Such was the preparation for a supreme crisis in the life of the
Kingdom.
The enormous debt left by the last reign taxed the ingenuity of the
regent to its utmost. Then it was that John Law, the Scotchman,
presented his great financial scheme of making unlimited wealth out of
paper, which was just what the regent needed. The collapse came
quickly, in 1720, bringing ruin to thousands, and leaving the country
in more desperate need than before.
When declared of age, in 1723, a marriage was arranged for Louis with
Marie Leczinska, daughter of the exiled Polish King Stanislas. Europe
at this time was agitated over the succession to the throne of Austria,
as the empire was now called. The Salic Law excluded female heirs, and
the emperor, Charles VI., had died in 1718, leaving only a daughter,
Maria Theresa, one year old. But a pragmatic sanction, once more
invoked, seems to have covered the necessities of the situation by
providing that the succession in the absence of a male heir might
descend to a female, and so there was a young and beautiful empress on
the throne at Vienna, who was going to make a great deal of history for
Europe; and who would open her brilliant reign by a valiant fight for
possession of Silesia, which the young king of Prussia intended to
seize as an addition to his own new kingdom. This young King Frederick
was also making history very fast, and after a stormy career was going
to convert his Kingdom into a Power, and to be the one sovereign of his
age whom the world would call _Great_! But at this particular period
of his youth, Frederick and his nobility, still blinded by the
splendors of the reign of Louis XIV., were mere servile imitators of
the court at Versailles, and the culture and the civilization for which
they hungered were French--only French; and for Frederick, an intimate
companionship with Voltaire was his supreme desire. But a closer view
of the witty, cynical Frenchman wrought a wonderful change. The finely
pointed shafts of ridicule when aimed at himself were not so
entertaining. And his guest, no longer _persona grata_, was escorted
over the frontier to France.
A nearer view of Versailles at this time might also have disenchanted
these worshippers at the shrine of French civilization. A king
absolutely indifferent to conditions in his kingdom, immersed in
debasing pleasures, while Madame de Pompadour actually ruled the
state--this is not the worst they would have seen! Destitute of shame,
of pity, of patriotism, and of human affection, what did it mean to the
king that his people were growing desperate under the enormous taxation
made necessary by incessant wars and by the extravagant expenditures of
the court? Louis simply turned his back upon the whole problem of
administration, and left his ministers, Fleury, and later de Choiseul,
to deal with the misery and the discontent and to make their way
through the financial morass as best they might.
The power of Madame de Pompadour may be imagined when we learn that
Maria Theresa, empress and proud daughter of the Caesars, when she
needed the friendship of Louis XIV., in her struggle with Frederick of
Prussia, in order to win him to her side, wrote a flattering letter to
this woman.
This friendship, so artfully sought by the empress, led to another very
different and very momentous alliance. A marriage was arranged between
her little daughter, Marie Antoinette, and the boy Louis, who was to be
the future king of France. The dauphin, the dauphiness, and their
eldest child were all dead. So Louis, the second son of the dauphin,
was the heir to his grandfather, Louis XV.
How should the empress of Austria, born, nurtured, and fed in the very
centre of despotism, utterly misunderstanding as she must the past, the
present, and the future, how should she suspect that the throne of
France would be a scaffold for her child? Hapsburg and Bourbon were to
her realities as enduring as the Alps.
In the meantime England and France had come into collision over their
boundaries in America, and the war opened by Braddock and his young
aide, Washington, had been a still further drain upon impoverished
France. With the loss of Montreal and Quebec, those two strongholds in
the north, the French were virtually defeated. And when the end came,
France had lost every inch of territory on the North American
Continent, and had ceded her vast possessions, extending from Canada to
the Gulf of Mexico, to England and Spain.
So while England was steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated
with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a
people crying for bread--taxing a starving people for money to procure
unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had
succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour. Did she
desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created
and made possible. And one may see to-day at Versailles the sleigh in
which this mad caprice was realized.
The various instructors of Louis XV. had not taught him anything about
mind and soul processes. They were quite unaware that there had
commenced a movement in the _brain_ of France, which was going to
liberate terrific forces--forces which would sweep before them the work
of the Richelieus and the Mazarins and the Colberts as if it were chaff.
The human mind was probing, questioning doubting, everything it had
once believed. And as one after another cherished beliefs disappeared,
it grew still more daring. The whole religious, social, and political
system was wrong. The only remedy was to overthrow it all, and crown
reason as the sovereign of a new era. Such was the ferment at work
beneath the surface as Louis was devising incredible extravagances for
du Barry. And there was rage in men's hearts as they wrote insulting
lines upon his equestrian statue in the Place Louis Quinze.
The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The
bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and
standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy
king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the nobility of
France.
It is said that the three great events of modern times are the
Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French
Revolution. Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista
of causes behind them! A French Revolution is not the work of a day,
nor of a single man. There had been a steady movement toward this
event for a thousand years--in fact, ever since the dogma that _labor
is degrading_ was placed at the foundation of the social structure of
France.
