THE ASCENDENCY OF FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIV
[Sidenote: France at the accession of Louis XIV, 1643-1715.]
191. Under the despotic rule of Louis XIV (1643-1715) France enjoyed a
commanding influence in European affairs. After the wars of religion
were over, the royal authority had been reëstablished by the wise
conduct of Henry IV. Richelieu had solidified the monarchy by depriving
the Huguenots of the exceptional privileges granted to them for their
protection by Henry IV; he had also destroyed the fortified castles of
the nobles, whose power had greatly increased during the turmoil of the
Huguenot wars. His successor, Cardinal Mazarin, who conducted the
government during Louis XIV's boyhood, was able to put down a last
rising of the discontented nobility.[348]
[Sidenote: What Richelieu and Mazarin had done for the French Monarchy.]
When Mazarin died in 1661, he left to the young monarch a kingdom such
as no previous French king had enjoyed. The nobles, who for centuries
had disputed the power with Hugh Capet and his successors, were no
longer feudal lords but only courtiers. The Huguenots, whose claim to a
place in the state beside the Catholics had led to the terrible civil
wars of the sixteenth century, were reduced in numbers and no longer
held fortified towns from which they could defy the king's agents.
Richelieu and Mazarin had successfully taken a hand in the Thirty Years'
War, and France had come out of it with enlarged territory and increased
importance in European affairs.
[Sidenote: The government of Louis XIV.]
Louis XIV carried the work of these great ministers still farther. He
gave that form to the French monarchy which it retained until the
French Revolution. He made himself the very mirror of kingship. His
marvelous court at Versailles became the model and the despair of other
less opulent and powerful princes, who accepted his theory of the
absolute power of kings but could not afford to imitate his luxury. By
his incessant wars of aggression he kept Europe in turmoil for over half
a century. The distinguished generals who led his newly organized
troops, and the wily diplomats who arranged his alliances and negotiated
his treaties, made France feared and respected by even the most powerful
of the other European states.
[Sidenote: The theory of the 'divine right' of kings in France.]
192. Louis XIV had the same idea of kingship that James I had tried in
vain to induce the English people to accept. God had given kings to men,
and it was His will that monarchs should be regarded as His lieutenants
and that all those subject to them should obey them absolutely, without
asking any questions or making any criticisms; for in yielding to their
prince they were really yielding to God Himself. If the king were good
and wise, his subjects should thank the Lord; if he proved foolish,
cruel, or perverse, they must accept their evil ruler as a punishment
which God had sent them for their sins. But in no case might they limit
his power or rise against him.[349]
[Sidenote: Different attitude of the English and French nations toward
absolute monarchy.]
Louis had two great advantages over James. In the first place the
English nation has always shown itself far more reluctant than France to
place absolute power in the hands of its rulers. By its Parliament, its
courts, and its various declarations of the nation's rights, it had
built up traditions which made it impossible for the Stuarts to
establish their claim to be absolute rulers. In France, on the other
hand, there was no Great Charter or Bill of Rights; the Estates General
did not hold the purse strings, and the king was permitted to raise
money without asking their permission or previously redressing the
grievances which they chose to point out. They were therefore only
summoned at irregular intervals. When Louis XIV took charge of the
government, forty-seven years had passed without a meeting of the
Estates General, and a century and a quarter was still to elapse before
another call to the representatives of the nation was issued in 1789.
Moreover, the French people placed far more reliance upon a powerful
king than the English, perhaps because they were not protected by the
sea from their neighbors, as England was. On every side France had
enemies ready to take advantage of any weakness or hesitation which
might arise from dissension between a parliament and the king. So the
French felt it best, on the whole, to leave all in the king's hands,
even if they suffered at times from his tyranny.
[Illustration: Louis XIV]
[Sidenote: Personal characteristics of Louis XIV.]
