THE HOUSES OF VALOIS AND BOURBON.
The House of Valois.--Luxury of the Court and the
Nobles.--Insurrection.--Jaques Bonhomme.--Henry III.--Henry
IV., of Navarre.--Cardinal Richelieu.--French Academy.--Regency
of Anne of Austria.--Palaces of France.--The Noble and the
Ennobled.--Persecution of the Protestants.--Edict of Nantes.--Its
Revocation.--Distress of the Protestants.--Death of Louis XIV.
In the year 1328 the direct line of the Capets became extinct by
the death of Charles IV., who left no male descendant. The nobles,
assembled in parliament at Paris, assigned the crown to Philip, Count
of Valois, a nephew of the former king. He was crowned at Rheims,
in May, 1328, as Philip VI. The nobles, having thus obtained a king
according to their wishes, complained to him that they had borrowed
large sums of money from wealthy merchants and artisans, which it was
inconvenient for them to pay, and that it was not consistent with the
dignity of the French nobility that they should be harassed by debts
due to the low-born. The king promptly issued a decree that all these
debts should be cut down one fourth, that four months grace should be
allowed without interest, and then, that these plebeian creditors might
be reduced to a proper state of humility, he ordered them all to be
imprisoned and their property to be confiscated. The merciless monarch
doubled the taxes upon the people, and created a court at Paris of
such magnificence that the baronial lords abandoned their castles and
crowded to the metropolis to share its voluptuous indulgences. Even
neighboring kings, attracted by the splendor of the Parisian court,
took up their abode in Paris. The nobles needed vast sums of money to
sustain them in such measureless extravagance. They accordingly left
stern overseers over their estates, to drive the peasants to their toil
and to extort from them every possible farthing.
The king, to replenish his ever-exhausted purse, assumed the sole right
of making and selling salt throughout the realm. Each family, always
excepting the nobles, who were then exempted from every species of tax,
was required to take a certain quantity at an exorbitant price.
Vincennes was then the great banqueting-hall of Europe. In its present
decay it exhibits but little of the grandeur it presented four hundred
years ago, when its battlements towered above the forest of oaks,
centuries old, which surrounded the castle--when plumed and blazoned
squadrons met in jousts and tournaments, and when, in meteoric
splendor, hunting bands of lords and ladies swept the park. Brilliant
as was this spectacle, no healthy mind can contemplate it but with
indignation. To support this luxury of a few thousand nobles, thirty
millions of people were plunged into the extreme of ignorance, poverty,
and misery.
Again the king and the nobles had empty purses, and were greatly in
debt. By an arbitrary decree all the coin of the kingdom was called
in. It was then passed through the mint greatly debased. With this
debased coin the debts were paid, and _then_ an order was issued that
the coin should be regarded at its depreciated value.
With the lapse of centuries intelligence had gradually increased, and
there was now quite a growing middling class between the peasants
and the nobles--artisans, merchants, manufacturers, and literary and
professional men. These outrages had at length become intolerable.
Human nature could endure no more. This middle class became the leaders
of the blind and maddened masses, and hurled them in fury upon their
foes. The conspiracy spread over the kingdom, and in all the towns
and throughout the country the signal for revolt was simultaneously
given. It was a servile insurrection, accompanied by all the horrors
inevitable to such a warfare. The debased populace, but little elevated
above the brute, were as merciless as the hyena or the wolf. Phrensied
with rage and despair, in howling bands they burst upon the castles,
and the wrongs of centuries were terrifically avenged. We need not
tell the story. Violence, torture, flame, and blood exhausted their
energies. Mothers and maidens suffered all that mortals can endure in
terror, brutal indignities, shame, and woe. In war even the refined and
courteous often become diabolical; but those who have been degraded by
ages of ignorance and oppression, when they first break their fetters,
generally become fiends incarnate.
The nobles so thoroughly despised the peasants that they had not
dreamed that the starving, cringing boors would dare even to think
of emerging from their mud hovels to approach the lordly castle of
rock, with its turrets and battlements and warlike defenders. The
sheep might as well conspire against the dogs and the wolves. The
peasant had hardly individuality enough even to receive a name. He was
familiarly called Jack Goodman, _Jacques Bonhomme_. This insurrection
of the Jacks, or of the Jacquerie as it is usually called, was, after
much devastation and bloodshed, quelled. Barbaric phrensy can seldom
long hold out against disciplined valor. One half of the population of
France fell a prey to the sword, or to the pestilence and famine which
ensued.
