part of the Government. Perhaps palace-building may be considered a
mistake, since it diverted the revenues of the kingdom into monuments of
royal vanity. But the sums lavished on architects, gardeners, painters,
sculptors, and those who worked under them, employed thousands of useful
artisans, created taste, and helped to civilize the people. The people
profited by the extravagance of the King and his courtiers; the money
was spent in France, which was certainly better than if it had been
expended in foreign wars; it made Paris and Versailles the most
attractive cities of the world; it stimulated all the arts, and did not
demoralize the nation. Would this country be poorer, and the government
less stable, if five hundred millions were expended at Washington to
make it the most beautiful city of the land, and create an honest pride
even among the representatives of the West, perhaps diverting them from
building another capital on the banks of the Mississippi? Would this
country be richer if great capitalists locked up their money in State
securities, instead of spending their superfluous wealth in reclaiming
sterile tracts and converting them into gardens and parks? The very
magnificence of Louis impressed such a people as the French with the
idea of his power, and tended to make the government secure, until
subsequent wars imposed such excessive taxation as to impoverish the
people and drain the sources of national wealth. We do not read that
Colbert made serious remonstrances to the palace-building of the King,
although afterwards Louis regarded it as one of the errors of his reign.
But when Colbert died, in 1685, another spirit seemed to animate the
councils of the King, and great mistakes were made,--which is the more
noteworthy, since the moral character of the King seemed to improve. It
was at this time that he fell under the influence of Madame de Maintenon
and the Jesuits. They made his court more decorous. Montespan was sent
away. Bossuet and La Chaise gained great ascendency over the royal
conscience. Louis began to realize his responsibilities; the love of
glory waned; the welfare of the people was now considered. Whether he
was _ennuied_ with pleasure, or saw things in a different light, or felt
the influence of the narrow-minded but accomplished and virtuous woman
whom he made his wife, or was disturbed by the storm which was gathering
in the political horizon, he became more thoughtful and grave, though
not less tyrannical.
Yet it was then that he made the most fatal mistake of his life, the
evil consequences of which pursued him to his death. He revoked the
Edict of Nantes, which Henry IV. had granted, and which had secured
religious toleration. This he did from a perverted conscience, wishing
to secure the unanimity and triumph of the Catholic faith; to this he
was incited by the best woman with whom he was ever brought in intimate
relations; in this he was encouraged by all the religious bigots of his
kingdom. He committed a monstrous crime that good might come,--not
foreseeing the ultimate consequences, and showing anything but an
enlarged statesmanship. This stupid folly alienated his best subjects,
and sowed the seeds of revolution in the next reign, and tended to
undermine the throne. Richelieu never would have consented to such an
insane measure; for this cruel act not only destroyed veneration at
home, but created detestation among all enlightened foreigners.
It is a hackneyed saying, that "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the
Church." But it would seem that the persecution of the Protestants was
an exception to this truth,--and a persecution all the more needless and
revolting since the Protestants were not in rebellion against the
government, as in the tune of Charles IX. This diabolical persecution,
justified however by some of the greatest men in France, had its
intended results. The bigots who incited that crime had studied well the
principles of successful warfare. As early as 1666 the King was urged to
suppress the Protestant religion, and long before the Edict of Nantes
was revoked the Protestants had been subjected to humiliation and
annoyance. If they held places at court, they were required to sell
them; if they were advocates, they were forbidden to plead; if they were
physicians, they were prevented from visiting patients. They were
gradually excluded from appointments in the army and navy; little
remained to them except commerce and manufactures. Protestants could not
hold Catholics as servants; soldiers were unjustly quartered upon them;
their taxes were multiplied, their petitions were unread. But in 1685
dragonnades subjected them to still greater cruelties; who tore up their
linen for camp beds, and emptied their mattresses for litters. The poor,
unoffending Protestants filled the prisons, and dyed the scaffolds with
their blood. They were prohibited under the severest penalties from the
exercise of their religion; their ministers were exiled, their children
were baptized in the Catholic faith, their property was confiscated, and
all attempts to flee the country were punished by the galleys. Two
millions of people were disfranchised; two hundred thousand perished by
the executioners, or in prisons, or in the galleys. All who could fly
escaped to other countries; and those who escaped were among the most
useful citizens, carrying their arts with them to enrich countries at
war with France. Some two hundred thousand contrived to fly,--thus
weakening the kingdom, and filling Europe with their execrations. Never
did a crime have so little justification, and never was a crime followed
with severer retribution. Yet Le Tellier, the chancellor, at the age of
eighty, thanked God that he was permitted the exalted privilege of
affixing the seal of his office to the act before he died. Madame de
Maintenon declared that it would cover Louis with glory. Madame de
Sévigné said that no royal ordinance had ever been more magnificent.
