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On these occasions he was always the good fellow, endeavoring to please the people of the middle classes, whom he made his allies against feudality. Several times during dinner he said to his daughter: "Who, think you, could have robbed my silversmith? The robberies now amount to over twelve hundred thousand crowns in eight years.
He could not undo things which were done already; and he could not help lying and excusing himself when pressed upon points disagreeable to himself. The creature slinks away and hides with subterfuges, as a hunted animal runs to his covert at the sight of man, the tyrant and pursuer. Strange relics of feudality, and consequence of our ever-so-old social life!
We reign without contest. We are princes, too princes of finance. We have founded an aristocracy as proud and as powerful as the old one. Feudality of nobility no longer exists; it has given way to that of money." Serge laughed. He saw what Herzog was driving at. "Your great barons of finance are sometimes subject to executions," said he.
Blois was the fruitful and brilliant example to which the Bourgeoisie and Feudality, Wealth and Nobility, gave such splendid replies in the towns and in the rural regions. Imagination could not desire any other sort of dwelling for the prince who reigned over France in the sixteenth century.
M. Desormeaux, the head clerk at the Department of Justice, was an old legitimist, much imbued with reactionary ideas. "Such are our masters," said he with a sneer, "the high barons of financial feudality. Ah! you are indignant at the arrogance of the old aristocracy; well, on your knees, by Jupiter! on your face, rather, before the golden crown on field of gules."
The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little popular as Philip the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing, and knew it; the feudality did not possess sufficient union, the people did not have enough force to profit on this occasion against the Crown.
The fashion and style of our malice change with time: the barons of the middle ages plundered the traveller on the highway, and then offered him hospitality in their castles; mercantile feudality, less brutal, exploits the proletaire and builds hospitals for him: who would dare to say which of the two has deserved the palm of virtue?
But, when stating these excellent arguments, did you ask yourself, sir, whither would tend such a transformation of our system of mortgages?... To monetize, if I may say so, landed property; to accumulate it within portfolios; to separate the laborer from the soil, man from Nature; to make him a wanderer over the face of the earth; to eradicate from his heart every trace of family feeling, national pride, and love of country; to isolate him more and more; to render him indifferent to all around him; to concentrate his love upon one object, money; and, finally, by the dishonest practices of usury, to monopolize the land to the profit of a financial aristocracy, a worthy auxiliary of that industrial feudality whose pernicious influence we begin to feel so bitterly.
One set knocked to pieces the old feudal groundwork and mowed down the feudal heads that had grown upon it; Napoleon brought about, within France, the conditions under which alone free competition could develop, the partitioned lands be exploited the nation's unshackled powers of industrial production be utilized; while, beyond the French frontier, he swept away everywhere the establishments of feudality, so far as requisite, to furnish the bourgeois social system of France with fit surroundings of the European continent, and such as were in keeping with the times.
The peace which now reigned in Europe allowed the United Provinces to direct their whole efforts toward the reform of those internal abuses resulting from feudality and fanaticism. Confiscations were reversed, and property secured throughout the republic.
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