Louis had another great advantage over James. He was a handsome man, of
elegant and courtly mien and the most exquisite perfection of manner;
even when playing billiards he retained an air of world mastery. The
first of the Stuarts, on the contrary, was a very awkward man, whose
slouching gait, intolerable manners, and pedantic conversation were
utterly at variance with his lofty pretensions. Louis added to his
graceful exterior a sound judgment and quick apprehension. He said
neither too much nor too little. He was, for a king, a hard worker and
spent several hours a day attending to the business of government. It
requires, in fact, a great deal of energy and application to be a real
despot. In order really to understand and to solve the problems which
constantly face the ruler of a great state, a monarch must, like
Frederick the Great or Napoleon, rise early and toil late. Louis was
greatly aided by the able ministers who sat in his council, but he
always retained for himself the place of first minister. He would never
have consented to be dominated by an adviser, as his father had been by
Richelieu. "The profession of the king," he declared, "is great, noble,
and delightful if one but feels equal to performing the duties which it
involves,"--and he never harbored a doubt that he himself was born for
the business.
[Sidenote: The king's palace at Versailles.]
193. Louis XIV was careful that his surroundings should suit the
grandeur of his office. His court was magnificent beyond anything that
had been dreamed of in the West. He had an enormous palace constructed
at Versailles, just outside of Paris, with interminable halls and
apartments and a vast garden stretching away behind it. About this a
town was laid out, where those who were privileged to be near his
majesty or supply the wants of the royal court lived. This palace and
its outlying buildings, including two or three less gorgeous residences
for the king when he occasionally tired of the ceremony of Versailles,
probably cost the nation about a hundred million dollars, in spite of
the fact that thousands of peasants and soldiers were forced to turn to
and work without remuneration. The furnishings and decorations were as
rich and costly as the palace was splendid. For over a century
Versailles continued to be the home of the French kings and the seat of
their government.
[Illustration: The King's Bedroom in the Palace of Versailles]
[Sidenote: Life at Louis XIV's court.]
This splendor and luxury helped to attract the nobility, who no longer
lived on their estates in well-fortified castles, planning how they
might escape the royal control. They now dwelt in the effulgence of the
king's countenance. They saw him to bed at night and in stately
procession they greeted him in the morning. It was deemed a high honor
to hand him his shirt as he was being dressed, or, at dinner, to provide
him with a fresh napkin. Only by living close to the king could the
courtiers hope to gain favors, pensions, and lucrative offices for
themselves and their friends, and perhaps occasionally to exercise some
little influence upon the policy of the government. For they were now
entirely dependent upon the good will of their monarch.[350]
[Sidenote: The reforms of Colbert.]
The reforms which Louis carried out in the earlier part of his reign
were largely the work of the great financier, Colbert, to whom France
still looks back with gratitude. He early discovered that Louis'
officials were stealing and wasting vast sums. The offenders were
arrested and forced to disgorge, and a new system of bookkeeping was
introduced similar to that employed by business men. He then turned his
attention to increasing the manufactures of France by establishing new
industries and seeing that the older ones kept to a high standard, which
would make French goods sell readily in foreign markets. He argued
justly that if foreigners could be induced to buy French goods, these
sales would bring gold and silver into the country and so enrich it. He
made rigid rules as to the width and quality of cloths which the
manufacturers might produce and the dyes which they might use. He even
reorganized the old mediæval guilds; for through them the government
could keep its eye on all the manufacturing that was done, and this
would have been far more difficult if every one had been free to carry
on any trade which he might choose. There were serious drawbacks to this
kind of government regulation, but France accepted it, nevertheless, for
many years.[351]
[Sidenote: Art and literature in the reign of Louis XIV.]
It was, however, as a patron of art and literature that Louis XIV gained
much of his celebrity. Molière, who was at once a playwright and an
actor, delighted the court with comedies in which he delicately
satirized the foibles of his time. Corneille, who had gained renown by
the great tragedy of _The Cid_ in Richelieu's time, found a worthy
successor in Racine, the most distinguished perhaps of French tragic
poets. The charming letters of Madame de Sévigné are models of prose
style and serve at the same time to give us a glimpse into the more
refined life of the court. In the famous memoirs of Saint-Simon, the
weaknesses of the king, as well as the numberless intrigues of the
courtiers, are freely exposed with inimitable skill and wit.
[Sidenote: The government fosters the development of the French
language and literature.]