This was the first convulsive movement made by the _people_. Defeated
though they were, and with their fetters riveted anew, they obtained
new ideas of power and right which they never forgot. Already we begin
to hear many of the phrases which four hundred years later were upon
all lips, when the monarchy and the feudal aristocracy were buried in
one common grave.
The house of Valois retained the throne for two hundred and sixty-one
years. During these two and a half centuries, as generations came and
went, storms of war and woe were incessantly sweeping over France.
The history of the kingdom during these dreary ages is but the record
of the intrigues of ecclesiastics, the conflicts between monarchs and
nobles, and the sweep of maddened armies. The _Third Estate_, the
people, continued to be deprived of almost all social and political
rights. They were debased by ignorance and depressed by intolerable
burdens. The monarchy was gradually centralizing power. The chiefs
and sub-chiefs of the conglomerated tribes were losing their feudal
authority and lapsing into nobles of higher and lower rank, whose
splendor was obtained by exemption from all the burdens of the state,
and by enormous taxation of the people. The Roman Catholic Church,
under the Popes, blazed with almost supernatural splendor over Europe;
and the high dignitaries of the Church, as lords spiritual, were as
luxurious, haughty, and domineering as were any of the lords temporal.
Henry III., the last of the Valois race, was stabbed by a friar in
1589, and died leaving no issue. Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre,
as the nearest relative, claimed the crown. He ascended the throne
as Henry IV., and after several years of civil war put down all
opposition. He was the first of the Bourbon family who swayed the
sceptre, and by far the most able and energetic. Under his vigorous
sway the kingdom became consolidated, the throne attained a great
supremacy over the nobles, and the resources of the realm were greatly
developed. Henry IV. was sincerely devoted to the interests of France.
He encouraged commerce, manufactures, and the arts; endeavored to
enforce equitable laws, and under his wise administration the _people_
made decided advances in wealth and intelligence. He retained the
throne for twenty-one years, until 1610, when he died beneath the
dagger of an assassin. Though Henry governed _for_ the people, he did
not admit them to any voice in public affairs. During his long reign no
assembly was convened in which the people had any representation.
Henry IV. at his death left a son, Louis, nine years of age. The mother
of this child, Mary of Medicis, was invested with the regency. When
this prince was fourteen years of age he was considered by the laws
of France as having attained his majority. He accordingly, while thus
but a boy, marrying a bride of fifteen, Anne of Austria, ascended the
throne as Louis XIII. For twenty-eight years this impotent prince
sat upon the throne, all the time in character a bashful boy devoid
of any qualities which could command respect. Cardinal Richelieu was
during this reign the real monarch of France. Measurelessly ambitious,
arrogant, and cruel, he consolidated the despotism of the throne, and
yet, by far-reaching policy, greatly promoted the power and grandeur
of the kingdom. This renowned minister, stern, vindictive, cruel,
shrinking from no crime in the accomplishment of his plans, with the
dungeons of the Bastilles of France and the executioner's axe at his
command, held the impotent king and the enslaved kingdom for nearly
thirty years in trembling obedience to his will.
The Chateau of Versailles was commenced by Richelieu. He also, in the
year 1635, established the French Academy, which has since exerted so
powerful an influence upon literature and science throughout Europe.
Richelieu died in December, 1642, and six months after, in May, 1643,
Louis XIII., who, during his reign, had been but a puppet in the hands
of the cardinal, followed him to the tomb. As the monarch was lying
upon his dying bed, he called his little son, five years of age, to
his side, and said to him, "What is your name?" "Louis Fourteenth,"
answered the proud boy, already eager to grasp the sceptre. "Not yet,
not yet," sadly rejoined the dying father.
Anne of Austria held the regency for nine years, until her son, having
attained the age of fourteen, had completed his minority and assumed
the crown. Under this powerful prince the monarchy of France, as an
unlimited despotism, became firmly established. The nobles, though
deprived of all political power, were invested with such enormous
privileges, enabling them to revel in wealth and luxury, that they
were ever ready to unite with the king in quelling all uprising of the
people, who were equally robbed by both monarch and noble. During the
long reign of this monarch, for Louis XIV. sat upon the throne for
seventy-two years, if we consider his reign to have commenced when he
was proclaimed king upon the death of his father, France made vast
strides in power, wealth, and splendor. Palaces arose almost outvying
the dreams of an Oriental imagination. The saloons of Marly, the
Tuileries, the Louvre, and Versailles, were brilliant with a splendor,
and polluted with debaucheries, which Babylon, in its most festering
corruption, could not have rivaled. The nobles, almost entirely
surrendered to enervating indulgence, were incapacitated for any post
which required intellectual activity and energy. Hence originated a
class of men who became teachers, editors, scientific and literary
writers, jurists, and professional men. In the progress of commerce and
manufactures, wealth increased with this class, and the king, to raise
money, would often sell, at an enormous price, a title of nobility to
some enriched tradesman.
