From 1621 to 1624 Marie de' Medici, re-established in credit, prosecuted
her intrigues; and in three years there were three different ministries:
de Luynes was succeeded by the prince de Condé, whose Montauban was
found at Montpellier; the Brûlarts succeeded Condé, and having, like de
Luynes, neglected France's foreign interests, they had to give place to
La Vieuville; while this latter was arrested in his turn for having
sacrificed the interests of the English Catholics in the negotiations
regarding the marriage of Henrietta of France with the prince of Wales.
All these personages were undistinguished figures beyond whom might be
discerned the cold clear-cut profile of Marie de' Medici's secretary,
now a cardinal, who was to take the helm and act as viceroy during
eighteen years.
Cardinal Richelieu 1624-1642.
Richelieu came into power at a lucky moment. Every one was sick of
government by deputy; they desired a strong hand and an energetic
foreign policy, after the defeat of the Czechs at the White Mountain by
the house of Austria, the Spanish intrigues in the Valtellina, and the
resumption of war between Spain and Holland. Richelieu contrived to
raise hope in the minds of all. As president of the clergy at the
states-general of 1614 he had figured as an adherent of Spain and the
ultramontane interest; he appeared to be a representative of that
religious party which was identical with the Spanish party. But he had
also been put into the ministry by the party of the _Politiques_, who
had terminated the civil wars, acclaimed Henry IV., applauded the
Protestant alliance, and by the mouth of Miron, president of the third
estate, had in 1614 proclaimed its intention to take up the national
tradition once more. Despite the concessions necessary at the outset to
the partisans of a Catholic alliance, it was the programme of the
_Politiques_ that Richelieu adopted and laid down with a master's hand
in his Political Testament.
Louis XIII. and Richelieu.
To realize it he had to maintain his position. This was very difficult
with a king who "wished to be governed and yet was impatient at being
governed." Incapable of applying himself to great affairs, but of sane
and even acute judgment, Louis XIII. excelled only in a passion for
detail and for manual pastimes. He realized the superior qualities of
his minister, though with a lively sense of his own dignity he often
wished him more discreet and less imperious; he had confidence in him
but did not love him. Cold-hearted and formal by nature, he had not even
self-love, detested his wife Anne of Austria--too good a Spaniard--and
only attached himself fitfully to his favourites, male or female, who
were naturally jealously suspected by the cardinal. He was accustomed to
listen to his mother, who detested Richelieu as her ungrateful protégé.
Neither did he love his brother, Gaston of Orleans, and the feeling was
mutual; for the latter, remaining for twenty years heir-presumptive to a
crown which he could neither defend nor seize, posed as the beloved
prince in all the conspiracies against Richelieu, and issued from them
each time as a Judas. Add to this that Louis XIII., like Richelieu
himself, had wretched health, aggravated by the extravagant medicines of
the day; and it is easy to understand how this pliable disposition which
offered itself to the yoke caused Richelieu always to fear that his king
might change his master, and to declare that "the four square feet of
the king's cabinet had been more difficult for him to conquer than all
the battlefields of Europe."
Richelieu, therefore, passed his time in safeguarding himself from his
rivals and in spying upon them; his suspicious nature, rendered still
more irritable by his painful practice of a dissimulation repugnant to
his headstrong character, making him fancy himself threatened more than
was actually the case. He brutally suppressed six great plots, several
of which were scandalous, and had more than fifty persons executed; and
he identified himself with the king, sincerely believing that he was
maintaining the royal authority and not merely his own. He had a
preference for irregular measures rather than legal prosecutions, and a
jealousy of all opinions save his own. He maintained his power through
the fear of torture and of special commissions. It was Louis XIII. whose
cold decree ordained most of the rigorous sentences, but the stain of
blood rested on the cardinal's robe and made his reasons of state pass
for private vengeance. Chalais was beheaded at Nantes in 1626 for having
upheld Gaston of Orleans in his refusal to wed Mademoiselle de
Montpensier, and Marshal d'Ornano died at Vincennes for having given him
bad advice in this matter; while the duellist de Boutteville was put to
the torture for having braved the edict against duels. The royal family
itself was not free from his attacks; after the Day of Dupes (1630) he
allowed the queen-mother to die in exile, and publicly dishonoured the
king's brother Gaston of Orleans by the publication of his confessions;
Marshal de Marillac was put to the torture for his ingratitude, and the
constable de Montmorency for rebellion (1632). The birth of Louis XIV.
in 1638 confirmed Richelieu in power. However, at the point of death he
roused himself to order the execution of the king's favourite,
Cinq-Mars, and his friend de Thou, guilty of treason with Spain (1642).