Men of letters were generously aided by the king with pensions. Colbert
encouraged the French Academy, which had been created by Richelieu. This
body gave special attention to making the French tongue more eloquent
and expressive by determining what words should be used. It is now the
greatest honor that a Frenchman can obtain to be made one of the forty
members of this association. A magazine which still exists, the _Journal
des Savants_, was founded for the promotion of science. Colbert had an
astronomical observatory built at Paris; and the Royal Library, which
only possessed about sixteen thousand volumes, began to grow into that
great collection of two and a half million volumes--by far the largest
in existence--which to-day attracts scholars to Paris from all parts of
the world. In short, Louis and his ministers believed one of the chief
objects of any government to be the promotion of art, literature, and
science, and the example they set has been followed by almost every
modern state.[352]
[Sidenote: Louis XIV's warlike enterprises.]
194. Unfortunately for France, the king's ambitions were by no means
altogether peaceful. Indeed, he regarded his wars as his chief glory. He
employed a carefully reorganized army and the skill of his generals in a
series of inexcusable attacks on his neighbors, in which he finally
squandered all that Colbert's economies had accumulated and led France
to the edge of financial ruin.
[Sidenote: He aims to restore the 'natural boundaries' of France.]
Louis XIV's predecessors had had, on the whole, little time to think of
conquest. They had first to consolidate their realms and gain the
mastery of their feudal dependents, who shared the power with them; then
the claims of the English Edwards and Henrys had to be met, and the
French provinces freed from their clutches; lastly, the great religious
dispute was only settled after many years of disintegrating civil war.
But Louis was now at liberty to look about him and consider how he
might best realize the dream of his ancestors and perhaps reëstablish
the ancient boundaries which Cæsar reported that the Gauls had occupied.
The "natural limits" of France appeared to be the Rhine on the north and
east, the Jura Mountains and the Alps on the southeast, and to the south
the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees. Richelieu had believed that it was
the chief end of his ministry to restore to France the boundaries
determined for it by nature. Mazarin had labored hard to win Savoy and
Nice, and to reach the Rhine on the north. Before his death France at
least gained Alsace and reached the Pyrenees, "which," as the treaty
with Spain says (1659), "formerly divided the Gauls from Spain."
[Sidenote: Louis lays claim to the Spanish Netherlands.]
Louis first turned his attention to the conquest of the Spanish
Netherlands, to which he laid claim through his wife, the elder sister
of the Spanish king, Charles II (1665-1700). In 1667 he surprised Europe
by publishing a little treatise in which he set forth his claims not
only to the Spanish Netherlands, but even to the whole Spanish monarchy.
By confounding the kingdom of France with the old empire of the Franks
he could maintain that the people of the Netherlands were his subjects.
[Sidenote: The invasion of the Netherlands, 1667.]
Louis placed himself at the head of the army which he had reformed and
reorganized, and announced that he was to undertake a "journey," as if
his invasion was only an expedition into another part of his undisputed
realms. He easily took a number of towns on the border, and completely
conquered Franche-Comté. This was an outlying province of Spain,
isolated from her other lands, and a most tempting morsel for the hungry
king of France. These conquests alarmed Europe, and especially Holland,
which could not afford to have the barrier between it and France
removed, for Louis would be an uncomfortable neighbor. A Triple
Alliance, composed of Holland, England, and Sweden, was accordingly
organized to induce France to make peace with Spain. Louis contented
himself for the moment with the dozen border towns that he had taken
and which Spain ceded to him on condition that he would return
Franche-Comté (Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1668).
[Sidenote: Louis breaks up the Triple Alliance and allies himself with
Charles II of England.]
The success with which Holland had held her own against the navy of
England[353] and brought the proud king of France to a halt, produced an
elation on the part of that tiny country which was very aggravating to
Louis. He was thoroughly vexed that he should have been blocked by so
trifling an obstacle as Dutch intervention. He consequently conceived a
strong dislike for the United Provinces, which was increased by the
protection that they afforded to political writers who annoyed him with
their attacks. He broke up the Triple Alliance by inducing Charles II of
England to conclude a treaty which arranged that England should help
France in a new war against the Dutch.
[Sidenote: Louis' invasion of Holland, 1672.]
Louis then startled Europe again by seizing the duchy of Lorraine, which
brought him to the border of Holland. At the head of a hundred thousand
men he crossed the Rhine (1672) and easily conquered southern Holland.
For the moment the Dutch cause appeared to be lost. But William of
Orange showed the spirit of his great ancestor, William the Silent; the
sluices in the dikes were opened and the country flooded, so the French
army was checked before it could take Amsterdam and advance into the
north. Holland found an ally in the elector of Brandenburg, and the war
became general. The emperor sent an army against Louis, and England
deserted him and made peace with Holland.
