The wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV. settled himself upon the
throne which Richelieu had rendered so exalted and immovable.
Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in
him to make four kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted
more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He
was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage,
dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a
magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties,
his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments.
No king more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more
glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he
desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He
crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every
manifestation of genius, but he signed the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his
subjects.
The marriage of the Dauphin with the Infanta of Spain had occurred
before he attained his majority. It was planned by Mazarin, and was a
part of the policy left as a fatal bequest to Louis XIV. by that
minister.
The Salic Law was not recognized in Spain. Hence, the crown might
descend to an heiress, and by her be transmitted to her husband. Such
was the hope in the marriage of Louis with the Infanta; the hope of
some happy turn of fortune, some break in the line of succession
whereby the Spanish kingdom might be absorbed into a Bourbon empire, as
it had once been in the empire of the Hapsburgs. This was the _ignis
fatuus_ which was to control the policy of this stormy reign, and which
was to envelop it at last in the clouds of defeat and disaster.
The secret of Louis' greatness was his instinctive recognition of
greatness in others. His new minister, Colbert, to whom he owed so
much, was a man of the people, and a protestant. He it was who
discovered the peculations of Fouquet, the magnificent Minister of
Finance, who was building a palace at Vaux greater than the king
himself could afford, and who was suddenly swept from this princely
residence into the Bastille, where he spent the remaining years of his
life with plenty of leisure in which to think upon the forty thousand
pounds he had expended upon that fête he gave in honor of his royal
master; and to recall the splendors of the supper and the size of the
banqueting-hall, which Mansart, Le Brun, and the best that Italy could
furnish at that time had made beautiful.
It is said that the unfortunate visit of the king to his minister's
abode resulted in the creation of Versailles as a suburban residence.
From the Palais de St. Germain, on the heights in the suburbs of Paris,
Louis could see the Cathedral of St. Denis, where were the royal vaults
and the ancestors he must some day join. So depressing was this view
to him, and so charmed was he with the plan of Fouquet's palace and
gardens, that artists were immediately set to work to make one more
royal at Versailles, where his father, Louis XIII., used to have his
hunting-box; the place where that much-governed king used to go to hide
away from his scheming mother and his argus-eyed minister. The genius
of Colbert was severely taxed to supply the means for Louis'
magnificent tastes and for his foreign wars, at the same time. Even
Colbert could not create money out of nothing. The burden must rest
somewhere, and just as surely must ultimately be borne by the people.
The choice of Louvois as Minister of War was no less happy than that of
Colbert in Finance. And with Vauban to build his defences, Turenne and
Luxembourg and the great Condé to lead his armies, it is not strange
that there were victories.
The four great wars of Louis' reign were not for theatrical effect,
like that of the fanciful Charles VIII. in Italy. They were all in
pursuance of a serious and definite purpose. Just or unjust, wise or
unwise, they were planned in order to reach some boundary, or to secure
some strategic position essential to France. These wars were:
First--The war upon the Spanish Netherlands, ending with the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle, 1668.
Second--The invasion of the Dutch Republic, ending with the peace of
Nymwegen, 1678.
Third--War with the coalition of European States, closing with the
Treaty of Ryswick, 1697.
Fourth--War of the Spanish Succession, closed by the Treaty of Utrecht,
1713.
The first of these wars, undertaken because Louis believed and intended
that Flanders should belong to France, to which it was geographically
allied, was ostensibly undertaken in order to recover the unpaid dowry
which had been promised by Spain in exchange for Louis' renunciation of
any claim upon the throne of Spain which might result from his marriage
with the Infanta Maria Theresa. His conquest of the Spanish
possessions in Flanders might have been supposed to set at rest forever
the question of a claim upon the Spanish throne. But we shall hear of
that again. The success of this war made Louis, at twenty-nine years
of age, the most heroic figure in Europe. Every one bowed before him,
and everything seemed to be gravitating toward him as toward a central
sun. Not alone nobility, but even genius put on his livery and became
sycophantish, Bossuet and even Molière, hungering for his smile, and in
despair if he frowned.
This was the time of the supremacy of the beautiful Louise la Vallière.
Her reign was brief, and, the king's infatuation being passed, she was
to spend the rest of her dreary life in a Carmelite convent, hearing
only the far-off echoes from the brilliant world in which she was once
the central and envied figure.
