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in his own family,* he established the hereditaryship of fiefs as a general principle; and from this epoch authors date the complete establishment of the feudal system in France.

On the other hand, the lords who gave their suffrages to Hugh Capet forgot not the interest of their own ambition. They completed the breach of those feeble ties which subjected them to the royal authority, and became every where independent. They left the king no jurisdiction, either over themselves, or their vassals; they reserved the right of waging war with each other; they even assumed the same privilege, in certain cases, with regard to the king himself; +so that

Hotoman has proved beyond a doubt, in his FrancoGallia, that, under the two first races of kings, the crown of France was elective. The princes of the reigning fa mily had nothing more in their favour than the custom of choosing one of that house.

The principal of these cases was, when the king refused to appoint judges to decide a difference between himself and one of his first barons; the latter had then a right to take up arms against the king; and the subordinate vassals were so dependent on their immediate lords, that they were obliged to follow them against the lord paramount. St. Louis, though the power of the crown was in his time much increased, was obliged to confirm both this privilege of the first barons, and this obligation of their vassals.

if Hugh Capet, by rendering the crown hereditary, laid the foundation of the greatness of his family, and of the crown itself, yet he added little to his own authority, and acquired scarcely any thing more than a nominal superiority over the number of sovereigns who then swarmed in France.*

But the establishment of the feudal system in England was an immediate and sudden consequence of that conquest which introduced it: Besides, this conquest was made by a prince who kept the greater part of his army in his own pay, and who was placed at the head of a people over whom he was an hereditary sovereign, -circumstances which gave a totally different turn to the government of that kingdom.

Surrounded by a warlike, though a conquered nation, William kept on foot part of his army. The English, and after them the Normans

* «The grandees of the kingdom," says Mezeray, "thought that Hugh Capet ought to put up with all "their insults, because they had placed the crown on "his head: nay, so great was their licentiousness, that, "on his writing to Audebert, viscount of Perigueux, or"dering him to raise the siege he had laid to Tours, and asking him, by way of reproach, who had made him "a viscount? that nobleman haughtily answered, "Not you, but those who made you a king. [Ce n'est pas vous, "mais ceux qui vous ont fait roi]."

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themselves, having revolted, he crushed both; and the new king of England, at the head of victorious troops, having to do with two nations lying under a reciprocal check from the enmity they bore to each other, and, moreover, equally subdued by a sense of their unfortunate attempts of resistance, found himself in the most favourable circumstances for becoming an absolute monarch; and his laws, thus promulgated in the midst, as it were, of thunder and lightning, imposed the yoke of despotism both on the victors and the vanquished.

He divided England into sixty thousand two hundred and fifteen military fiefs, all held of the crown; the possessors of which were, on pain of forfeiture, to take up arms, and repair to his standard on the first signal: he subjected not only the common people, but even the barons, to all the rigours of the feudal government: he even imposed on them his tyrannical forest laws. *

He reserved to himself an exclusive privilege of killing game throughout England, and enacted the severest penalties on all who should attempt it without his permission. The suppression, or rather mitigation of these penalties, was one of the articles of the Charta de Foresta, which the barons afterwards obtained by force of arms. Nullus de cætero amittat vitam, vel membra, pro venatione nostra. Ch. de Forest. Art. 10.

He assumed the prerogative of imposing taxes. He invested himself with the whole executive power of government. But what was of the greatest consequence, he arrogated to himself the most extensive judicial power by the establishment of the court which was called Aula Regis,—a formidable tribunal, which received appeals from all the courts of the barons, and decided, in the last resort, on the estates, honour, and lives of the barons themselves; and which, being wholly composed of the great officers of the crown, removable at the king's pleasure, and having the king himself for president, kept the first noblemen in the kingdom under the same control as the meanest subject.

Thus, while the kingdom of France, in consequence of the slow and gradual formation of the feudal government, found itself, in the issue, composed of a number of parts simply placed by each other, and without any reciprocal adherence, the kingdom of England on the contrary, from the sudden and violent introduction of the same system, became a compound of parts united by the strongest ties; and the regal authority, by the pressure of its immense weight, consolidated the whole into one compact indissoluble body.

To this difference in the original constitution of France and England, that is, in the original power of their kings, we are to attribute the difference, so little analogous to its original cause, of their present constitutions. This furnishes the solution of a problem, which, I must confess, for a long time perplexed me, and explains the reason why, of two neighbouring nations, situated almost under the same climate, and having one common origin, the one has attained the summit of liberty, the other has gradually sunk under an absolute monarchy.

In France, the royal authority was indeed inconsiderable; but this circumstance was by no means favourable to the general liberty. The lords were every thing; and the bulk of the nation were accounted nothing. All those wars which were made on the king had not liberty for their object; for of this the chiefs already enjoyed too great a share: they were the mere effect of private ambition or caprice. The people did not engage in them as associates in the support of a cause common to all; they were dragged, blindfold, and like slaves, to the standard of their leaders. In the mean time, as the laws, by virtue of which their masters were considered as vassals, had no rela

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