A numerous and powerful middle class, rich and highly educated, was
thus gradually formed, who had emerged from the people, and whose
sympathies were entirely with them. The nobles looked upon all these,
however opulent, or cultivated in mind, or polished in manners, with
contempt, as low-born. They refused all social intercourse with them,
regarding them as a degraded caste. They looked with even peculiar
contempt upon those who had purchased titles of nobility.
They drew a broad line of distinction between the _nobles_ and the
_ennobled_. The hereditary aristocracy, proud of a lineage which could
be traced through a hundred generations, and which was lost in the haze
of antiquity, exclaimed with pride, instinct to the human heart:
"You may give a lucky tradesman, in exchange for money, a title of
nobility, but you can not thus make him a nobleman; you can not thus
constitute him a lineal descendant of the old Frank barons; you can not
thus constitute him a Lorraine, a Montmorency, a Rohan. God alone can
create a nobleman."
Thus they regarded a man who had been ennobled by a royal decree, or
who had descended from a father or a grandfather thus ennobled, as a
new man, an upstart, one hardly redeemed from contempt. The doors of
their saloons were closed against him, and he was every where exposed
to mortifying neglect. A noble whose lineage could be traced for two or
three centuries, but whose origin was still _distinctly defined_, was
considered as perhaps belonging to the aristocratic calendar, though of
low estate. The fact that the time once was, when his ancestors were
known to be low-born, was a damaging fact, which no subsequent ages of
nobility could entirely efface. He only was the true noble, the origin
of whose nobility was lost in the depths of the past, the line of whose
ancestry ran so far back into the obscurity of by-gone ages that no one
could tell when it commenced.
It has generally been said that there were three estates in the
realm; the clergy composing the first, the nobles the second, and the
people the third. But the higher class of the clergy, luxuriating
in the bishoprics and the abbacies, with their rich emoluments,
were the sons of the nobility, and shared in all the privileges and
popular odium pertaining to that class. The lower clergy, devoted to
apostolic labors and poverty, belonged to the people, and were with
them in all their sympathies. Thus there were in reality but two
classes, the _privileged_ and the _unprivileged_, the _patrician_ and
the _plebeian_, the _tax payer_ and the _tax receiver_. The castle,
whether baronial or monastic in its architecture, was the emblem of
the one, the thatched cottage the symbol of the other. Louis XIV., as
Madame de Maintenon testifies, was _shocked_ to learn that Jesus Christ
associated with the poor and the humble, and conversed freely with them.
Soon after the succession of Louis XIV. to the throne he became
convinced that the maintenance of the Romish hierarchy was essential
to the stability of his power. He consequently commenced a series of
persecutions of the Protestants, with the determination of driving
that faith entirely from France. In 1662 he issued a decree that no
Protestant should be buried except after sunset or before sunrise.
Protestant mechanics or shop-keepers were not allowed to have
apprentices. Protestant teachers were permitted to instruct only in the
first rudiments of letters, and not more than twelve Protestants were
allowed to meet together for the purposes of worship. No Protestant
woman could be a nurse in the chamber of infancy; no Catholic could
embrace Protestantism or marry a Protestant woman under pain of exile.
Catholic magistrates were empowered to enter the dying chambers of
the Protestants to tease them, when gasping in death, to return to
the Catholic faith. In four years, between 1680 and 1684, more than
twenty royal edicts were issued against the Protestants, decreeing,
among other things, that no Protestant should be a lawyer, doctor,
apothecary, printer, or grocer. Children were often taken by violence
from Protestant parents, that they might be trained in the Catholic
faith.
Madame de Maintenon, the unacknowledged wife of Louis XIV., wished to
bring back into the fold of Rome a young lady, Mademoiselle de Murgay.
