The first part of the reign of the weak Louis XIII, who only numbered
nine years at the time of his father’s murder, was full of mischief
for France. During the time the queen-mother, Mary of Medicis,
conducted the government, Italian favorites exerted a great influence
upon affairs, enriched themselves at the expense of the French, and
irritated the pride of the nation by their insolence. Enraged at this,
the nobility took up arms, and filled the country with rebellion and
the tumult of war. When at length Louis XIII himself, upon coming of
age, assumed the government, he indeed consented that the foreign
favorites should be removed by murder and execution, and banished his
mother from the court; but the people gained little by it. The new
favorites in whom the king, who possessed no self-reliance, reposed
his confidence, were not distinguished from the former either by
virtue or talents; for this reason, both the nobles of the kingdom and
the Huguenots, who felt themselves injured in their rights, again rose
against the government, and threw the land into fresh confusion. This
melancholy condition of affairs was only put an end to when Cardinal
Richelieu was admitted into the state council, and introduced a
complete change of system, (A. D. 1624.)
This great statesman maintained an almost absolute sway in the court
and in the kingdom for nearly eighteen years, though the king never
loved him, the queen and the nobility were constantly attempting his
overthrow, and a succession of cabals and conspiracies were plotted
against him. The greatness of his mind triumphed over all obstacles.
Richelieu’s efforts were directed towards the extension and rounding
of the French territory without, and the increasing and strengthening
of the royal power within. In furtherance of the former of these
objects, he sought to weaken the house of Hapsburg, and for this
purpose entered into alliances with the enemies of the emperor not
only in Germany, in the time of the Thirty Years’ War, but in Italy
and other places; and, to attain his aims in regard to the latter
object, he neglected to call together the estates of the kingdom,
broke the power of the nobility and of the independent officials and
judges in the parliament, and attacked the Huguenots, who had formed
an almost independent alliance in the south and west of France, with
their own fortresses, and an effective militia, and great privileges.
After conquering the most important of the Huguenot towns (Nismes,
Montauban, Montpellier), and destroying their fortifications, in three
wars, and when he had at length taken Rochelle, the bulwark of the
Calvinists, after a siege of fourteen months, he proceeded to deprive
the Protestants of their political privileges and of their independent
position, but granted them, by the Edict of Nismes, liberty of
conscience and equal rights with Catholic subjects. The turbulent
nobles had been deprived of their greatest support by the disarming of
the Huguenots, and the war could now be prosecuted against them with
success. The most daring were got rid of by banishment and the
executioner. Even the queen-mother and her second son, and the duke of
Orleans, who attempted to procure the fall of Richelieu, were
compelled to leave the country, and the confidential friend of the
latter, Henry, duke of Montmorency, a scion of one of the most
renowned families of France, died at Toulouse by the hand of the
executioner. A similar fate awaited the count of Cinq-Mars and his
friend, De Thou, a few years later, when in conjunction with the queen
and some of the nobles, they formed a conspiracy against the mighty
cardinal. The parliament, the upper tax-offices and courts of justice,
which, like the king, claimed an independent authority on account of
their offices being hereditary, were weakened by the establishment of
extraordinary courts and higher officers, who were dependent upon the
minister.
In the year 1642, died Richelieu, hated and feared by the nobility and
the people, but admired by cotemporaries and posterity; Louis XIII, a
prince without either great virtues or great vices, and dependent upon
every one who could either acquire his favor or render himself
formidable to him, soon followed him. His widow, Anne of Austria, the
proud and ambitious sister of the king of Spain, undertook the
government during the minority of his son. But as she reposed the
whole of her confidence on the Italian, Mazarin, the inheritor of the
office and the principles of Richelieu, she met with vehement opposers
among the nobility and in the parliament, who attempted to regain
their former power and position. The people, in the hope of being
relieved of some of their heavy taxes, and guided by the clever and
dexterous Cardinal Retz, embraced their cause, with the intent of
compelling the court to remove Mazarin, and to adopt a different plan
of government. This gave occasion to a furious civil war, which is
known in history as “the War of the Fronde.” Mazarin was obliged to
leave the country for a short time, but so immovable were the favor
and confidence of the queen, that he governed France from Cologne as
he had formerly done in Paris. But his banishment did not last long.