Hardly a protest came from any person of influence in the land, not even
from Fénelon. The great Bossuet, at the funeral of Le Tellier, thus
broke out: "Let us publish this miracle of our day, and pour out our
hearts in praise of the piety of Louis,--this new Constantine, this new
Theodosius, this new Charlemagne, through whose hands heresy is no
more." The Pope, though at this time hostile to Louis, celebrated a
Te Deum.
Among those who fled the kingdom to other lands were nine thousand
sailors and twelve thousand soldiers, headed by Marshal Schomberg and
Admiral Duquesne,--the best general and the best naval officer that
France then had. Other distinguished people transferred their services
to foreign courts. The learned Claude, who fled to Holland, gave to the
world an eloquent picture of the persecution. Jurieu, by his burning
pamphlets, excited the insurrection of Cévennes. Basnage and Rapin, the
historians, Saurin the great preacher, Papin the eminent scientist, and
other eminent men, all exiles, weakened the supports of Louis. France
was impoverished in every way by this "great miracle" of the reign; "so
that," says Martin, "the new temple that Louis had pretended to erect to
unity fell to ruin as it rose from the ground, and left only an open
chasm in place of its foundations.... The nothingness of absolute
government by one alone was revealed under the very reign of the
great King."
The rebound of the revocation overthrew all the barriers within which
Louis had intrenched himself. All the smothered fires of hatred and of
vengeance were kindled anew in Holland and in every Protestant country.
William of Orange headed the confederation of hostile states that
dreaded the ascendency and detested the policy of Louis XIV. All Europe
was resolved on the humiliation of a man it both feared and hated. The
great war which began in 1688, when William of Orange became King of
England on the flight of James II., was not sought by Louis. This war
cannot be laid to his military ambition; he provoked it indeed,
indirectly, by his arrogance and religious persecutions, but on his part
it was as truly defensive as were the wars of Napoleon after the
invasion of Russia. Whatever is truly heroic in the character of Louis
was seen after he was forty-eight. Whatever claims to greatness he may
have had are only to be sustained by the memorable resistance he made
to united Europe in arms against him, when his great ministers and his
best generals had died, Turenne died in 1675, Colbert in 1683, Condé in
1686, Le Tellier in 1687, and Louvois in 1691. Then it was that his
great reverses began, and his glory paled before the sun of the King of
England, These reverses may have been the result of incapacity, and
they may have been the result of the combined forces which outnumbered
or overmatched his own; certain it is that in the terrible contest to
which he was now doomed, he showed great force of character and great
fortitude, which command our respect.
I cannot enter on that long war which began with the League of Augsburg
in 1686, and continued to the peace of Ryswick in 1697,--nine years of
desperate fighting, when successes and defeats were nearly balanced, and
when the resources of all the contending parties were nearly exhausted.
France, at the close of the war, was despoiled of all her conquests and
all the additions to her territory made since the Peace of Nimeguen,
except Strasburg and Alsace. For the first time since the accession of
Richelieu to power, France lost ground.
The interval between this war and that of the Spanish succession--an
interval of three years--was only marked by the ascendency of Madame de
Maintenon, and a renewed persecution, directed not against Protestants,
but against those Catholics who cultivated the highest and freest
religious life, and in which Bossuet appears to a great disadvantage by
the side of his rival, the equally illustrious Fénelon. It was also
marked by the gradual disappearance of the great lights in literature.