The Dutch Republic had come under Louis' displeasure and was marked for
his next foreign campaign. This (to his mind) insignificant nation of
fishermen and small traders had presumed to stand in his path. So the
most magnificent army since the Crusades in 1672 invaded the peaceful
little state of Holland. As one after another of the cities helplessly
fell, someone asked why Louis came himself--why he did not send his
valet? Louis insolently demanded as the price of peace the surrender
of all their fortified cities, the payment of twenty million francs,
and the renunciation of the Protestant faith.
The answer of William of Nassau was an unexpected one. The history of
modern times has nothing more heroic than this little mercantile state
defying the greatest potentate in Europe. William of Nassau knew
perfectly well that every battle meant defeat. The thing to do was to
make battles impossible by inundating their fertile fields. When he
saw the destruction of life and property in one scale and political
slavery in the other, he did not hesitate. The dikes were quietly
opened. Turenne and Luxembourg and Vauban were baffled as completely
as Napoleon in Russia. And when the magnificent army had evacuated the
flooded country, the dikes were quietly closed again and time and
windmills restored their fields to fertility.
In the meantime William had been drawing to himself powerful allies.
Half of Europe was in league with him in the battles he now fought upon
the Rhine. But the French were victorious. And after the peace of
Nymwegen, 1678, Louis had reached the zenith of his power.
Human pretension and arrogance could go no farther. He began to feel
that France was his own personal possession and that Europe might be.
It was the combination of a great king with a small man which produced
this composite being. He had built Versailles, a palace unmatched
since the Caesars. He not only commanded the presence, but the
obsequious presence of all that was illustrious and great at a time
when France was in the full flower of her splendid genius. Corneille,
Racine, Molière, if permitted to be, must pay him an almost idolatrous
homage. The beautiful Vallière was sent away, and de Montespan's reign
had commenced.
But when Colbert died in 1685, Louis fell under an influence which was
to be transforming. He had been burning the illuminating oil of youth
at very high pressure. Perhaps it was exhausted. He grew serious. De
Montespan was sent away--the orgies at Versailles ceased, the court
became decorous, almost austere, and with the awakening of conscience,
of course, the king became more sensitive to the heresies of the
Huguenots!
He was drifting toward the fatal mistake of his life. He revoked the
Edict of Nantes. Two millions of people by the stroke of his pen, at
the bidding of de Maintenon, were disfranchised; prohibited under
severe penalties from any observance of their religion; their property
confiscated, an attempt to flee from the country punished by the
galleys.
The prisons were full of Protestants and the scaffolds dyed with their
blood. Two hundred thousand perished by imprisonment, by the galleys,
and the executioner; while two hundred thousand more managed to escape
to America and to the lands of the enemies of France, which they would
enrich with their skill.
Not a word of protest came from a person in France. Not even from
Fénelon or Bossuet! Madame de Maintenon told him it was the "glorious
climax of a glorious reign." Madame de Sévigné said it was
"magnificent!" And Bossuet, greatest of French divines, exclaimed, "It
is the miracle of the century!"
France at one stroke was impoverished. The skill, the trained hand,
the element which was at the foundation of her excellence, and of that
which was to constitute her future supremacy in the world, had gone to
enrich her enemies. And whether in Germany, in England, or America, no
foreign people have had such glad welcome as was given to the Huguenots.
Then came the rebound in a form not expected. William of Orange was
now King of England. James had been driven off his throne, and his
daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, wore the double
crown. All the hostile European states, under William's leadership,
sprang together for the common defence of Europe from this detested foe.
The smothered hatred of Holland and every protestant state burst into
flame, and the great War of the Coalition commenced. Beginning with
the League of Augsburg, in 1688, it continued until the peace of
Ryswick, 1697, with the defeat of France all along the line.
Humiliated and broken, there remained for the king an opportunity to
retrieve the past by attaching the Spanish peninsula to France. There
was a vacant throne at Madrid which his grandson Philip, through the
neglected Queen Maria Theresa, might claim as his inheritance. Such
were the conditions which might still change defeat into triumph. The
fact that the right to the succession had been waived by the king was
easily disposed of. Philip, Louis' grandson, presented his claim in
competition with that of the son of Leopold I., Emperor of Germany.
When the pope, with whom the decision lay, decided in favor of Philip,
grandson of the great Louis, all Europe sprang to the aid of the
Austrian archduke in the war of the Spanish succession.