The direct causes which were precipitating the crisis in the closing
eighteenth century were financial and economic, while the contributing
causes were a remarkable intellectual movement and the War of
Independence in America. It is possible that a king with a heart and a
brain, and the moral sense which belongs to ordinary humanity, might
have averted this tragic outburst, and at least have delayed the event
by awakening hope. The Revolution was born of hopeless misery. With
the reign of Louis XV. hope died, and his successor fell heir to the
inevitable.
A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of
responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary
governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national
poverty, indulging in wildest extravagance--such was the man in whom
was vested the authority rendered so absolute by Richelieu; such the
man who opened up a pathway for the storm.
As for the nobility, their degradation may be imagined when it is said
there was as bitter rivalry between titled and illustrious fathers to
secure for their daughters the coveted position held by Madame de
Pompadour, as for the highest offices of State.
Could the upper ranks fall lower than this? Had not the kingdom
reached its lowest depths, where its foreign policy was determined by
the amount of consideration shown to Madame de Pompadour? But this
woman, whose friendship was artfully sought by the great Empress Maria
Theresa, was superseded, and the fresher charms of Madame du Barry
enslaved the king. The deposed favorite could not survive her fall,
and died of a broken heart. It is said that as Louis, looking from an
upper window of his palace, saw the coffin borne out in a drenching
rain, he smiled, and said, "Ah, the marquise has a bad day for her
journey." It may be imagined that the man who could be so pitiless to
the woman he had loved would feel little pity for the people whom he
had not loved, but whom he knew only as a remote, obscure something,
which held up the weight of his glory.
But this "obscure something" was undergoing strange transformation.
The greater light at the surface had sent some glimmering rays down
into the mass below, which began to awaken and to think. Misery,
hopeless and abject, was changing into rage and thirst for vengeance.
A new class had come into existence which was not noble, but with
highly trained intelligence it looked with contempt and loathing upon
the frivolous, half-educated nobles, Scorn was added to the ferment of
human passions beneath the surface, and when Voltaire had spoken, and
the restraints of religion were loosened, no living hand, not that of a
Richelieu nor a Louis XIV., could have averted the coming doom. But no
one seems to have suspected what was approaching.
A wonderful literature had come into existence, not stately and classic
as in the age preceding, but instinct with a new sort of life. The
profoundest themes which can occupy the mind of man were handled with
marvellous lightness of touch and clothed with prismatic brilliancy of
speech; but all was negation. None tried to build; all to demolish.
The black-winged angel of Destruction was hovering over the land.
Then Rousseau tossed his dreamy abstractions into the quivering air,
and the formula, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," was caught up by
the titled aristocracy as a charming idyllic toy, while princes, dukes,
and marquises amused themselves with a dream of Arcadian simplicity, to
be attained in some indefinite way, in some remote and equally
indefinite future. It was all a masquerade. No reality, no sincerity,
no convictions, good or evil. The only thing that was real was that an
over-taxed, impoverished people was exasperated and--hungry.
Did the king need new supplies for his unimaginable luxuries, they were
taxed. Was it necessary to have new accessions to French "glory," in
order to allay popular clamor or discontent, they must supply the men
to fight the glorious battles, and the means with which to pay them.
Every burden fell at last upon this lowest stratum of the State; the
nobility and clergy, while owning two-thirds of the land, being nearly
exempt from taxation.
And yet the king and nobility of France, in love with Rousseau's
theories, were airily discussing the "rights of man"--wolves and foxes
coming together to talk over the sacredness of the rights of property,
or the occupants of murderers' row growing eloquent over the sanctity
of human life! How incomprehensible that among those quick-witted
Frenchmen there seems not one to have realized that the logical
sequence of the formula, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," must be,
"Down with the Aristocrats!"
And so the surface which Richelieu had converted into adamant grew
thinner and thinner each day, until king and court danced upon a mere
gilded crust, unconscious of the abysmal fires beneath. Some of those
powdered heads fell into the executioner's basket twenty-five years
later. Did they recall this time? Did Madame du Barry think of it?
Did she exult at her triumph over de Pompadour, when she was dragged
shrieking and struggling to the guillotine?
Five years before the close of this miserable reign an event occurred
seemingly of small importance to Europe. A child was born in an
obscure Italian household. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte. His
birthplace, the island of Corsica, had only two months before been
incorporated with France. The fates even then were watching over this
child of destiny, who might, by a slight turn of events then imminent,
have been born a subject of Spain, or Germany, or of George III. of
England.
The impoverished Republic of Genoa was in desperate need of money. The
island could be had by the highest bidder, and in 1768 it was purchased
by France, just in time to make the great Corsican a French citizen.
Indeed, all the performers in the approaching drama were assembled.
Three young princes, grandsons of Louis XV., who were to be
successively upon the throne of France, were at Versailles: Louis the
Dauphin, now twenty, and his Austrian bride, Marie Antoinette, and his
two brothers, afterward successively Louis XVIII. and Charles X. Still
another princeling, Louis Philippe, was at the Palais Royal, son of the
Duke of Orleans, late regent, also destined to wear the French crown;
and last of all that infant at Ajaccio, in whom the play was to reach
its splendid climax.
In 1744 Louis XV. was stricken with small-pox, and exchanged the
brilliant scenes at Versailles for the royal vault in the Church of St.
Denis, where he took his place among his ancestors.