it
had a wider significance. To them, all these privileges were products
of the same principle, ruins of the same fabric. They were relics and
remnants of feudalism, and feudalism meant power given to land and
denied to capital and industry. It meant class government, the
negation of the very idea of the state and of the nation; it meant
conquest and subjugation by a foreign invader. None denied that many
great families had won their spurs in the service of their country;
everybody indeed knew that the noblest of all, Montmorency, bore the
arms of France because, at the victory of Bouvines, where their
ancestor was desperately wounded, the king laid his finger on the
wound and drew with his blood the lilies upon his shield. When we
come, presently, to the Abbe Sieyes, we shall see how firmly men
believed that the nobles were, in the mass, Franks, Teutonic tyrants,
and spoilers of the Celtic native. They intended that feudalism should
not be trimmed but uprooted, as the cause of much that was infinitely
odious, and as a thing absolutely incompatible with public policy,
social interests, and right reason. That men should be made to bear
suffering for the sake of what could only be explained by very early
history and very yellow parchments was simply irrational to a
generation which received its notion of life from Turgot, Adam Smith,
or Franklin.

Although there were three interpretations of feudal privilege, and
consequently a dangerous problem in the near future, the first step
was an easy one, and consisted in the appeal by the Crown to the
Commons for aid in regenerating the State. Like other princes of his
time, Lewis XVI. was a reforming monarch. At his accession, his first
choice of a minister was Machault, known to have entertained a vast
scheme of change, to be attempted whenever the throne should be
occupied by a serious prince. Later, he appointed Turgot, the most
profound and thorough reformer of the century. He appointed
Malesherbes, one of the weakest but one of the most enlightened of
public men; and after having, at the Coronation, taken an oath to
persecute, he gave office to Necker, a Protestant, an alien, and a
republican. When he had begun, through Malesherbes, to remove
religious disabilities, he said to him, "Now you have been a
Protestant, and I declare you a Jew"; and began to prepare a measure
for the relief of Jews, who, wherever they went, were forced to pay
the same toll as a pig. He carried