the other hand, the voice has gained the full note of confidence. No longer is the Revolution in doubt.

The commission has also undertaken to produce a full edition of the cahiers. It is true that seven volumes of the Archives parlementaires are devoted to them; but the editing was so careless that no serious work can be based upon them,' and the cahiers selected are for the most part those of the electoral districts, i. e., those of the parishes and towns, in a revised, simplified and mutilated form. It has been estimated that a complete edition of the cahiers would fill more than a hundred quarto volumes instead of seven. The task which the government commission has before it is a heavy one. So far, however, seven volumes have appeared, and these have justified in every way the high expectations which were entertained.'

The cahiers have suffered much from fetich worship. They have also had to stand against much hostile criticism. M. A. Wahl of Freiburg, a reactionary who shows no love for the Revolution, has attacked them at many points, but chiefly as interested exaggerations inspired by agitators whom he compares with the German social democrats of to-day. They made exceptions appear to be general rules, hoping that exaggeration of their miseries would bring more rapid and more complete relief. M. I. Loutchisky, whose method is statistical, discarded the cahiers in his work on small properties. Finding them inexact, lacking in precision, he preferred to use the official returns of assessors and taxgatherers. He seems to have erred in putting too much faith in the official seal. All the statistics of the old régime are disordered and unreliable, and fiscal documents may have taken a good deal of their color from carelessness as well as corruption. Although the scepticism of MM. Wahl, Loutchisky and others has had the salutary effect of inducing a more critical attitude toward the cahiers, they remain, as M. Sagnac said recently, the most important and precious monument of our history and the most authentic testament of the old French society." But faith in them falls far short of super2 Ibid., p. 23.

1A. Brette in Révolution française, XLVII, 26.

These are the cahiers of the bailliage of Orleans, edited by C. Bloch in two volumes; of the sénéchaussée of Angoulême and the siège royal of Cognac, edited by P. Boissonnade; of the bailliage of Cotentin, edited by E. Bridrey; of the bailliage of Châlons-sur-Marne, edited by G. Laurent; of the Sénéchaussée of Marseille, edited by J. Fournier; and of the Sénéchaussée of Nîmes, edited by E. Bligny-Bondurand. A. Onou in Révolution française, XLIX, 388 et seq.

5 Ibid., XLII, 340; XLIX, 387.

• Ibid., XXXIV, 372; XLIX, 413.

"Revue d'histoire moderne, VIII, 349.

stition. "We do not have to use the cahiers as a sole source," says M. Sée, "nor even to consider them as the most certain source." This dispassionate spirit animates most of the contemporary writers who have tried to reconstruct the economic life of the peasant during the Revolution."

2 As will be seen from Karéiew's article in Revolution française, XLII, 321 et seq., Russian names are prominent among these writers. To the Russians is due, in great part, the honor of having recommended and followed the true historical method in this field, of having searched in the archives with laborious zeal for the traces of the social facts which they wished to describe. First upon the field was M. N. Karéiew, whose work, Les Paysans et la question paysanne en France dans le dernier quart du xviii siècle, appearing in 1879, was translated from the Russian twenty years later. It was epitomized by A. Maury in the Journal des savants, July-Sept., 1880, and reviewed more recently in the English Historical Review, XVI, 178-182, and in the Revue historique, LXXXVI, 382-386. The book discusses exhaustively the position of the peasant under the manorial system and the effects of the revolutionary legislation. It can no longer be accepted as a guide, because our knowledge has been greatly extended during the last quarter of a century and some of the author's con. clusions have been overthrown. But it still enjoys a degree of authority rarely accorded to a pioneer work. Another writer, M. Maxime Kovalewsky, who is best known for his five-volume work on the origins of modern democracy, has published several important articles in the Revue internationale de sociologie, IX, 489–514; XIII, 577-620 and 714-765. These articles deal with the economic and social condition of France on the eve of the Revolution. The work of M. Loutchisky has been confined to a narrower field, the investigation of the extent of peasant property. Of his latest book, dealing with the possessions of the peasants in France on the eve of the Revolution, principally in the Limousin (Kiev, 1905), M. Sagnac says: "It renews or rather creates the history of landed property in France in the eighteenth century." Revue d'histoire moderne, III, 171. This work has not been translated, but fortunately a long analysis appeared in Revue d'histoire moderne, III, 156– 171. See also Loutchisky's La Petite Propriété en France avant la Révolution (1897) and his article in the Revue historique, LIX, 70-107. We should not forget M. A. Onou (formerly a pupil of Karéiew), who, in addition to his Russian work, has published an important article on the value of the cahiers in Révolution française, XLIX, 385-417.

