Economists have estimated that the
Church owned one-third of the land of Europe during the Middle Ages.
However this may have been she certainly held a very large part of
France. On April 16, 1790, the Assembly declared this territory to be
national property, and proceeded to sell it to the peasantry by means of
the paper _assignats_ which were issued for the purpose, and were
supposed to be secured upon the land. The sales were generally made in
little lots, as the sales were made of the public domain in Rome under
the Licinian Laws, and with an identical effect. The Emperor of Germany
and the King of Prussia met at Pilnitz in August, 1791, to consider the
conquest of France, and, on the eve of that meeting, the Assembly
received a report which stated that these lands to the value of a
thousand million francs had already been distributed, and that sales
were going on. It was from this breed of liberated husbandmen that
France drew the soldiers who fought her battles and won her victories
for the next five and twenty years.
Assuming that the type of the small French landholder, both rural and
urban, had been pretty well developed by the autumn of 1791, the crisis
came rapidly, for the confiscations which created this new energy roused
to frenzy, perhaps the most formidable energy which opposed it.
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