connected with the throne instigated or encouraged in this reign,--from
the King to the most infamous of his mistresses. Whoever pretended to
give his aid to the monarchy helped to subvert it by the very measures
which he proposed. "The Duke of Orleans, when he patronized Law, gave a
shock to the whole economical system of the old regime. When this Scotch
financier said to the powerful aristocracy around him, 'Silver is only
to you the means of circulation, beyond this it belongs to the country,'
he announced the ruin of the glebe and the fall of feudal prejudices.
The bankruptcies which followed the bursting of his bubble weakened the
potent charm of the word 'honor,' on which was based the stability of
the throne." The courtiers, when they blazed in jewels, in embroidered
silks and satins, in sumptuous equipages, and in all the costly
ornaments of their times, gave employment and importance to a host of
shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, who grew rich, as those who bought of
them grew poor. The wealth of bankers, brokers, mercers, jewellers,
tailors, and coachmakers dates to these times,--those prosperous and
fortunate members of the middle-class who "inhabited the Place Vendôme
and the Place des Victoires, as the nobles dwelt in the Rue de Grenelle
and the Rue St. Dominique. The nobles ruined themselves by the
extravagance into which they were led by the court, and their châteaux
and parks fell into the hands of financiers, lawyers, and merchants,
who, taking the titles of their new estates, became a parvenu
aristocracy which excited the jealousy of the old and divided its
ranks." The inferior, but still prosperous class, the shopkeepers, also
equally advanced in intelligence and power. In those dark and dingy
backrooms, in which for generations their ancestors had been immured,
they now discussed their rights, and retailed the scandals which they
heard. They read the sarcasms of the poets and the theories of the new
philosophers. Even the tranquillity which succeeded inglorious war was
favorable to the rise of the middle classes; and the Revolution was as
much the product of the discontent engendered by social improvements as
of the frenzy produced by hunger and despair. The court favored the
improvements of Paris, especially those designed for public amusements.
The gardens of the Tuileries were embellished, the Champs Elysées
planted with trees, and pictures were exhibited in the grand salon of
the Louvre. The Theatre Français, the Royal Opera, the Opéra Comique,
and various halls for balls and festivals were then erected,--those
fruitful nurseries of future clubs, those poisoned wells of popular
education. Nor were charities forgotten with the building of the
Pantheon and the extension of the Boulevards. The Hôpital des
Enfants-Trouvés allowed mothers, unseen and unheard, to bequeath their
children to the State.
There were two events connected with the reign of Madame de Pompadour--I
do not say of the King, or his queen, or his ministers, for
philosophical history compels us to confine our remarks chiefly to great
controlling agencies, whether they be sovereigns or people; to such a
man as Peter the Great, when one speaks of a semi-barbarous nation, to
ideas, when we describe popular revolutions--which had a great influence
in unsettling the kingdom, although brought about in no inconsiderable
measure by this unscrupulous mistress of the King. These were the
expulsion of the Jesuits, and the triumph of the philosophers.