When Louis XIV had attained the years of kingly majority, and Turenne,
the commander of the royal troops, had conquered his rival, the great
Condé, the general of the insurgents, in the suburb of St. Antoine,
Mazarin returned in triumph. His solemn entry into Paris was a sign
that absolute power had gained the victory, and that henceforth the
will of the monarch was to be law. Mazarin enjoyed for six years
longer the greatest respect in France and Europe; Cardinal Retz, the
ingenious composer of the Memoirs of this war, was obliged to leave
his country, after he had previously expiated his turbulent conduct in
the prison of Vincennes; Condé, poor and unhappy, wandered among the
Spaniards, till the grace of his master allowed him to return and take
possession of his estates; Mazarin’s nieces, Italian females without
name or position, were endowed with the wealth of France, and sought
for as brides by the greatest nobles; and the members of parliament
adapted themselves without opposition to the directions they received
from above, after Louis had appeared before them in his boots and
riding whip, and demanded their obedience with threats. Louis now gave
effect to his principle, “I am the state” (_l’etat, c’est moi_). The
peace of the Pyrenees with Spain was the last work of Mazarin. He died
shortly after, (March 9, 1661,) leaving enormous wealth behind him.
His death took place at the moment when Louis began to grow weary of
him, and was longing to seize the reins of government in his own
powerful grasp.
After the death of Mazarin, Louis XIV, in whom kingly absolutism
attained its highest point, appointed no prime minister, but
surrounded himself with men who merely executed his will, and whose
highest aim was to increase and spread abroad the renown, glory, and
honor of the king. In the choice of these men, Louis displayed
judgment and the talents of a ruler. His ministers, especially
Colbert, the great promoter of French industry, manufactures, and
trades, as well as his generals, Turenne, Condé, Luxemburg, and the
engineer, Vauban, as much surpassed, in talent, acquirements, and
dexterity, the statesmen and soldiers of all other countries, as Louis
XIV himself was preëminent among the princes of his age, in the
greatness of his power, in commanding presence, and kingly dignity. He
rendered the age of Louis XIV the most illustrious in the French
annals, and caused the Court of Versailles (the seat of the royal
residence) to be everywhere praised and admired as the model of taste,
of refinement, and of a distinguished mode of living. But as he sought
nothing but the gratification of his own selfishness, of his own love
of pleasure, of his pride, and of his desire for renown and splendor,
his reign became the grave of freedom, of morals, of firmness of
character, and of manly sentiments. Court favor was the end of every
effort, and flattery the surest road to arrive at it; virtue and merit
met with little acknowledgment.
It was during the last three decades of the seventeenth century that
France stood at the culminating point of her power abroad and of her
prosperity at home, so that the flattering chronicles of those days
described the age of Louis XIV as the golden age of France. Trade and
industry received a prodigious development by the care of Colbert; the
woollen and silk manufactories, the stocking and cloth weaving, which
flourished in the southern towns, brought prosperity, the maritime
force increased, colonies were planted, and the productions of France
were carried by trading companies to all quarters of the globe.
The court of France displayed a magnificence that had never before
been witnessed. The palace of Versailles, and the gardens which were
adorned with statues, fountains, and alleys of trees, were a model of
taste for all Europe, fêtes of all kinds, jovial parties, ballets,
fireworks, the opera and the theatre, in the service of which the
first intellects in France employed their talents, followed upon each
other in attractive succession; poets, artists, men of learning, all
were eager to do honor to a prince who rewarded with a liberal hand
every kind of talent that conduced either to his amusement or to his
glory. Sumptuous buildings, as the Hospital of Invalides, costly
libraries, magnificent productions of the press, vast establishments
for the natural sciences, academies, and similar institutions, exalted
the glory and renown of the great Louis. The refined air of society,
the polished tone, the easy manners of the nobility and courtiers,
subdued Europe more permanently and extensively than the weapons of
the army. The French fashions, language, and literature, bore sway
from this time in all circles of the higher classes. The consequences
of the French Academy by Richelieu were a development of the language,
style, and literary composition, that was extremely favorable to the
diffusion of the literature. The language, so particularly adapted for
social intercourse, for conversation, and for epistolary writing,
remained from henceforth the language of diplomacy, of courts, and of
the higher classes; and although the literary productions are wanting
in strength, elevation, and nature,――the polish of the form, and the
ease and felicity of the style, gave French taste the supremacy in
Europe, and strengthened the French people in the agreeable delusion
that they were the most civilized of nations.