La Fontaine died in 1695, Racine in 1699. Boileau was as good as dead;
Mesdames de la Sablière and de la Fayette, Pellisson and Bussy-Rabutin,
La Bruyère and Madame Sévigné, all died about this time. The only great
men at the close of the century in France who made their genius felt
were Bossuet, who encouraged the narrow intolerance which aimed to
suppress the Jansenists and Quietists, and Fénelon, who protected them
although he did not join them,--the "Eagle of Meaux" and the "Swan of
Cambray," as they were called, offering in the realm of art "the eternal
duality of strength and grace," like Michael Angelo and Raphael; the one
inspiring the fear and the other the love of God, yet both seeing in the
Christian religion the highest hopes of the world. The internal history
of this period centres around those pious mystics of whom Madame Guyon
was the representative, and those inquiring intellectual Jansenists who
had defied the Jesuits, but were finally crushed by an intolerant
government. The lamentable dispute between Bossuet and Fénelon also then
occurred, which led to the disgrace of the latter,--as banishment to his
diocese was regarded. But in his exile his moral influence was increased
rather than diminished; while the publication of his "Télémaque," made
without his consent from a copy that had been abstracted from him, won
him France and Europe, though it rendered Louis XIV. forever
irreconcilable. Bossuet did not long survive the banishment of his
rival, and died in 1704, a month before Bourdaloue, and two years before
Bayle. France intellectually, under the despotic intolerance of the
King, was going through an eclipse or hastening to a dissolution, while
the material state of the country showed signs of approaching
bankruptcy. The people were exhausted by war and taxes, and all the
internal improvements which Colbert had stimulated were neglected. "The
fisheries of Normandy were ruined, and the pasture lands of Alsace were
taken from the peasantry. Picardy lost a twelfth part of its population;
many large cities were almost abandoned. In Normandy, out of seven
hundred thousand people, there were but fifty thousand who did not sleep
on straw. The linen manufactures of Brittany were destroyed by the heavy
duties; Touraine lost one-fourth of her population; the silk trade of
Tours was ruined; the population of Troyes fell from sixty thousand to
twenty thousand; Lyons lost twenty thousand souls since the beginning
of the war."
In spite of these calamities the blinded King prepared for another
exhausting war, in order to put his grandson on the throne of Spain.
This last and most ruinous of all his wars might have been averted if he
only could have cast away his ambition and his pride. Humbled and
crippled, he yet could not part with the prize which fell to his family
by the death of Carlos II. of Spain. But Europe was determined that the
Bourbons should not be further aggrandized.
Thus in 1701 war broke out with even intensified animosities, and lasted
twelve years; directed on the one part by Marlborough, Eugene, and
Heinsius, and on the other part by Villars, Vendôme, and Catinat, during
which the finances of France were ruined and the people reduced to
frightful misery. It was then that Louis melted up the medallions of his
former victories, to provide food for his starving soldiers. He offered
immense concessions, which the allies against him rejected. He was
obliged to continue the contest with exhausted resources and a saddened
soul. He offered Marlborough four millions to use his influence to
procure a peace; but this general, venal as he was, preferred ambition
to money. The despair which once overwhelmed Holland now overtook
France. The French marshals encountered a greater general than William
III., whose greatness was in the heroism of his soul and his diplomatic
talents, rather than in his genius on the battlefield. But Marlborough,
who led the allies, never lost a battle, nor besieged a fortress he did
not take. His master-stroke was to transfer his operations from Flanders
to the Danube. At Blenheim was fought one of the decisive battles of the
world, in which the Teutonic nations were marshalled against the French.
The battle of Ramillies completed the deliverance of Flanders; and
Louis, completely humiliated, agreed to give up ten Flemish provinces to
the Dutch, and to surrender to the Emperor of Germany all that France
had gained since the peace of Westphalia in 1648. He also agreed to
acknowledge Anne, as Queen of Great Britain, and to banish the Pretender
from his dominions; England was to retain Gibraltar, and Spain to cede
to the Emperor of Germany her possessions in Italy and the Netherlands.