The number of French writers is naturally large. Among them may be noticed: M. Jaurès, who has taken full advantage of special investigations and whose Histoire socialiste (reviewed by C. A. Beard in POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, XXI, 111120) has vindicated the right of economic questions to a commanding place in general history; M. Edme Champion, who has written an excellent little book on La France d'après les cahiers de 1789 (Paris, 1897); M. Henri Sée, who has made an intimate study of Les Classes rurales en Bretagne du xvie siècle à la Révolution (1906), and who has published an article under the same title in the Revue d'histoire moderne, VI, 309-324, examined the Breton parish cahiers in Révolution française,, XLVI, 487-513, and XLVII, 28-46, and explained the general significance of the manorial system in Revue d'histoire moderne, X, 173–191; M. C. Bloch, whose attention has been concentrated in a similar way on Orleans, and who has

II. THE MANORIAL SYSTEM IN 1789

The manorial system of the middle ages was part of the feudal system;' part, that is, of an organization which had government as its chief object. The feudal hierarchy, conducting the business of administration, justice and war, rested for support, as all governments must do, upon the mass of the people. It was the labor of the serf upon the landed estates of the governing class, the manors, that paid the expenses of government. And the serf, besides being bound to labor for his lord and make him certain payments in kind, was subject to numerous restrictions, such as being under the lord's jurisdiction and being unable to leave the manor or marry without his lord's consent.

Now in 1789 feudalism was not at all what it had been five hundred years before. The chief alteration lay in the supplanting of aristocratic by monarchic government. The king had steadily absorbed the political and judicial powers of the nobles and extended the imposition of royal taxes. The peasants therefore, besides supporting the church, found themselves subject to a double exploitation. They were supporting two governments: the actual, effective government of the king, levying its taille, its poll-tax and its twentieths, and the government emeritus of the feudal nobles who, having dropped out of politics, devoted themselves with great assiduity to social relaxations and collected cens and mutation fines as of old to pay for their dinners and their dances.

Viewed in this light, the situation of the peasant seems hard indeed, almost intolerable. But in certain important respects the relations between manorial lord and serf had been greatly modified. As M. Kovalewsky has shown, the money payments into which the labor dues had been commuted (especially in the north),' had steadily declined in value while the revenues from the peasant's holdings had risen.'

edited the cahiers of the bailliage of Orleans and published an article on the division of landed property in the Revue d'histoire moderne, II, 246–267; M. Paul Viollet, who contributed to the Cambridge Modern History, vol. viii, a useful chapter on French law; M. Ph. Sagnac, in whose Législation civile de la Révolution française will be found the most authoritative account of the abolition of the manorial system (see also his article on the division of the soil during the Revolution in Revue d'histoire moderne, V, 457-470, and the edition of the cahiers of Flandre Maritime which he published with Saint-Leger in 1906); and MM. Aulard, Brette and Caron, who are regular contributors to the historical reviews.

1 Sée, almost alone among the French writers, makes the distinction between féodal and domanial; Séances et travaux de l'Académie des Sciences, CLI, 508.

Kovalewsky, Revue internationale de sociologie, IX, 500; Sée, Revue d'histoire moderne, VI, 314, and X, 176. 3 Kovalewsky, loc. cit. and p. 496.

Again, the cens which he paid annually was indistinguishable from the ordinary rents, except in origin; and on the fourth of August not a voice was raised in favor of confiscation, not even on the extreme Left where sat Pétion and Robespierre. Finally, the serf had almost everywhere emancipated himself from those obnoxious and humiliating obligations which were the distinguishing mark of serfdom. He was now a censitaire, a métayer, not a serf.