Financial policy of Richelieu.
Absolute authority was not in itself sufficient; much money was also
needed. In his state-papers Richelieu has shown that at the outset he
desired that the Huguenots should share no longer in public affairs,
that the nobles should cease to behave as rebellious subjects, and the
powerful provincial governors as suzerains over the lands committed to
their charge. With his passion for the uniform and the useful on a grand
scale, he hoped by means of the Code Michaud to put an end to the sale
of offices, to lighten imposts, to suppress brigandage, to reduce the
monasteries, &c. To do this it would have been necessary to make peace,
for it was soon evident that war was incompatible with these reforms. He
chose war, as did his Spanish rival and contemporary Olivares. War is
expensive sport; but Richelieu maintained a lofty attitude towards
finance, disdained figures, and abandoned all petty details to
subordinate officials like D'Effiat or Bullion. He therefore soon
reverted to the old and worse measures, including the debasement of
coinage, and put an extreme tension on all the springs of the financial
system. The land-tax was doubled and trebled by war, by the pensions of
the nobles, by an extortion the profits of which Richelieu disdained
neither for himself nor for his family; and just when the richer and
more powerful classes had been freed from taxes, causing the wholesale
oppression of the poorer, these few remaining were jointly and severally
answerable. Perquisites, offices, forced loans were multiplied to such a
point that a critic of the times, Guy Patin, facetiously declared that
duties were to be exacted from the beggars basking in the sun. Richelieu
went so far as to make poverty systematic and use famine as a means of
government. This was the price paid for the national victories.
Thus he procured money at all costs, with an extremely crude fiscal
judgment which ended by exasperating the people; hence numerous
insurrections of the poverty-stricken; Dijon rose in revolt against the
_aides_ in 1630, Provence against the tax-officers (_élus_) in 1631,
Paris and Lyons in 1632, and Bordeaux against the increase of customs in
1635. In 1636 the _Croquants_ ravaged Limousin, Poitou, Angoumois,
Gascony and Périgord; in 1639 it needed an army to subdue the
_Va-nu-pieds_ (bare-feet) in Normandy. Even the _rentiers_ of the
Hôtel-de-Ville, big and little, usually very peaceable folk, were
excited by the curtailment of their incomes, and in 1639 and 1642 were
roused to fury.
Struggle with the Protestants.
Every one had to bend before this harsh genius, who insisted on
uniformity in obedience. After the feudal vassals, decimated by the wars
of religion and the executioner's hand, and after the recalcitrant
taxpayers, the Protestants, in their turn, and by their own fault,
experienced this. While Richelieu was opposing the designs of the pope
and of the Spaniards in the Valtellina, while he was arming the duke of
Savoy and subsidizing Mansfeld in Germany, Henri, duc de Rohan, and his
brother Benjamin de Rohan, duc de Soubise, the Protestant chiefs, took
the initiative in a fresh revolt despite the majority of their party
(1625). This Huguenot rising, in stirring up which Spanish diplomacy had
its share, was a revolt of discontented and ambitious individuals who
trusted for success to their compact organization and the ultimate
assistance of England. Under pressure of this new danger and urged on by
the Catholic _dévôts_, supported by the influence of Pope Urban VIII.,
Richelieu concluded with Spain the treaty of Monzon (March 5, 1626), by
which the interests of his allies Venice, Savoy and the Grisons were
sacrificed without their being consulted. The Catholic Valtellina, freed
from the claims of the Protestant Grisons, became an independent state
under the joint protection of France and Spain; the question of the
right of passage was left open, to trouble France during the campaigns
that followed; but the immediate gain, so far as Richelieu was
concerned, was that his hands were freed to deal with the Huguenots.