In regard to the first, I would say, that Madame de Pompadour did not
like the Jesuits; not because they were the enemies of liberal
principles, not because they were the most consistent advocates and
friends of despotism in all its forms, intellectual, religious, and
political, or the writers of casuistic books, or the perverters of
educational instruction, or boastful missionaries in Japan and China, or
cunning intriguers in the courts of princes, or artful confessors of the
great, or uncompromising despots in the schools,--but because they
interfered with her ascendency. It is true she despised their
sophistries, ridiculed their pretensions, and detested their government;
but her hostility was excited, not because they aspired like her, like
the philosophers, like the popes, like the press in our times, to a
participation in the government of the world, but because they disputed
her claims as one of the powers of the age. The Jesuits were scandalized
that such a woman should usurp the reins of state, especially when they
perceived that she mocked and defied them; and they therefore refused to
pay her court, and even conspired to effect her overthrow. But they had
not sufficiently considered the potency of her wrath, or the desperate
means of revenge to which she could resort; nor had they considered
those other influences which had been gradually undermining their
influence,--even the sarcasms of the Jansenists, the ridicule of the
philosophers, and the invectives of the parliaments. Only one or two
favoring circumstances were required to kindle the smothered fires of
hatred into a blazing flame, and these were furnished by the attempted
assassination of the King, in his garden at Versailles, by Damiens the
fanatic, and the failure of La Valette the Jesuit banker and merchant at
Martinique. Then, when the nation was astounded by their political
conspiracies and their commercial gambling, to say nothing of the
perversion of their truth, did their arch-enemy, the King's mistress,
use her power over the King's minister, her own creature, the Due de
Choiseul, to decree the confiscation of their goods and their banishment
from the realm; nay, to induce the Pope himself, in conjunction with the
entreaties of all the Bourbon courts of Europe, to take away their
charter and suppress their order. The fall of the Jesuits has been
already alluded to in another volume, and I will not here enlarge on
that singular event brought about by the malice of a woman whom they had
ventured to despise. It is easy to account for her hatred and the
general indignation of Europe. It is not difficult to understand that
the decline of that great body in those virtues which originally
elevated them, should be followed by animosities which would undermine
their power. We can see why their moral influence should pass away, even
when they were in possession of dignities and honors and wealth. But it
is a most singular fact that the Pope himself, with whose interests they
were allied,--their natural protector, the head of the hierarchy which
they so constantly defended,--should have been made the main agent in
their temporary humiliation. Yet Clement XIV.--the weak and timid
Ganganelli--was forced to this suicidal act. Old Hildebrand would have
fought like a lion and died like a dog, rather than have stooped to such
autocrats as the Bourbon princes. A judicial and mysterious blindness,
however, was sent upon Clement; his strength for the moment was
paralyzed, and he signed the edict which dispersed the best soldiers
that sustained the interests of absolutism in Europe.
The effect of the suppression of the order in France was both good and
ill. The event unquestionably led to the propagation of an impious
philosophy and all sorts of crude opinions and ill-digested theories,
both in government and religion, in the schools, the salons, and the
pulpits of France. The press, relieved of its most watchful and jealous
spies, teemed with pamphlets and books of the most licentious character.
The good and evil powers were both unchained and suffered to go free
about the land, and to do what work they could. There are many who feel
that this combat is necessary for the full development of human strength
and virtue; who maintain that the good is much more powerful than the
evil in any age of moral experiences; and who believe that angels of
light will, on our mundane arena, prevail over angels of darkness,--that
one truth is stronger than one thousand lies, and that two can put ten
thousand to flight. There are others, again, who think that there is a
vitality in error as well as a vitality in truth, as proved seemingly by
the prevalence of Pagan falsehoods, Mohammedan empires, and Papal
superstitions. But to whatever party clearness of judgment belongs, one
thing is historically certain,--that never was poor human nature more
puzzled by false guides, more tempted by appetites and passions, more
enslaved by the lust of the eye and the pride of life, than during the
latter years of the reign of Louis XV. Never was there a period or a
country in Christendom more frivolous, pleasure-seeking, sceptical,
irreligious, vain, conceited, and superficial than during the reign of
Madame de Pompadour. No; never was there a time of so little moral
elevation among the great mass, or when so few great enterprises were
projected for the improvement of society.
And it was from society thus disordered, inexperienced, and godless that
all restraints were removed from the ancient and venerated guardians of
youth, of religion, and of literature. Judge what must have been the
effects; judge between these opposing theories, whether it were better
to have the institutions of society guarded by selfish, ambitious, and
narrow-minded priests, or to have the flood-gates of vastly
preponderating evil influences opened upon society already reeling in
the intoxication of the senses, or madly raving from the dethronement of
reason, the abnegation of religious duties, and the extinction of the
light of faith. I would not say that either one or the other of these
horrible alternatives is necessary or probable in these times, that _we_
are compelled to choose between them, or that we ever shall be
compelled; but simply, that, in the middle of the eighteenth century,
and in France,--that semi-Catholic and semi-infidel nation,--there
existed on the one hand a most execrable spiritual despotism exercised
by the Jesuits, and on the other a boundless ferment of destructive and
revolutionary principles, operating on a people generally inclined, and
in some cases abandoned, to every folly and vice. This despotism, while
it was selfish and unwarrantable, still had in view the guardianship of
morals and literature,--to restrain men from crimes by working on their
fears; but society, while it sought to free itself from hypocritical and
oppressive leaders, also sought to remove all social and moral
restraints, and to plunge into reckless and dangerous experiments. It
was a war between these two social powers,--between unlawful despotism
and unsanctified license. We are to judge, not which was the better, but
which was the worse.