But France, with all her disasters, was not ruined; the treaty of
Utrecht, 1713, left Louis nearly all his inherited possessions, except
in America.
Louis was now seventy-four,--an old man whose delusions were dispelled,
and to whom successive misfortunes had brought grief and shame. He was
deprived by death of his son and grandson, who gave promise of rare
virtues and abilities; only a feeble infant--his great-grandson--was the
heir of the monarchy. All his vast enterprises had failed. He suffered,
to all appearance, a righteous retribution for his early passion for
military glory. "He had invaded the rights of Holland; and Holland gave
him no rest until, with the aid of the surrounding monarchies, France
was driven to the verge of ruin. He had destroyed the cities of the
Palatinate; and the Rhine provinces became a wall of fire against his
armies. He had conspired against liberty in England; and it was from
England that he experienced the most fatal opposition." His wars, from
which he had expected glory, ended at last in the curtailment of his
original possessions. His palaces, which had excited the admiration of
Europe, became the monuments of extravagance and folly. His
persecutions, by which he hoped to secure religious unity, sowed the
seeds of discontent, anarchy, and revolution. He left his kingdom
politically weaker than it was when he took it; he entailed nothing but
disasters to his heirs. His very grants and pensions were subversive of
intellectual dignity and independence. At the close of the seventeenth
century the great lights had disappeared; he survived his fame, his
generals, his family, and his friends; the infirmities of age oppressed
his body, and the agonies of religious fears disturbed his soul. We see
no greatness but in his magnificence; we strip him of all claims to
genius, and even to enlightened statesmanship, and feel that his
undoubted skill in holding the reins of government must be ascribed to
the weakness and degradation of his subjects, rather than to his own
strength. But the verdicts of the last and present generation of
historians, educated with hatred of irresponsible power, may be again
reversed, and Louis XIV. may loom up in another age, if not as the
_grand monarque_ whom his contemporaries worshipped, yet as a man of
great natural abilities who made fatal mistakes, and who, like Napoleon
after him, alternately elevated and depressed the nation over which he
was called to reign,--not like Napoleon, as a usurper and a fraud, but
as an honest, though proud and ambitious, sovereign, who was supposed to
rule by divine right, of whom the nations of Europe were jealous, who
lived in fear and hatred of his power, and who finally conspired, not to
rob him of his throne and confine him to a rock, but to take from him
the provinces he had seized and the glory in which he shone.
AUTHORITIES.
Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV.; Henri Martin's History of France; Miss
Pardoe's History of the Court of Louis XIV.; Letters of Madame de
Maintenon; Mémoires de Greville; Saint Simon; P. Clément; Le
Gouvernement de Louis XIV.; Mémoires de Choisy; Oeuvres de Louis XIV.;
Limièrs's Histoire de Louis XIV.; Quincy's Histoire Militaire de Louis
XIV.; Lives of Colbert, Turenne, Vauban, Condé, and Louvois; Macaulay's
History of England; Lives of Fénelon and Bossuet; Mémoires de Foucault;
Mémoires du Due de Bourgogne; Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes; Laire's
Histoire de Louis XIV.; Mémoires de Madame de la Fayette; Mémoires de
St. Hilaire; Mémoires du Maréchal de Berwick; Mémoires de Vilette;
Lettres de Madame de Sévigné; Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier;
Mémoires de Catinat; Life, by James.
LOUIS XV.
A. D. 1710-1774.
REMOTE CAUSES OF REVOLUTION.
