"Behold the cost of his glory," says M. Duruy elsewhere, "a public debt
of more than two milliards four hundred millions, with a sum in the
treasury of eight hundred thousand livres; an excessive scarcity of
specie; commerce paralyzed; the nobility overwhelmed with debts, the
least burdensome of which had been contracted at an interest of
fifteen and twenty on the hundred; the magistrates, the _rentiers_, long
deprived of the revenues owed them by the State; the peasants, in
certain provinces, wanting for everything, even for straw on which to
lie; those of our frontiers passing over to foreign countries; very many
districts of our territory uncultivated and deserted." For the credit
side of the account of this greatest of kings, the historian can cite
the acquisition of two provinces, Flanders and Franche-Comté, certain
cities, Strasbourg, Landau, Dunkerque, "so many victories, Europe
defied, France so long preponderant, finally, the incomparable
brilliancy of that court of Versailles and those marvels of the letters
and the arts which have given to the seventeenth century the name of the
_siècle_ de Louis Quatorze!" Of the bigotry, ignorance, intolerance, and
incredible and always uneasy vanity of the little soul of this great
monarch the chroniclers of even his sycophants are full.
His political creed may be learned from this passage in his _Mémoires_:
"The kings are absolute lords and have naturally the full and entire
disposition of all property which is possessed as well by the churchmen
as by the laymen, to use at all times, as judicious stewards, that is to
say, according to the general need of their State. Everything which may
be found within the limits of their States, of whatsoever nature it may
be, appertains to them by the same title, and the coin which is in their
strong-box and that which remains in the hands of their treasurers, and
that which they permit to remain in the commerce of their peoples."
Consequently, the end of this reign of seventy-two years was "very
different from its beginning. He received his kingdom powerful and
preponderating abroad, tranquil and contented at home; he left it
weakened, humiliated, discontented, impoverished, and already filled
with the seeds of the Revolution." (Roederer: _Mémoires_.)
For the administration of the government of the State, there were three
great Councils, under the immediate direction of the king, who was his
own prime minister. The _Conseil d'en haut_, to which he called the
secretaries of State, and sometimes the princes of the blood,
corresponded to the modern council of ministers in that it had the
general direction of the great political affairs, with the additional
function of judging appeals of the _Conseil d'État_, or _Conseil du
Roi_. The latter, subordinate to the ministers but superior to the
supreme courts, was the great administrative body of the kingdom and was
composed of eighteen members. The _Grand Conseil_, which had been
invested by Charles VIII with the judicial attributes up to that time
appertaining to the Conseil du Roi, in order that the latter might
remain a purely administrative body, sat in judgment on ecclesiastical
matters, appeals to the higher courts, conflicts with parliamentary
authority, etc.
For the administration of the city of Paris, and with the design of
replacing the various seigneurial, ecclesiastic, and municipal
authorities by one royal one, a decree was issued as early as 1674, in
which all these justices, "and even that of our bailiwick of the palace,
shall be reunited to the _siège présidial de la prévosté et vicomté de
Paris_, held at the Châtelet, ... so that in the future they shall never
be separated from it, nor re-established, for any cause, or under any
pretext whatsoever." A second seat of the _prévôté_ and vicomté of Paris
was established at the same time at the Châtelet with the same powers
and prerogatives as the other,--the number of affairs being much too
great for the cognizance of one jurisdiction. A supplemental decree,
some months later, established the seat of the second in the abbey of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This abolition of the divers administrations of
justice by the seigneurs was greatly appreciated by the populace, and
greatly resented by the deposed lords, secular and ecclesiastical. In
1687, a magistrate, Nicolas de la Reynie, was appointed as
superintendent of the police of Paris, and he was succeeded, ten years
later, by the Marquis d'Argenson,--these being the first two
_lieutenants de police_. This police, in addition to maintaining the
public order, exercised a surveillance over all printed and written
matter--even searching the post and opening suspected letters in the
_cabinet noir_, and making itself a servile instrument in the abuse of
the _lettres de cachet_ through which, as the president of the Cour des
Aides, Malesherbes said to Louis XV in 1770: "no citizen has any
assurance that his liberty may not at any moment be sacrificed to some
personal vengeance."
An edict of 1705, recalling that, in 1690, _la noblesse au premier
degré_ had been bestowed upon the president, councillors, and other
officers "of our _Cour de Parlement de Paris_;" that in 1691 the same
privileges had been granted to the presidents, councillors, and other
officers "of our _Cour des Aydes de Paris_;" in 1704, on the officers of
the _Chambre des Comptes_, granted also this nobility to the presidents,
treasurers-general of France, avocat, procureur, and _greffier en chef_
of the bureau of finance. In the following year, the privileges of this
nobility were granted to the _échevins_, the procureur, the greffier,
and receiver of the city of Paris, and the _prévôt_ of the merchants was
given the title of chevalier. Following the ancient traditions of the
French monarchy, the king preferred to see himself served by the men of
the middle classes, rather than by the powerful lords, whose _rôle_ was
reduced to that of obsequious courtiers in his antechamber, but, "in
working with the bourgeois, the grandson of Henri IV wished to remain
always _le roi des gentilshommes_."
In the person of Louis XV the most ignoble vices of a man were united to
those of a king, but he had sufficient intelligence to foresee the
calamity that was coming. "The thing will last at least as long as I
do," he said, "my successor may get out of it the best way he can." And
to Madame Pompadour is credited the famous saying: "After us, the
deluge." When the minister Choiseul was disgraced, in 1770, half the
nobles deserted the court to follow him to his estate of Chanteloup,
near Amboise,--so much had the splendor of Versailles, that great glory
of the reign of the _Roi-Soleil_, departed!
There were thirteen parlements and four provincial councils in France
having sovereign jurisdiction in civil and criminal cases; the authority
of the Parlement of Paris covered two-fifths of the kingdom. The
chambres des comptes, the cours des aides, and the cours des monnaies
judged all cases relating to the imposts, to the coinage, and to
bullion. The grand conseil, the requêtes de l'Hôtel, the tribunal of the
University of Paris, the capitaineries royales, etc., had each a special
jurisdiction. Certain persons could only be judged by certain tribunals.
In 1735, the Parlement having despatched its first president and several
of its members to the king, then at Compiègne, to remonstrate with him,
Louis XV informed them that he "forbade his Parlement to meet, to issue
any decree, or to deliberate in any manner on the affairs of State; that
they were to assemble only to receive his orders and to execute them,
and that they had better not constrain him to make them feel the weight
of his authority." In September of the same year, he summoned them to a
bed of justice at Versailles, contrary to all precedent, and when they
returned protesting, all the presidents and conseillers des enquêtes
and requêtes were summarily banished to different cities in the kingdom
by lettres de cachet. In 1753, the whole body was sent into exile, at
Soissons, and to replace it the king created a _chambre royale_, which
held its sittings at the Louvre, but which, though duly registered at
the Châtelet _au très exprès commandement du roi_, was received with
such contempt for its authority and such general levity that the members
"became so well accustomed to it that they frequently assembled
laughing, and made jests of their own decrees." The Parisians, who
ridicule everything, declared that these members enjoyed themselves
greatly at the masked ball during the Carnival, because none of them
were _recognized_.
[Illustration: BIRTH OF EQUALITY: THE ASSEMBLÉE ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST
4, 1789.