One thing, however, is certain,--that Madame de Pompadour, in whom was
centred so much power, threw her influence against the Jesuits, and in
favor of those who were not seeking to build up literature and morals on
a sure and healthy foundation, but rather secretly and artfully to
undermine the whole intellectual and social fabric, under the plea of
liberty and human rights. Everybody admits that the writings of the
philosophers gave a great impulse to the revolutionary storm which
afterwards broke out. Ideas are ever most majestic, whether they are
good or evil. Men pass away, but principles are indestructible and of
perpetual power. As great and fearful agencies in the period we are
contemplating, they are worthy of our notice.
Although the great lights which adorned the literature of the preceding
reign no longer shone,--such geniuses as Molière, Boileau, Racine,
Fénelon, Bossuet, Pascal, and others,--still the eighteenth century was
much more intellectual and inquiring than is generally supposed. Under
Louis XIV. intellectual independence had been nearly extinguished. His
reign was intellectually and spiritually a gloomy calm between two
wonderful periods of agitation. All acquiesced in his cold, heartless,
rigid rule, being content to worship him as a deity, or absorbed in the
excitements of his wars, or in the sorrows and burdens which those wars
brought in their train. But under Louis XV. the people began to meditate
on the causes of their miseries, and to indulge in those speculations
which stimulated their discontents or appealed to their intellectual
pride. Not from La Rochelle, not from the cells of Port Royal, not from
remonstrating parliaments did the voices of rebellion come: the genius
of Revolution is not so poor as to be obliged to make use of the same
class of instruments, or repeat the same experiments, in changing the
great aspects of human society. Nor will she allow, if possible, those
who guard the fortresses which she wishes to batter down to be
suspicious of her combatants. Her warriors are ever disguised and
masked, or else concealed within some form of a protecting deity, such
as the fabled horse which the doomed Trojans received within their
walls. The court of France did not recognize in those plausible
philosophers, whose writings had such a charm for cultivated intellect,
the miners and sappers of the monarchy. Only one class of royalists
understood them, and these were the Jesuits whom the court had exiled.
Not even Frederic the Great, when he patronized Voltaire, was aware what
an insidious foe was domiciled in his palace, with all his sycophancy
of rank, with all his courtly flattering. In like manner, when the grand
seigneurs and noble dames of that aristocratic age wept over the sorrows
of the "New Héloïse," or craved that imaginary state of untutored
innocence which Rousseau so morbidly described, or admired those
brilliant generalizations of laws which Montesquieu had penned, or
laughed at the envenomed ironies of Voltaire, or quoted the atheistic
doctrines of D'Alembert and Diderot, or enthusiastically discussed the
economical theories of Dr. Quesnay and old Marquis Mirabeau,--that stern
father of him who, both in his intellectual power and moral deformity,
was alike the exponent and the product of the French Revolution,--when
the blinded court extolled and diffused the writings of these new
apostles of human rights, they little dreamed that they would be still
more admired among the people, and bring forth the Brissots, the
Condoreets, the Marats, the Dantons, the Robespierres, of the next
generation. I would not say that their influence was wholly bad, for in
their attacks on the religion and institutions of their country they
subverted monstrous usurpations. But whatever was their ultimate
influence, they were doubtless among the most efficient agents in
overturning the throne; they were, in reality, the secret enemies of
those by whom they were patronized and honored. "They cannot, indeed,
claim the merit of being the first in France who opened the eyes of the
nation; for Fénelon had taught even to Louis XIV., in his immortal
'Télémaque,' the duties of a king; Racine, in his 'Germanicus,' had
shown the accursed nature of irresponsible despotism; Molière, in his
'Tartuffe,' had exposed the vices of priestly hypocrisy; Pascal, in his
'Provincial Letters,' had revealed the wretched sophistries of the
Jesuits; Bayle even, in his 'Critical Dictionary,' had furnished
materials for future sceptics."
