United States or Yemen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I have considered this famous pamphlet at some length, because it was eminently timely, expressing, as it did, the doctrines and the aspirations of the subversionary party in France. I believe, and principally on the evidence of the cahiers, that this party did not form a majority, or even, numerically, a very large minority, of the French nation.
Quick comes the answer: "Our electors have sent in but few cahiers, and these are defective. We cannot tell our king, the nation, what the people were and what they are, what they have and what they want, until they tell us. Our cahier must wait the pleasure of the people."
Nor was this all. The worthy veteran might, on some trifling quarrel, be deprived of the rank he had won with his sweat and his blood, and sent back to his paternal hawk's nest, a broken and disgraced man. The cahiers demand that there shall be no more dismissals without trial; and many of them ask that particular cases of hardship may be rectified.
Read English to them and make them happy.... But first there must be verbs... there had been cahiers of them... first, second, third conjugation.... It was impudence, an impudent invasion... the dreadful clever, foreign school.... They would laugh at her.... She began to repeat the English alphabet.... She doubted whether, faced with a class, she could reach the end without a mistake.... She reached Z and went on to the parts of speech.
We have, however, a still more interesting and important expression of public opinion in France at this time, in the cahiers, or lists of grievances and suggestions for reform which, in pursuance of an old custom, the king asked the nation to prepare.
It did achieve the purpose of translating a large part of the demands of the cahiers into legislative enactments; yet it did not learn the meaning of the word toleration, and it did not pave the way for liberty, but only for a doctrine of liberty. The elections to the Législative took place in September, under the influence of several cross currents of opinion.
It is a mistake to assume that the Frenchmen of 1789 cared chiefly for civil and social reforms, and only incidentally for reforms of a political character. In most of the cahiers the political reforms are first mentioned and are as elaborately insisted on as any others.
Meanwhile, the regent, irreverently called Uncle Sam, who rules the land while his master is away in Utopia, reads the cahiers of the nobles, laughs in his sleeve at that of the clergy, and forgets all about that of the third estate. Or if he thinks of it at all, it is only to try to fill its place with twenty-four-volume Census Reports and massive tomes from the other departments.
An examination of the title-page, however, dampened our expectations, for there was added the rest of the title, namely, "And of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Presbyterian Church." The book proved indeed a delusion and a snare, for of its six hundred pages more than nine tenths pertained to church affairs, were part and parcel of the cahiers of the clergy.
A commoner, having bought noble lands, complains of the additional taxes laid on him on this account. Jean Baptiste Lardier, seigneur de Saint-Gervais de Pierrefitte, A. P. v. 17. The meetings in which the cahiers were composed were sometimes stormy. At Nemours the economist Dupont was one of the committee especially engaged in the task.
Word Of The Day