It is impossible to contemplate the inglorious reign of Louis XV.
otherwise than as a more complete development of the egotism which
marked the life of his immediate predecessor, and a still more fruitful
nursery of those vices and discontents which prepared the way for the
French Revolution. It is in fact in connection with that great event
that this reign should be considered. The fabric of despotism had
already been built by Richelieu, and Louis XIV. had displayed and
gloried in its dazzling magnificence, even while he undermined its
foundations by his ruinous wars and courtly extravagance. Under Louis
XV. we shall see even greater recklessness in profitless expenditures,
and more complete abandonment to the pleasures which were purchased by
the burdens and sorrows of his people; we shall see the monarch and his
court still more subversive of the prosperity and dignity of the nation,
and even indifferent to the signs of that coming storm which, later,
overturned the throne of his grandson, Louis XVI.
And Louis XV. was not only the author of new calamities, but the heir of
seventy years' misrule. All the evils which resulted from the wars and
wasteful extravagance of Louis XIV. became additional perplexities with
which he had to contend. But these evils, instead of removing, he only
aggravated by follies which surpassed all the excesses of the preceding
reign. If I were asked to point out the most efficient though indirect
authors of the French Revolution, I would single out those royal tyrants
themselves who sat upon the throne of Henry IV. during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. I shall proceed to state the principal events
and features which have rendered that reign both noted and ignominious.
In contemplating the long reign of Louis XV,--whom I present as a
necessary link in the political history of the eighteenth century,
rather than as one of the Beacon Lights of civilization,--we first
naturally turn our eyes to the leading external events by which it is
marked in history; and we have to observe, in reference to these, that
they were generally unpropitious to the greatness and glory of France,
Nearly all those which emanated from the government had an unfortunate
or disgraceful issue. No success attended the French arms in any quarter
of the world, with the exception of the victories of Marshal Saxe at
Fontenoy (1745); and the French lost the reputation they had previously
acquired under Henry IV., Condé, Turenne, and Luxembourg. Disgrace
attended the generals who were sent against Frederic II., in the Seven
Years' War, even greater than what had previously resulted from the
contests with the English and the Dutch, and which were brought to a
close by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748. But it was not on the
fields of Germany that the greatest disasters happened; the French were
rifled of their possessions both in America and in India. Louisbourg
yielded to the bravery of New England troops, and finally Canada itself
was lost. All dreams of establishing a new empire on the Mississippi and
the Gulf of St. Lawrence vanished for ever, while Madras and Calcutta
fell into the hands of the English, with all the riches of Mahometan and
Mogul empires. During the regency of the Duke of Orleans,--for Louis XV.
was an infant five years of age when his great-grandfather died in
1715,--we notice the disgraceful speculations which followed the schemes
of Law, and which resulted in the ruin of thousands, and the still
greater derangement of the national finances. The most respectable part
of the reign of Louis XV. were those seventeen years when the
administration was hi the hands of Cardinal Fleury, who succeeded the
Duke of Bourbon, to whom the reins of government had been intrusted
after the death of the Duke of Orleans, two years before the young King
had attained his majority. Though the cardinal was a man of peace, was
irreproachable in morals, patriotic in his intentions, and succeeded in
restoring for a time the credit of the country, still even he only
warded off difficulties,--like Sir Robert Walpole,--instead of bravely
meeting them before it should be too late. His timid rule was a negative
rather than a positive blessing. But with his death ended all
prosperity, and the reign of mistresses and infamous favorites
began,--the great feature of the times, on which I shall presently speak
more fully, as one of the indirect causes of subsequent revolution.
In singling out and generalizing the evils and public misfortunes of the
reign of Louis XV., perhaps the derangement of the finances was the most
important in its political results. But for this misfortune the King was
not wholly responsible: a vast national debt was the legacy of Louis
XIV. This was the fruit of his miserable attempt at self-aggrandizement;
this was the residuum of his glories. Yet as a national debt, according
to some, is no calamity, but rather a blessing,--a chain of loyalty and
love to bind the people together in harmonious action and mutual
interest, and especially the middle classes, upon whom it chiefly falls,
to the support of a glorious throne,--we must not waste time by
dwelling on the existence of this debt,--a peculiarity which has
attended the highest triumphs of civilization, an invention of honored
statesmen and patriotic ministers, and perhaps their benignant boon to
future generations,--but rather we will look to the way it was sought to
be discharged.