Yet serfs of a kind still remained, chiefly in Nivernois, Bourbonnais and the eastern provinces which had been acquired by conquest.' They numbered perhaps 300,000. What their circumstances were it is not easy to determine; to define their legal status would be a perilous enterprise for any writer. The infinite varieties of servile condition puzzled the ablest contemporaries. Montesquieu, in defining the two kinds of servitude, real mortmain and personal mortmain, thought that the first bound the peasant to the land, the second to the person of his lord. This is corrected by M. Karéiew. The peasant subject to personal mortmain was bound to the soil, unable to leave it or become free; real mortmain, by far the more common variety, affected the peasant only while he held the land and did not prevent his leaving it.' Personal mortmain was comparatively rare. Rare also was the right of formariage which made marriages between persons of different manors depend on the consent of their lords." A form of serfdom which did not, as a rule, bind the peasant to the soil or limit freedom of marriage was not the serfdom of the middle ages. It was serfdom on its way to extinction. There appears to have been at this time only one test of servile status capable of a general application-the absence of property right in the land." The serf could neither alienate nor sell his holding; and if direct heirs failed or even if his children did not live with him, the holding reverted to the lord. "By 1789, in most cases," says M. Viollet," the question whether a man was a serf or a freeman was of much more importance to his heirs than to himself."

Although this modified serfdom was for the most part localized in eastern France and existed entirely as an exception, it does not follow

1 Sagnac, Législation civile, p. 60; Champion, La France d'après les cahiers, chap. x; Karéiew, pp. 19-24. See also Sée, Les Classes rurales en Bretagne, p. 22. 'Esprit des lois, livre xv, chap. 10. 3 Karéiew, p. 20.

The two groups insensibly shaded into each other. Karéiew, p. 24.

5 Sée, Séances et travaux de l'Académie, CLI, 512; Karéiew, p. 25. Sée, loc. cit.; Karéiew, p. 22.

* Cambridge Modern History, VIII, 714.

7

* Sée, loc. cit.

that the prevalent tenure was freehold. There were some allodial properties; M. Kovalewsky has proved it from administrative correspondence, the debates of the provincial assemblies and the rural cahiers; but when M. Jaurès says that there existed already "innumerable agricultural properties exempt from all feudal right," he is not in line with the specialist authorities. Freehold, like servile tenure, was only an exception.' The fact is that, while the peasants had freed their persons and acquired a qualified right of property in the land, the land was still weighted with manorial rights and charges. The jurists recognized a double proprietorship. According to them there could be no land without a lord. The lord, once full proprietor as against the serfs, still retained the domaine direct, by virtue of which he received certain payments in kind and in money. The peasant, on the other hand, having acquired a prescriptive right to his little plot of land,' enjoyed the usufruct, the domaine utile. The jurists regarded him as a proprietor; and it is in this qualified sense that Arthur Young and de Tocqueville refer to the great number of peasant proprietors.

Regarding this matter of small peasant holdings there has been much investigation. Tocqueville, who bases his conclusions on the returns of the land-tax, was the first to maintain that the diffusion of property among the peasants was almost as great before the Revolution as after it. Today this view seems to be firmly established. "Most of the peasants are small proprietors," says M. Sée, who is writing of Brittany. M. Bloch, speaking of Orleans, and M. Loutchisky, speaking of the Limousin villages," hold very much the same opinion. When men of such eminence in this field as MM. Sagnac," Sée," Bloch and Loutchisky are of one mind, we need not hesitate to follow them. M. Karéiew has made his submission; and though his book remains unchanged, a recantation will be found in the preface to the French edition." Against this formidable weight of opinion MM. Champion and Kovalewsky stand out practically alone. The latter condemns, and with some force, the evidence on which Loutchisky bases his estimate of five million proprietors." M. Champion tries to prove the insignificance

1 Revue internationale de sociologie, XIII, 714, 715. Histoire socialiste, I, 19. Sagnac, p. 59; Karéiew, p. 33. Karéiew, p. 35.

5 Sée, Séances et travaux de l'Académie, CLI, 512. Viollet, in Cambridge Modern History, VIII, 718, 719. 'L'Ancien Régime, libre ii, chap. I.

8 Revue d'histoire moderne, VI, 313.
11 La Législation civile, p. 58.
13 Karéiew, p. x.

14 Revue internationale de sociologie, XIII, 740.