One of the most recent of the works on the great cardinal, that of the
Abbé Lacroix, presents us with a Richelieu but little known,
administering his diocese of Luçon, at the age of twenty-two, firmly and
justly, regular in his habits and conciliatory in his character,
ambitious, preparing himself, during eight years of obscure study and
skilful intrigue, for his accession to power, and having already
selected the men whom he would designate to carry out his great designs.
"The bishop prepared the minister," says this biographer.
It was no part of his plans to have the Parlement oppose them, and that
body was forced, during this reign, to swallow some of its bitterest
mortifications. In 1631, having refused to verify a royal decree, the
king returned from Fontainebleau hastily, and ordered the members to
present themselves in a body at the Louvre, the greffier bringing with
him the register of their debates; in the grand gallery of the palace
they were obliged to kneel before the throne, and the monarch, rising,
took the register which was presented to him, tore out the page on which
was the record of their deliberation, and ordered that there should be
inserted in its place the decree of the royal council which had been
refused the _enregistrement_. Ten years later, in the midst of the
Thirty Years' War, the magistrates having declined to approve of certain
new taxes, Louis XIII held a "bed of justice," and again brought them
to terms. The Parlement was formally forbidden to put forth any
remonstrances regarding the edicts which concerned the government and
the administration of the State. Only on those relating to the financial
decrees were they to be permitted to have a voice. These wearisome
episodes were repeated at intervals during the reigns of all the later
kings of France.
Neither was there any contemplation of the _États Généraux_ in the
administration of the king and his minister. A few assemblies of
notables were held, one in 1625 on the subject of the Valteline and the
rupture with the Pope, and another in the latter part of the following
year, to which were admitted only magistrates, ecclesiastics,
councillors of State, and the _prévôt_ of the merchants of Paris.
Against Mazarin, minister and cardinal, but not a priest, the Parlement
was more successful in its long contest. Entrenched in their office,
rendered hereditary by the establishment of the _paulette_ (so named
from the contractor Paulet, who suggested it to Sully in 1604), the
magistrates had acquired a spirit of independence and pride which led
them to style themselves "the born protectors of the people," and to
assert their right to assume the _rôle_ of the _États Généraux_, and to
play the part of the Parliament of England, which at that hour was
accomplishing a revolution, and to which, indeed, Mazarin compared them.
In January, 1646, they proclaimed the cardinal a disturber of the public
peace, an enemy of the king and the State, and directed him to leave the
court immediately, and the kingdom within a week. In February, 1651, he
was again banished, he, his family, his adherents, and his foreign
servants, and this decree, promulgated to the sound of the trumpet in
all the quarters of Paris, was greeted by the populace with noisy
exclamations of joy. In March and in June these orders were repeated,
the wily favorite of Anne d'Autriche seeking every opportunity of
regaining his power. It was these triumphs of the Fronde that inspired
the despotic Louis XIV with that dislike for the city of Paris which he
cherished all his life,--these, and the too-frequent public monuments
which spoke of other crowned heads than his own!
The nation had already entered that period of incredible distress and
degradation which was to lead to the Revolution, and on the surface of
which the so-called splendor of the court glittered with a species of
decaying phosphorescence which blinds the eyes of grave historians to
this day. In 1646 there were in the jails of the kingdom twenty-three
thousand eight hundred persons, confined for non-payment of taxes, five
thousand of whom died there. "_Tout le royaume_," said Omer Talon, two
years later, "is sick with exhaustion. The peasant no longer possesses
anything but his soul, because he has not yet been able to put that up
for sale." No prince, in the judgment of Saint-Simon, possessed the art
of reigning in a higher degree than did Louis XIV. "Louis Quatorze is
certainly not a great man," says Duruy, "but he is very certainly a
great king, and the greatest that Europe has seen." And yet the latter
quotes from the _Mémoires_ which the king demanded from his intendants
on the condition of their provinces for the instruction of his grandson,
the Duc de Bourgogne: "The wars, the mortality, the lodging and the
continual passage of armed forces, the military regulations, the heavy
taxes, the withdrawal of the Huguenots, have ruined this country.... The
bridges and the roads are in a deplorable state, and commerce is
abolished. The frontier provinces are the most completely crushed by the
requisitions, the pillaging of the soldiers, who, receiving neither pay
nor provisions, pay themselves with their own hands. In the district of
Rouen, out of seven hundred thousand inhabitants, six hundred and fifty
thousand have for bed a bundle of straw. The peasant in certain
provinces is returning to a state of savagery,--living, for the most
part, on herbs and roots, like the beasts; and, wild as they are,
fleeing when any one approaches." "There is no nation as savage as these
people," says the intendant of Bourges of those under his
administration; "there may be found sometimes troops of them seated in a
circle in the middle of a field and always far from the roads; if they
are approached, this band immediately disappears."
At this great king's death, he left France, says M. Duruy himself, "in a
prodigious state of exhaustion. The State was ruined, and seemed to have
no other resource than bankruptcy. Before the War of Succession, Vauban
had already written: 'Nearly the tenth part of the people are reduced to
beggary; of the nine other portions, five cannot give any alms to the
mendicants, from whom they differ but slightly; three are very much
distressed; the tenth part do not include more than one hundred thousand
families, of which not ten thousand are comfortably situated.' This
poverty became especially terrible in 1715, after that war in which it
was necessary to borrow money at four hundred per cent., to create new
imposts, to consume in advance the revenues of two years, and to raise
the public debt to the sum of two milliards four hundred millions, which
would make in our day nearly eight milliards!"
[Illustration: AFTER THE CAPTURE OF THE BASTILLE, JULY 14, 1789. From a
painting by François Flameng.