classes. Montesquieu has written it: “There are three estates in France, the Church, the sword, and the robe. Each of them has a sovereign contempt for the two others.” One of Louis XV.’s ministers of foreign affairs, the Marquis d’Argenson, has foretold what must be the certain end of this régime of divisions and perpetual conflicts of power. “Who,” he writes, “will decide this question in the future, to wit, whether despotism will increase or diminish in France? For my part, I hold for the advent of the second article, and even for republicanism. Louis XV. has not known how to govern either tyrannically or like a good republican leader; now, here, when one takes neither one rôle nor the other, woe to royal authority.... The peoples have grown very fond of parliaments, seeing in them the only remedy for the vexations they endure from another quarter. All this points to some revolt which is smouldering under the ashes.” In 1752 the same Marquis d’Argenson had traced these prophetic lines: “The bad results of our government by absolute monarchy have succeeded in convincing France and all Europe that it is the very worst kind of government. I do not mean the same thing as the philosophers, who say that anarchy itself would be preferable. However, the opinion is growing and making its way, and that may bring about a national revolution.”

A noisy and active revolution is forming itself against the Church in the very bosom of Catholicism, and against royalty in that of the magistracy and the parliamentarian middle classes. A sort of league is established between all the parliaments of France, which consider themselves as the different groups of a single assembly, the several members of an invisible body. Louis XV., energetic at times, awakes from his torpor and comprehends the necessity of striking a great blow. During the night of January 19, 1771, all the members of the Paris Parliament who, through a spirit of opposition, were refusing to render justice, are arrested in their beds and summoned to give a plain yes or no to an order requiring them to resume their ordinary functions. They answer no, and are sent into exile. The people remain quiet, and the dissolved Parliament gives place without resistance to the new Maupeou Parliament, so called from the name of the chancellor. Louis XV. thinks himself more powerful than Louis XIV., the chancellor stronger than Richelieu. Madame de Pompadour had overthrown the Jesuits. Madame Du Barry has overthrown the parliamentarians; in other words, the Jansenists. The rival parties, Jesuits and Jansenists, having disappeared, would not one suppose that the absolute monarchy would remain standing alone above their ruins? But that is merely an optical illusion. The Maupeou Parliament is discredited, and power sustains it but feebly. It allows the affair of Beaumarchais against Counsellor Goëzman,—an affair so trifling in itself but so important on account of the noise it makes,—to take truly incredible proportions. The terrible and dramatic Polish question preoccupies Versailles and Paris less than the wretched quarrel between the author of the _Barber of Seville_ and one of his judges, or rather, the wife of one of them.

What was it all about? To know whether the wife of a counsellor of Parliament had or had not kept fifteen louis received from a litigant. Why, then, such passion and excitement in the public? Why this feverish anxiety, this mad curiosity with which all Paris, all France, follows the vicissitudes of this trial? Because the affair is symbolical. What is at stake is less the Goëzman household than the whole Maupeou Parliament. It is the magistracy that I see on the prisoner’s bench, and not Beaumarchais. It is the accused who, by an inversion of rôles, appears as counsel for the King,—what do I say?—as counsel for that new power, opinion. His statements are the public prosecutor’s speeches. The cause is as much political as judicial. The old social edifice is cracking and undermined on every side. All the springs of the old machine are out of order. And instead of lamenting over this, the privileged classes do nothing but laugh. The Goëzman trial is a comedy which entertains the boxes as much as it does the pit. I am not sure that Louis XV. himself, hard as it is to divert him, is not cheered up by it. It certainly amuses Madame Du Barry extremely. She has charades at her house in which Madame Goëzman and Beaumarchais are confronted with each other. Beaumarchais is the centre of all eyes, the fashionable man, the hero of the day. “I am afraid,” writes Voltaire, “that this brilliant fellow may be in the right against everybody.... His naïveté enchants me” (the naïveté of Beaumarchais!). “I forgive him his imprudence and petulance.”

The conclusion of the most serious act or the most important treaty of peace would be awaited with less impatience than the issue of this trial, which preoccupies, if one can believe it, both peoples and kings,—so entirely does France, in spite of her decline, retain in the last years of Louis XV. the privilege of concentrating the attention of all Europe on what is passing within her borders. “Judgment at last!”... as says the Chicaneau in Racine’s _Plaideurs_. February 26, 1774, after seven months of waiting, the sentence is pronounced. Madame Goëzman is condemned to formal censure (_le blâme_) and to the restitution of the fifteen louis, which are to be distributed among the poor. Beaumarchais is also condemned to censure. _Le blâme_ is not a slight penalty, but an infamous one, a penalty which renders him who is stricken by it incapable of fulfilling any public function; the condemned receives the sentence kneeling, in presence of the court, while the president says to him: “The court censures thee and declares thee infamous.” Well! the man whom the Maupeou Parliament thinks it can thus stamp with infamy, is a victor; all Paris goes to leave cards at the house of the condemned man. The Prince de Conti and the Duke de Chartres give him a brilliant entertainment the day after sentence is decreed. M. de Sartines says to him: “One should be modest even though one has been censured.” The opposition, silenced for a moment, starts up anew. A rain of pamphlets and diatribes begins against this Maupeou Parliament which, by inflicting civil death on a man upheld by public opinion, has given itself a mortal blow. Its days, like those of the old King, are numbered. As to Louis XV., judging Beaumarchais from the address just displayed by this clever man in the Goëzman trial, he intrusts him with a secret mission to England. When discordances like these exist in any society, catastrophes are not far distant.