The Eve of the French Revolution. By Edward J. Lowell.
(Gay and Bird.)—This is a very careful study of an important subject. The writer is dominated throughout by a judicial temper. Facts about which exaggerated views are commonly held, are set in their true light. The upshot of it all may be described by saying that things under the ancien regime were bad, but not so bad as they have been sometimes represented. In some parts of France the peasantry were deplorably poor ; in others, they wero better off than the same class elsewhere. An English traveller, writing in 1789 of North-Eastern France, says, "all the people look happy," and thinks that the great difference that he sees between England and France is "in favour of the former." Arthur Young, at about the same time, writing of Languedoc, takes much the same view. But, as Mr. Lowell remarks, "these descriptions would give too favourable an idea if they were taken for the whole of France." The taxation was very heavy, though not so heavy as has been represented. Mr. Lowell rightly discredits M. Taine's estimate that the peasants paid in this way "over 80 per cent. of their income." He pertinently asks : "If a man could pay that pro- portion to the Government year after year, and not die of want, how very prosperous a man living on the same land must be to- day if his taxes amount only to one-quarter or one-third of his income." The unfairness of the system by which so many were exempt, and the corruption of the Administration, made the burdens intolerable. One of the most interesting parts of the book is the account of the Encyclopaedists. Diderot comes out as one of the ablest, and, at the same time, one of the most men- dacious of mankind. When a writer makes his principal witness out of a biography which had no existence except in his own imagination, "our confidence in his facts is hopelessly lost."
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