She consequently wrote to her brother:
"If you could send her to me you would do me a great pleasure. There
are no other means than violence, for they will be much afflicted in
the family by De Murgay's conversion. I will send you a _lettre de
cachet_ (secret warrant) in virtue of which you will take her into your
own house until you find an opportunity of sending her off."[8]
Such outrages as these were of constant occurrence. Zeal for the
conversion of the Protestants never rose to a higher pitch. At the same
time Louis XIV. could bid defiance to God's commands, and insult the
moral sense of the nation by traveling with his wife and his two guilty
favorites, Madame de Montespan and Madame la Vallière, all in the same
carriage. The profligacy of the ecclesiastics and the debauchery of the
court and the nobles, though less disguised during the wild saturnalia
of the succeeding regency, was never more universal than during this
reign. This was the golden age of kings. Feudality had died, and
democracy was not born. The monarchy was absolute. The nobles, deprived
of all _political_ power, existed merely as a luxurious appendage and
embellishment to the throne, while the people, unconscious of either
power or rights, made no movements to embarrass the sovereign.[9]
In the year 1681 Louis XIV. commenced his system of dragooning the
Protestants into the Catholic faith. He sent regiments of cavalry into
the provinces, quartered them in the houses of the Protestants, placing
from four to ten in each family, and enjoined it upon these soldiers
to do every thing they could to compel the Protestants to return to
the Catholic faith. Scenes ensued too awful to be narrated. He who has
nerves to endure the recital can find the atrocities minutely detailed
in "_L'Histoire de l'Édit de Nantes, par Elias Benoît_."
The brutal soldiery, free from all restraint, committed every
conceivable excess. They scourged little children in the presence of
their parents, that the shrieks of agony of the child might induce
the parents to abjure their faith. They violated the modesty of women
and girls, and mangled their bodies with the lash. They tortured,
mutilated, disfigured. And when human nature in its extreme of agony
yielded, the exhausted victim was compelled to sign a recantation of
his faith, declaring that he did it of his own free will, without
compulsion or persuasion. In their terror the Protestants fled in all
directions, into the fields, the forests, to caves, and made desperate
endeavors to escape from the kingdom. Multitudes died of exhaustion and
famine by the way-side and on the sea-shore. Large tracts of country
were thus nearly depopulated. Madame de Maintenon wrote to her brother,
sending him a present of a large sum of money:
"I beseech you employ usefully the money you are to have. The lands in
Poitou are sold for nothing. The distresses of the Protestants will
bring more into market. You can easily establish yourself splendidly in
Poitou."
The Protestant countries, England, Switzerland, Holland, and Denmark,
issued proclamations to these persecuted Christians offering them
an asylum. The court was alarmed, and interdicted their leaving the
kingdom under penalty of condemnation to the galleys, confiscation of
their property, and the annulling of all contracts they should have
made for a year before their emigration.[10]
The condition of the Protestants was now miserable in the extreme. It
was the determination of the court utterly to exterminate the reformed
faith. The Archbishop of Paris made out a list of the works of four
hundred authors who were considered as assailing Catholicism, and all
the libraries, public and private, of the kingdom were searched that
the condemned books might be burned.
There were between two and three millions of Protestants in France.[11]
The dragoons were sent in every direction through the kingdom,
enjoined by the court, to secure, at whatever expense of torture,
a return to Catholicism. One of the tortures which these merciless
fanatics were fond of applying was to deprive their victim of sleep.
They kept the sufferer standing, and relieved each other in their
cruel work of pinching, pricking, twitching, pulling with ropes,
burning, suffocating with offensive fumes, until after successive
days and nights of torture the victim was driven to madness, and to
promise any thing to escape from his tormentors. By these means, it was
boasted that in the district of Bordeaux, where there were one hundred
and fifty thousand Protestants, one hundred and forty thousand were
converted in a fortnight. The Duke of Noailles wrote to the court that
in the district to which he had been sent with his dragoons there had
been two hundred and forty thousand Protestants, but he thought that by
the end of the month none could be left.
In the year 1598 Henry IV., by the Edict of Nantes, had granted freedom
of conscience and of worship to the Protestants. Louis XIV. now issued
a decree revoking this edict. The revocation, which was signed the 18th
of October, 1685, states in the preamble that "since the better and the
greater part of our subjects of the pretended reformed religion have
embraced the Catholic faith, the maintenance of the Edict of Nantes
remains superfluous." It then declares that no more exercise of the
reformed worship is to be tolerated in the realm. All the Protestant
pastors were to leave the kingdom within fifteen days, and were
forbidden to exercise their office under pain of the galleys. Parents
were forbidden to instruct their children in the reformed faith, and
were enjoined to send them to the Catholic church to be baptized and to
be instructed in the Catholic schools and catechism, under penalty of a
fine of five hundred livres. The Protestant laity were prohibited from
emigrating under pain of the galleys for the men, and imprisonment for
life for the women.