But the hostilities of all these men were united in Voltaire, who in
nearly two hundred volumes, and with a fecundity of genius perfectly
amazing and unparalleled, in poetry, in history, in criticism,--yet
without striking originality or profound speculations,--astonished and
delighted his generation. This great and popular writer clothed his
attacks on ecclesiastical power, and upon Christianity itself, in the
most artistic and attractive language,--clear, simple, logical, without
pedantry or ostentation,--and enlivened it with brilliant sarcasms,
appealing to popular prejudices, and never soaring beyond popular
appreciation. Never did a man have such popularity; never did a famous
writer leave so little to posterity which posterity can value.
While Voltaire was indirectly undermining the religious convictions of
mankind, the Encyclopedists more directly attacked the sources of
religious belief, and openly denied what Voltaire had doubted. But
neither Diderot nor D'Alembert made such shameless assaults as the
apostles of a still more atheistic school,--such men as Helvetius and
the Baron d'Holbach, who advocated undisguised selfishness, and
attributed all virtuous impulses to animal sensation. More dangerous
still than these ribald blasphemers were those sentimental and morbid
expounders of humanity of whom Rousseau was the type,--a man of more
genius perhaps than any I have named, but the most egotistical of that
whole generation of dreamers and sensualists who prepared the way for
revolution. He was the father of those agitating ideas which spread over
Europe and reached America. He gave utterance in his eloquent writings
to those mighty watch-words, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," that
equally animated Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Jefferson. But the writings
of the philosophers will again be alluded to in the next lecture, as
among the efficient causes of the French Revolution.
When we contemplate those financial embarrassments which arose from half
a century of almost universal war, and those awful burdens which bent to
the dust, in suffering and shame, the whole people of a great country;
when we consider the absurd and wicked distinctions which separated man
from man, and the settled hostility of the clergy to all means of
intellectual and social improvement; when we remember the unparalleled
vices of a licentious court, the ignominious negligence of the
government to the happiness and wants of those whom it was its duty to
protect, and the shameless insults which an infamous woman was allowed
to heap upon the nation; and then when we bear in mind all the elements
of disgust, of discontent, of innovation, and of reckless and impious
defiance,--can we wonder that a revolution was inevitable, if society is
destined to be progressive, and man ever to be allowed to break
his fetters?
On that Revolution I cannot enter. I leave the subject as the winds
began to howl and the rains began to fall and the floods began to rise,
and all together to beat upon that house which was built upon the sand.
AUTHORITIES.
Lacretelle's Histoire de France; Anquetil; Henri Martin's History of
France; Dulaure's Histoire de Paris; Lord Brougham's Lives of Rousseau
and Voltaire; Memoires de Madame de Pompadour; Mémoires de Madame Du
Barry; Revue des Deux Mondes, 1847; Château de Lucienne; L'Ami des
Hommes, par M. le Marquis de Mirabeau; Maximes Générales du
Gouvernement, par Le Docteur Quesnay; Histoire Philosophique du Règne de
Louis XV., par le Comte de Tocqueville; Mémoires Secrets; Pièces
Inédites sous le Règne de Louis XV.; Anecdotes de la Cour de France
pendant la Faveur de Madame Pompadour; Louis XV. et la Société du XVIII.
Siècle, par M. Capefigue; Alison's introductory chapter to the History
of Europe; Louis XV. et son Siècle, par Voltaire; Saint Simon; Mémoires
de Duclos; Mémoires du Duc de Richelieu.
PETER THE GREAT.
A. D. 1672-1725.
HIS SERVICES TO RUSSIA.
If I were called upon to name the man who, since Charlemagne, has
rendered the greatest services to his country, I should select Peter the
Great. I do not say that he is one of the most interesting characters
that has shone in the noble constellations of illustrious benefactors
whom Europe has produced. Far otherwise: his career is not so
interesting to us as that of Hildebrand, or Elizabeth, or Cromwell, or
Richelieu, or Gustavus Adolphus, or William III., or Louis XIV., or
Frederic II., or others I might mention. I have simply to show an
enlightened barbarian toiling for civilization, a sort of Hercules
cleansing Augean stables and killing Nemean lions; a man whose labors
were prodigious; a very extraordinary man, stained by crimes and
cruelties, yet laboring, with a sort of inspired enthusiasm, to raise
his country from an abyss of ignorance and brutality. It would be
difficult to find a more hard-hearted despot, and yet a more patriotic
sovereign. To me he looms up, even more than Richelieu, as an instrument
of Divine Providence. His character appears in a double light,--as
benefactor and as tyrant, in order to carry out ends which he deemed
useful to his country, and which, we are constrained to admit, did
wonderfully contribute to its elevation and political importance.