It was a little side play in the opening of this great drama, which
brought the kingdom of Prussia into existence. Frederick, elector of
Brandenburg, when called upon to arm by the emperor, refused to do so
except upon one condition: that he might wear the title of king instead
of elector; which condition was granted, with the stipulation that the
name of Prussia, a detached piece of territory the ancestors of
Frederick had cut out of the side of Russia, be substituted for
Brandenburg. So out of this war of personal ambition there had sprung
a new kingdom, the kingdom of Prussia, of which France was to hear much
in the future.
England was not eager to join the new coalition in defence of the
Hapsburg, whom in common with the rest of Europe she had for years been
trying to pull down. But when Louis insolently espoused the cause of
the exiled King James, and promised by force to place the pretender on
the throne, then she needed no urging, and sent Marlborough and the
flower of her army to join Prince Eugene in Germany.
It was Marlborough at Blenheim (1702) who drove the iron of defeat into
the soul of Louis XIV. When the war was ended he had made every
concession demanded; had given up a vast extent of territory; banished
the English pretender from his kingdom; and acknowledged Anne as queen
of Great Britain.
By the provisions of the treaty (the Peace of Utrecht) Gibraltar passed
to England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in
Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been
spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed
away as a spider's web.
An imbittered, broken old man, shorn of his omnipotence, who had
outlived his fame and his worshippers, was dying in his great palace at
Versailles; his only solace the austere woman who had inspired the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who upon the death of his
unhappy queen he had privately made his wife. Marie Therese had borne
his mad infatuation for Louise la Valliére; la Valliére had carried her
broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de
Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her
household Madame de Maintenon, the pious widow of the poet Scarron, in
order that the austere virtues of that lady might be engrafted upon the
children of the royal household. Grave, ambitious, talented, the
governess of de Montespan's children was not too much absorbed in her
duties to find ways of establishing an influence over the king.
This man, who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the
government, who was ministers, magistrates, parliaments, all in one,
this central sun of whom Corneille, Molière, Racine were but single
rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing
adventuress; her will his law. The hey-day of youth having passed, he
was beginning to be anxious about his soul. She artfully pricked his
conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.
She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was
to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith.
At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and brutally stamped out
Protestantism.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stake in the great
game played in Europe was the headship, the pre-eminent position held
by the house of Hapsburg. The entire reign of Louis XIV. had had this
for its ultimate object. He seemed many times near it; but was never
to reach the goal. The absorption of Spain was a last and desperate
attempt. It had failed. France had not won the leadership of European
civilization.
In the coming reign, new forces, new conditions, were to widen the
field of national ambitions. And it was the nation across the channel
which would grasp these forces and distance her rivals in an advance
along the untried paths of commerce and a world-wide expansion.
With a strange apathy France had seen herself mistress of a large part
of the American Continent, won for her by adventurous Frenchmen and
Catholic missionaries. She did practically nothing to develop this
magnificent colonial empire. Failing to comprehend changing
conditions, the same old problem, with a towering house of Hapsburg,
obscured her view, and remained the great unchanging fact about which
her policy revolved.
Louis XV. was five years old when, in 1715, he became heir to a throne
absolutely rigid. The best work of Richelieu and Mazarin and Louis
XIV. had been expended upon it. Absolutism could go no farther. The
king was all; next below him a fawning, obsequious nobility, and then
that vague entity known as "the people," a remote invisible force,
sustaining the weight of the splendid pyramid, the apex of which was
this boy of five.
The young Louis was being prepared to sit upon this giddy elevation.
The Duke of Orleans, his accomplished cousin, a competent instructor in
vice, was chosen as regent, and the royal education began. The best
and rarest of the world's culture was at his service. Fénelon, the
polished ecclesiastic, fed him the classics in tempting form from his
own Télémaque, written for the purpose. Although this work was later
suppressed by the boy's royal father under the suspicion of being a
covert satire upon his own reign, in which Madame de Montespan was
represented by Calypso; and other famous or infamous members of his
court also appeared in thin disguise.
The handsome boy was breathing the atmosphere of genius created by an
age which compares well with those of Pericles and Augustus and the
Medici, and nourished at the same time by the exhalations from a new
crop of vices growing out of the decaying remains of those left by the
old court.