But however flatterers may sing the praises of the age of Louis XIV,
one spot of shame remains ineradicable――the persecution of the
Huguenots. The French king believed that the unity of the Church was
inseparable from a perfect monarchy. For this reason he oppressed the
Jansenists, a Catholic party, which first contended against the
Jesuits, and afterwards against the head of the Church himself; and he
compelled the Calvinists, by the most severe persecutions, either to
fly, or to return into the bosom of the Catholic Church. Colbert, who
esteemed the Huguenots as active and industrious citizens, prevented
for some time these violent measures; but the suggestions of the royal
confessor, La Chaise, the zeal for conversion of the affectedly pious
Madame Maintenon, who had been first a tutoress of the court, and
afterwards Louis’ trusted wife, and the cruelty of Louvois, the
minister of war, at length triumphed over the advice of Colbert. A
long succession of oppressive proceedings against the Huguenots
prepared the way for the great stroke. The number of their churches
was restricted, and their worship confined to a few of the principal
towns. Louis’ paroxysms of repentance and devotion were always the
sources of fresh oppressions to the Calvinistic heretics, by whose
conversion he thought to expiate his own crimes. They were gradually
excluded from office and dignities; converts were favored; in this
way, the ambitious were enticed, the poor were won by money, which
flowed from the king’s conversion chest, and from the liberal gifts of
the pious illustrious; a wide field was opened to the zeal for
proselytism by the enactment that the conversion of children under age
was valid. Families were divided, children were torn from their
parents and brought up as Catholics. Court and clergy, the heartless
and eloquent bishop Bossuet at their head, set all means in motion to
establish the ecclesiastical unity of France. When all other means of
conversion failed, came the dragonades. At the command of Louvois, the
cavalry took possession of the southern provinces, and established
their quarters in the dwellings of the Huguenots. The prosperity of
the industrious citizens, whose substance was devoured by the
dragoons, soon disappeared. The bad treatment by these booted
missionaries, who quitted the houses of the apostates to fall in
doubled numbers upon those who remained stedfast, operated more
effectually than all the enticements of the court or the seductions of
the priests. Thousands fled abroad that they might preserve their
faith upon a foreign soil. At last came the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, October, 1685. The religious worship of the Calvinists was now
forbidden, their churches were torn down, their schools closed, their
preachers banished from the land; when the emigration increased to a
formidable degree, this was forbidden, under punishment of the galleys
and forfeiture of goods. But despite all threats and prohibitions,
upwards of 500,000 French Calvinists carried their industry, their
faith, and their courage to Protestant lands. Switzerland, the
Palatinate of the Rhine, Brandenburg, Holland, and England, offered an
asylum to the persecuted. The silk manufacture and stocking-weaving
were carried abroad by the fugitive Huguenots. Flatterers extolled the
king as the exterminator of heresy, but the courage of the peasants in
Cevennes, and the number of Huguenots who contented themselves with
private devotion, show how little religious oppression conduced to the
desired end. For when the persecution was carried into the distant
valleys of the Cevennes, where Waldenses and Calvinists lived,
according to ancient custom, in the simplicity of the faith, the
oppressors met with an obstinate resistance. Persecution called forth
the courage of its victims, oppression urged zeal into fanaticism. Led
on by a young mechanic, the Camisards, clad in a linen frock, rushed
“with naked breast against the marshals.” A frightful civil war filled
the peaceful valleys of Cevennes; fugitive priests, in the gloom of
the forest, exhorted the evangelical brethren to a desperate defense,
till, at length, the persecutors grew weary. Nearly two millions of
the Huguenots remained without rights and without religious worship.