Peter the Great entered upon his inheritance as absolute sovereign of
Russia, when it was an inland and even isolated state, hemmed in and
girt around by hostile powers, without access to seas; a vast country
indeed, but without a regular standing army on which he could rely, or
even a navy, however small. This country was semi-barbarous, more
Asiatic than European, occupied by mongrel tribes, living amid snow and
morasses and forests, without education, or knowledge of European arts.
He left this country, after a turbulent reign, with seaports on the
Baltic and the Black seas, with a large and powerfully disciplined army,
partially redeemed from barbarism, no longer isolated or unimportant,
but a political power which the nations had cause to fear, and which,
from the policy he bequeathed, has been increasing in resources from his
time to ours. To-day Russia stands out as a first-class power, with the
largest army in the world; a menace to Germany, a rival of Great Britain
in the extension of conquests to the East, threatening to seize Turkey
and control the Black Sea, and even to take possession of Oriental
empires which extend to the Pacific Ocean.
Nobody doubts or questions that the rise of Russia to its present proud
and threatening position is chiefly owing to the genius and policy of
Peter the Great. Peter was a descendant of a patriarch of the Greek
Church in Russia, whose name was Romanoff, and who was his
great-grandfather. His grandfather married a near relative of the Czar,
and succeeded him by election. His father, Alexis, was an able man, and
made war on the Turks.
Peter was a child when his father died, and his half-brother Theodore
became the Czar. But Theodore reigned only a short time, and Peter
succeeded him at the age of ten (1682), the government remaining in the
hands of his half-sister, Sophia, a woman of great ability and
intelligence, but intriguing and unscrupulous. She was aided by Prince
Galitzin, the ablest statesman of Russia, who held the great office of
chancellor. This prince, it would seem, with the aid of the general of
the Streltzi (the ancient imperial guards) and the cabals of Sophia,
conspired against the life of Peter, then seventeen years of age,
inasmuch as he began to manifest extraordinary abilities and a will of
his own. But the young Hercules strangled the serpent,--sent Galitzin to
Siberia, confined his sister Sophia in a convent for the rest of her
days, and assumed the reins of government himself, although a mere
youth, in conjunction with his brother John. That which characterized
him was a remarkable precocity, greater than that of anybody of whom I
have read. At eighteen he was a man, with a fine physical development
and great beauty of form, and entered upon absolute and undisputed power
as Czar of Muscovy.
In the years of the regency, when the government was in the hands of his
half-sister, he did not give promise of those remarkable abilities and
that life of self-control which afterwards marked his career.
In his earlier youth he had been surrounded with seductive pleasures, as
Louis XIV. had been, by the queen-regent, with a view to _control_ him,
not oppose him; and he yielded to these pleasures, and is said to have
been a very dissipated young man, with his education neglected. But he
no sooner got rid of his sister and her adviser, Galitzin, than he
seemed to comprehend at once for what he was raised up. The vast
responsibilities of his position pressed upon his mind. To civilize his
country, to make it politically powerful, to raise it in the scale of
nations, to labor for its good rather than for his own private pleasure,
seems to have animated his existence. And this aim he pursued from first
to last, like a giant of destiny, without any regard to losses, or
humiliations, or defeats, or obstacles.
Chance, or destiny, or Providence, threw in his path the very person
whom he needed as a teacher and a Mentor,--a young gentleman from
Geneva, whom historians love to call an adventurer, but who occupied the
post of private secretary to the Danish minister. Aristocratic pedants
call everybody an adventurer who makes his fortune by his genius and his
accomplishments. They called Thomas Becket an adventurer in the time of
Henry II., and Thomas Cromwell in the reign of Henry VIII. The young
secretary to the Danish minister seems to have been a man of remarkable
ability, insight, and powers of fascination, based on his intelligence
and on knowledge acquired in the first instance in a mercantile
house,--as was the success of Thomas Cromwell and Alexander Hamilton.