Notwithstanding the penalty, vast numbers escaped from the kingdom.
No vigilance could guard such extended frontiers. In one year after
the revocation, Vauban wrote that France had lost one hundred thousand
inhabitants, twelve thousand disciplined soldiers, six hundred
officers, and her most flourishing manufactures. The Duke of St. Simon
records that "a fourth part of the kingdom was perceptibly depopulated."
These crimes perpetrated against religion filled the land with
infidelity. There were even Catholics of noble name and note, as
Fénélon and Massillon, who energetically remonstrated. Montesquieu,
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mirabeau, not distinguishing between
Christianity and the Papal Church, uttered cries of indignation which
thrilled upon the ear of Europe and undermined the foundations of
Christianity itself.
The edict of revocation was executed with the utmost rigor. The
pastors in Paris were not allowed even the fifteen days which the
edict granted, but were ordered to leave in forty-eight hours. Those
pastors who had children over seven years of age had those children
taken from them. Fathers and mothers, thus robbed of their children, in
poverty and heart-broken, were driven into exile. "Old men of eighty or
ninety years were seen gathering up the last remains of their life to
undertake distant journeys, and more than one died before reaching the
asylum where he was to rest his weary foot and drooping head."[12]
The court became alarmed by the magnitude of emigration. Guards were
posted at the gates of towns, at the fords of rivers, on the bridges,
on the highways, and at all points of departure upon the frontiers.
Still the fugitives, hiding in caverns by day and traveling by
night through by-paths, in great numbers eluded their foes. Every
conceivable disguise was adopted, as of shepherds, pilgrims, hunters,
valets, merchants. Women of rank--for there were not a few such among
the Protestants, who had been accustomed to all the delicacies and
indulgences of life--traveled on foot, exposed to hunger and storms,
two or three hundred miles. Girls of sixteen, of all ranks in life,
incurred the same hardships and perils. They disfigured their faces,
wore coarse and ragged garments, and trundled wheel-barrows filled with
manure, or carried heavy burdens, to elude suspicion. Some assumed the
disguise of men or boys and took the office of servants; others feigned
insanity or to be deaf and dumb. In these ways large numbers escaped to
Rotterdam.[13]
Those near the sea-shore concealed themselves in ships among bales of
merchandise, and in hogsheads stowed away among the freight. There were
children who passed whole weeks in such lurking places without uttering
a cry. Some desperately pushed out to sea in open boats, trusting
to winds and waves to bear them to a place of safety. Thousands
perished of cold, exposure, and starvation. Thousands were seized,
loaded with chains, and dragged through the realm in derision and
contempt, and were then condemned to pass the remainder of their days
as galley-slaves. The galleys of Marseilles were crowded with these
victims, among whom were many of the noblest men who have ever dwelt on
earth. The prisons were crowded with women arrested in their flight and
doomed to life-long captivity.
It is estimated that five hundred thousand found a refuge in foreign
lands. Thirteen hundred passed through the city of Geneva in one
week. England formed eleven regiments out of the refugees. One of
the faubourgs of London was entirely peopled by these exiles. M. de
Sismondi estimates that as many perished in the attempt to escape
as escaped. A hundred thousand in the Province of Languedoc died
prematurely, and of these ten thousand perished by fire, the gallows,
or the wheel.[14] We can not but sympathize with the indignation of
Michelet as he exclaims:
"Let the Revolutionary Reign of Terror beware of comparing herself
with the Inquisition. Let her never boast of having, in her two or
three years, paid back to the old system what it did for us for six
hundred years! The Inquisition would have good cause to laugh. What
are the twelve thousand men guillotined of the one, to the millions of
men butchered, hung, broken on the wheel--to that pyramid of burning
stakes--to those masses of burnt flesh which the other piled up to
heaven. The single inquisition of one of the provinces of Spain states,
in an authentic monument, that in sixteen years it burned twenty
thousand men!
"History will inform us that in her most ferocious and implacable
moments the Revolution trembled at the thought of aggravating death,
that she shortened the sufferings of victims, removed the hand of man,
and invented a machine to abridge the pangs of death.
