What Might Have Been

“With the escape of the Huguenots a general decline settled on France. Flourishing manufacturing cities fell into decay.... It is estimated that, at the time the Revolution began, two hundred thousand poor people in Paris claimed charity from the hands of the king. Only the Jesuits flourished in the decaying nation.”^{11James A. Wylie, History of Protestantism, book 13, chapter 20.}LF 118.2

The gospel would have brought France the solution to those problems that baffled her clergy, king, and legislators and that finally plunged the nation into ruin. But under Rome the people had lost the Savior's lessons of self-sacrifice and unselfish love for the good of others. The rich received no rebuke for oppressing the poor, and the poor received no help for their pitiful condition. The selfishness of the wealthy and powerful grew more and more oppressive. For centuries, the rich wronged the poor, and the poor hated the rich.LF 118.3

In many provinces the working classes were at the mercy of landlords and were forced to submit to exhorbitant demands. The middle and lower classes were heavily taxed by the civil authorities and clergy. “The farmers and the peasants might starve, for all their oppressors cared.... The lives of the agricultural workers consisted of unending work and unrelieved misery. Their complaints ... were treated with insolent contempt.... Judges were notorious for accepting bribes.... Less than half of the taxes ever found their way into the royal or church treasury; the collectors kept the rest and squandered it in shameless self-indulgence. And the men who impoverished their fellow-subjects in this way were not required to pay taxes and were entitled by law or custom to all the privileges of the state.... So that these could gratify their selfish desires, millions of people were condemned to hopeless and degrading lives.” (See Appendix.)LF 118.4

For more than half a century before the Revolution, King Louis XV occupied the throne. He was well known as a lazy, superficial, and self-indulgent monarch. With the state financially embarrassed and the people exasperated, no one needed a prophet's eye to foresee a terrible outbreak. The king's counselors urged the need for reform, but he did not listen. The doom that was coming on France was pictured in the king's selfish answer, “After me, the deluge!”LF 118.5

Rome had influenced the kings and ruling classes to keep the people in bondage, intending to fasten the souls of both the rulers and the people in her shackles. The moral degradation was a thousand times more terrible than the physical suffering that resulted from her policy. Deprived of the Bible, and given fully to selfishness, the people were shrouded in ignorance and sunken in vice, completely unfit to govern themselves.LF 119.1