de Rohan, with M. de Brienne,
archbishop of Sens, with M. de Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, and with the
Abbe Maury, defender of the clergy. Rivarol,[4231] himself a skeptic,
declares that at the approach of the Revolution, "the enlightenment of
the clergy equaled that of the philosophers." "Who would believe it, but
body with the fewest prejudices," says Mercier,[4232] "is the clergy."
And the Archbishop of Narbonne, explaining the resistance of the upper
class of the clergy in 1791 [4233] attributes it, not to faith but to
a point of honor. "We conducted ourselves at that time like true
gentlemen, for, with most of us, it could not be said that it was
through religious feeling."

V. Political Opposition.

Progress of political opposition.--Its origin.--The
economists and the parliamentarians.--They prepare the way
for the philosophers.--Political fault-finding in the
drawing-rooms.--Female liberalism.

The distance between the altar and the throne is a short one, and yet it
requires thirty years for opinion to overcome it. No political or social
attacks are yet made during the first half of the century. The irony of
the "Lettres Persanes"is as cautious as it is delicate, and the "Esprit
des Lois" is conservative. As to the Abbe de Saint-Pierre his reveries
provoke a smile, and when he undertakes to censure Louis XIV the Academy
strikes him off its list. At last, the economists on one side and the
parliamentarians on the other, give the signal.--Voltaire says[4234]
that "about 1750 the nation, satiated with verse, tragedies, comedies,
novels, operas, romantic histories, and still more romantic moralizings,
and with disputes about grace and convulsions, began to discuss
the question of corn." What makes bread dear? Why is the laborer so
miserable? What constitutes the material and limits of taxation? Ought
not all land to pay taxes, and should one piece pay more than its net
product? These are the questions that find their way into drawing-rooms
under the king's auspices, by means of Quesnay, his physician, "his
thinker," the founder of a system which aggrandizes the sovereign to
relieve the people, and which multiplies the number of tax-payers to
lighten the burden of taxation.--At the same time, through the opposite
door, other questions enter, not less novel. "Is France[4235] a mild
and representative monarchy or a government of the Turkish stamp? Are
we subject to the will of an absolute m