[Sidenote: Peace of Nimwegen, 1678.]
[Sidenote: Louis' encroachments on German territory.]
When a general peace was concluded at Nimwegen, at the end of six years,
the chief provisions were that Holland should be left intact, and that
France should retain Franche-Comté, which had been conquered by Louis in
person. This bit of the Burgundian heritage thus became at last a part
of France, after France and Spain had quarreled over it for a century
and a half. For the ten years following there was no open war, but Louis
busied himself in the interval by instituting courts in the debatable
region between France and Germany, to decide what neighboring districts
belonged to the various territories and towns which had been ceded to
France by the treaties of Westphalia and later ones. The vestiges of the
old feudal entanglements gave ample scope for claims, which were
reënforced by Louis' troops. Louis, moreover, seized the important free
city of Strasburg, and made many other less conspicuous but equally
unwarranted additions to his territory. The emperor was unable to do
more than protest against these outrageous encroachments, for he was
fully occupied with the Turks, who had just laid siege to Vienna.[354]
[Sidenote: Situation of the Huguenots at the beginning of Louis XIV's
reign.]
195. Louis XIV exhibited as woeful a want of statesmanship in the
treatment of his Protestant subjects as in the prosecution of disastrous
wars. The Huguenots, deprived of their former military and political
power, had turned to manufacture, trade, and banking; "as rich as a
Huguenot" had become a proverb in France. There were perhaps a million
of them among fifteen million Frenchmen, and they undoubtedly formed by
far the most thrifty and enterprising part of the nation. The Catholic
clergy, however, did not cease to urge the complete suppression of
heresy.
[Sidenote: Louis' policy of suppression.]
Louis XIV had scarcely taken the reins of government into his own hands
before the perpetual nagging and injustice to which the Protestants had
been subjected at all times took a more serious form. Upon one pretense
or another their churches were demolished. Children were authorized to
renounce Protestantism when they reached the age of seven. If they were
induced by the offer of a toy or a sweetmeat to say, for example, the
words "Ave Maria" (Hail, Mary), they might be taken from their parents
to be brought up in a Catholic school. In this way Protestant families
were pitilessly broken up. Rough and licentious dragoons were quartered
upon the Huguenots with the hope that the insulting behavior of the
soldiers might drive the heretics to accept the religion of the king.
[Sidenote: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and its results.]
At last Louis was led by his officials to believe that practically all
the Huguenots had been converted by these drastic measures. In 1685,
therefore, he revoked the Edict of Nantes, and the Protestants thereby
became outlaws and their ministers subject to the death penalty. Even
liberal-minded Catholics, like the kindly writer of fables, La Fontaine,
and the charming letter writer, Madame de Sévigné, hailed the
reëstablishment of "religious unity" with delight. They believed that
only an insignificant and seditious remnant still clung to the beliefs
of Calvin. But there could have been no more serious mistake. Thousands
of the Huguenots succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the royal
officials and fled, some to England, some to Prussia, some to America,
carrying with them their skill and industry to strengthen France's
rivals. This was the last great and terrible example of that fierce
religious intolerance which had produced the Albigensian Crusade, the
Spanish Inquisition, and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.[355]
[Sidenote: Louis' operations in the Rhenish Palatinate.]
Louis now set his heart upon conquering the Rhenish Palatinate, to which
he easily discovered that he had a claim. The rumor of his intention and
the indignation occasioned in Protestant countries by the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes, resulted in an alliance against the French king
headed by William of Orange. Louis speedily justified the suspicions of
Europe by a frightful devastation of the Palatinate, burning whole towns
and destroying many castles, including the exceptionally beautiful one
of the elector at Heidelberg. Ten years later, however, Louis agreed to
a peace which put things back as they were before the struggle began. He
was preparing for the final and most ambitious undertaking of his life,
which precipitated the longest and bloodiest war of all his warlike
reign.
[Illustration: TREATY OF UTRECHT]
[Sidenote: The question of the Spanish succession.]
196. The king of Spain, Charles II, was childless and brotherless, and
Europe had long been discussing what would become of his vast realms
when his sickly existence should come to an end. Louis had married one
of his sisters, and the emperor, Leopold I, another, and these two
ambitious rulers had been considering for some time how they might
divide the Spanish possessions between the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs.