"And it will also inform us that the Church of the Middle Ages
exhausted itself in inventions to augment suffering, to render it
poignant, intense; that she found out exquisite arts of torture,
ingenious means to contrive that, without dying, one might long taste
of death; and that, being stopped in that path by inflexible Nature,
who, at a certain degree of pain, mercifully grants death, she wept at
not being able to make man suffer longer."[15]
Louis XIV. died in 1715. He did not allow any assembly of the states to
be convened during his reign. Every body began to manifest discontent.
The nobility were humbled and degraded, and hungered for more power.
The people had become very restive. The humbler class of the clergy,
sincere Christians and true friends of their parishioners, prayed
earnestly for reform. The Jesuits alone united with the monarch and his
mistresses to maintain despotic sway. The court was utterly corrupt;
the king a shameless profligate. Every thing was bartered for money.
Justice was unknown. The court reveled in boundless luxury, while the
mass of the people were in a state almost of starvation. The burden had
become intolerable.
The monarchy of France attained its zenith during the reign of Louis
XIV. Immense standing armies overawed Europe and prevented revolt at
home. Literature and art flourished, for the king was ambitious to
embellish his reign with the works of men of genius. Great freedom of
opinion and of utterance was allowed, for neither king nor courtiers
appear to have had any more fear of a rising of the peasants than
they had of a revolt of the sheep. Vast works were constructed, which
the poor and the starving alone paid for. Still there were not a few
who perceived that the hour of vengeance was at hand. One of the
magistrates of Louis XIV. remarked, "The conflict is soon to arrive
between those who pay and those whose only function is to receive." The
Duke of Orleans, who was regent after the death of Louis XIV., said,
"If I were a subject I would most certainly revolt. The people are
good-natured fools to suffer so long."
Louis XIV. left the throne to his great-grandchild, a boy five years
of age. The populace followed the hearse of the departed monarch with
insults and derisive shouts to the tomb. The hoary despot, upon a
dying bed, manifested some compunctions of conscience. He left to his
successor the words:
"I have, against my inclination, imposed great burdens on my subjects;
but have been compelled to do it by the long wars which I have been
obliged to maintain. Love peace, and undertake no war, except when the
good of the state and the welfare of your people render it necessary."
These words were not heeded, until the people were, in their terrible
might, inspired by fury and despair.
There is nothing more mournful to contemplate than the last days of
Louis XIV. He was the victim of insupportable melancholy, dreading
death almost with terror. His children and his grandchildren were
nearly all dead. The people were crushed by burdens which they could no
longer support. The treasury was in debt over eight hundred millions
of dollars. Commerce was destroyed, industry paralyzed, and the
country uncultivated and in many places almost depopulated. The armies
of France had been conquered and humiliated; a disastrous war was
threatening the realm, and the king from his dying bed could hear the
execrations of the people, rising portentously around his throne.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: Histoire de Madame de Maintenon, et des principaux
Evenements du Regne de Louis XIV. Par M. le Duc de Noilles, Paris,
1848.]
[Footnote 9: "Madame de Maintenon," writes St. Simon, "had men,
affairs, justice, religion, all, without exception, in her hands, and
the king and the state her victims."]
[Footnote 10: Under these circumstances the Protestants sent the
following touching petition: "It being impossible for us to live
without the exercise of our religion, we are compelled, in spite of
ourselves, to supplicate your majesty, with the most profound humility
and respect, that you may be pleased to allow us to leave the kingdom,
with our wives, our children, and our effects, to settle in foreign
countries, where we can freely render to God the worship which we
believe indispensable, and on which depends our happiness or our misery
for eternity." This petition met only the response of aggravated
severities.--_Hist. of the Protestants of France, by G. de Félice_, p.
486.]
[Footnote 11: History of the Protestants of France, by G. de Félice, p.
405.]
[Footnote 12: History of the Protestants of France, by G. de Félice, p.
408.]
[Footnote 13: Histoire de l'Édit de Nantes, par Elias Benoît, tome v.,
p. 953.]
[Footnote 14: Boulainvilliers.]
[Footnote 15: "It is painful to detect continually the hand of the
clergy in these scenes of violence, spoliation, and death. The
venerable Malesherbes, the Baron de Breteuil, Rulhières, Joly de
Fleury, Gilbert de Voisins, Rippert de Monclus, the highest statesmen,
the most eminent magistrates, who have written upon the religious
affairs of this period, utter but one voice on it. They agree in
signalizing the influence of the priests, an influence as obstinate
as incessant, sometimes haughty, sometimes supple and humble, but
always supplicating the last means of restraint and severity for the
re-establishment of religious unity."--_History of the Protestants of
France, by G. de Félice_, p. 487.]