But when Charles II died, in 1700, it was discovered that he had left a
will in which he made Louis' younger grandson, Philip, the heir to his
twenty-two crowns, but on the condition that France and Spain should
never be united.
[Sidenote: Louis' grandson, Philip, becomes king of Spain.]
It was a weighty question whether Louis should permit his grandson to
accept this hazardous honor. Should Philip become king of Spain, Louis
and his family would control all of southwestern Europe from Holland to
Sicily, as well as a great part of North and South America. This would
mean the establishment of an empire more powerful than that of Charles
V. It was clear that the disinherited emperor and the ever watchful
William of Orange, now king of England, would never permit this
unprecedented extension of French influence. They had already shown
themselves ready to make great sacrifices in order to check far less
serious aggressions on the part of the French king. Nevertheless, family
pride and personal ambition led Louis criminally to risk the welfare of
his country. He accepted the will and informed the Spanish ambassador at
the French court that he might salute Philip V as his new king. The
leading French newspaper of the time boldly proclaimed that the Pyrenees
were no more.
[Sidenote: The War of the Spanish Succession.]
King William soon succeeded in forming a new Grand Alliance (1701) in
which Louis' old enemies, England, Holland, and the emperor, were the
most important members. William himself died just as hostilities were
beginning, but the long War of the Spanish Succession was carried on
vigorously by the great English general, the duke of Marlborough, and
the Austrian commander, Eugene of Savoy. The conflict was even more
general than the Thirty Years' War; even in America there was fighting
between French and English colonists, which passes in American histories
under the name of Queen Anne's War. All the more important battles went
against the French, and after ten years of war, which was rapidly
ruining the country by the destruction of its people and its wealth,
Louis was willing to consider some compromise, and after long discussion
a peace was arranged in 1713.
[Sidenote: The Treaty of Utrecht, 1713.]
The Treaty of Utrecht changed the map of Europe as no previous treaty
had done, not even that of Westphalia. Each of the chief combatants got
its share of the Spanish booty over which they had been fighting. The
Bourbon Philip V was permitted to retain Spain and its colonies on
condition that the Spanish and French crowns should never rest on the
same head. To Austria fell the Spanish Netherlands, hereafter called the
Austrian Netherlands, which continued to form a barrier between Holland
and France. Holland received certain fortresses to make its position
still more secure. The Spanish possessions in Italy, i.e., Naples and
Milan, were also given to Austria, and in this way Austria got the hold
on Italy which it retained until 1866. England acquired from France,
Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay region, and so began the
expulsion of the French from North America. Besides these American
provinces she received the island of Minorca with its fortress, and the
rock and fortress of Gibraltar, which still gives her command of the
narrow entrance to the Mediterranean.
[Sidenote: The development of international law.]
The period of Louis XIV is remarkable for the development of
international law. The incessant wars, the great alliances embracing
several powers, and the prolonged peace negotiations, such as those
which preceded the treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht, made increasingly
clear the need of well-defined rules governing independent states in
their relations with one another both in peace and in war. It was of
the utmost importance to determine, for instance, the rights of
ambassadors and of the vessels of neutral powers not engaged in the war,
and what should be considered fair conduct in warfare and in the
treatment of prisoners.
[Sidenote: Grotius' _War and Peace_.]
The first great systematic treatise on international law was published
by Grotius in 1625, when the horrors of the Thirty Years' War were
impressing men's minds with the necessity of finding some other means
than war of settling disputes between nations. Grotius' _War and Peace_
was followed, in Louis XIV's time, by Pufendorf's _On the Law of Nature
and Nations_ (1672). While the rules laid down by these and later
writers on international law have by no means put an end to war, they
have prevented many conflicts by settling certain questions and by
increasing the ways in which nations may come to an understanding with
one another through their ambassadors without recourse to arms.
Louis XIV outlived his son and grandson, and left a sadly demoralized
kingdom to his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV (1715-1774). The
national treasury was depleted, the people were reduced in numbers and
were in a miserable state, and the army, once the finest in Europe, was
in no condition to gain further victories. Later we must study the
conditions in France which led to the great Revolution. Now, however, we
turn to the rise of two new European powers, Prussia and Russia, which
began in the eighteenth century to play a prominent rôle in European
affairs.