Soubise had begun the revolt (January 1625) by seizing Port Blavet in
Brittany, with the royal squadron that lay there, and in command of the
ships thus acquired, combined with those of La Rochelle, he ranged the
western coast, intercepting commerce. In September, however, Montmorency
succeeded, with a fleet of English and Dutch ships manned by English
seamen, in defeating Soubise, who took refuge in England. La Rochelle
was now invested, the Huguenots were hard pressed also on land, and, but
for the reluctance of the Dutch to allow their ships to be used for such
a purpose, an end might have been made of the Protestant opposition in
France; as it was, Richelieu was forced to accept the mediation of
England and conclude a treaty with the Huguenots (February 1626).
Peace of Alais, 1629.
He was far, however, from forgiving them for their attitude or being
reconciled to their power. So long as they retained their compact
organization in France he could undertake no successful action abroad,
and the treaty was in effect no more than a truce that was badly
observed. The oppression of the French Protestants was but one of the
pretexts for the English expedition under James I.'s favourite, the duke
of Buckingham, to La Rochelle in 1627; and, in the end, this
intervention of a foreign power compromised their cause. When at last
the citizens of the great Huguenot stronghold, caught between two
dangers, chose what seemed to them the least and threw in their lot with
the English, they definitely proclaimed their attitude as anti-national;
and when, on the 29th of October 1628, after a heroic resistance, the
city surrendered to the French king, this was hailed not as a victory
for Catholicism only, but for France. The taking of La Rochelle was a
crushing blow to the Huguenots, and the desperate alliance which Rohan,
entrenched in the Cévennes, entered into with Philip IV. of Spain, could
not prolong their resistance. The amnesty of Alais, prudent and moderate
in religious matters, gave back to the Protestants their common rights
within the body politic. Unfortunately what was an end for Richelieu was
but a first step for the Catholic party.
Richelieu and the Catholics.
The little Protestant group eliminated, Richelieu next wished to
establish Catholic religious uniformity; for though in France the
Catholic Church was the state church, unity did not exist in it. There
were no fixed principles in the relations between king and church, hence
incessant conflicts between Gallicans and Ultramontanes, in which
Richelieu claimed to hold an even balance. Moreover, a Catholic movement
for religious reform in the Church of France began during the 17th
century, marked by the creation of seminaries, the foundation of new
orthodox religious orders, and the organization of public relief by
Saint Vincent de Paul. Jansenism was the most vigorous contemporary
effort to renovate not only morals but Church doctrine (see JANSENISM).
But Richelieu had no love for innovators, and showed this very plainly
to du Vergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint Cyran, who was imprisoned at
Vincennes for the good of Church and State. In affairs of intellect
dragooning was equally the policy; and, as Corneille learnt to his cost,
the French Academy was created in 1635 simply to secure in the republic
of letters the same unity and conformity to rules that was enforced in
the state.
Destruction of public spirit.
Before Richelieu, there had been no effective monarchy and no
institutions for controlling affairs; merely advisory institutions which
collaborated somewhat vaguely in the administration of the kingdom. Had
the king been willing these might have developed further; but Richelieu
ruthlessly suppressed all such growth, and they remained embryonic.
According to him, the king must decide in secret, and the king's will
must be law. No one might meddle in political affairs, neither
parlements nor states-general; still less had the public any right to
judge the actions of the government. Between 1631 and the edict of
February 1641 Richelieu strove against the continually renewed
opposition of the parlements to his system of special commissions and
judgments; in 1641 he refused them any right of interference in state
affairs; at most would he consent occasionally to take counsel with
assemblies of notables. Provincial and municipal liberties were no
better treated when through them the king's subjects attempted to break
loose from the iron ring of the royal commissaries and intendants. In
Burgundy, Dijon saw her municipal liberties restricted in 1631; the
provincial assembly of Dauphiné was suppressed from 1628 onward, and
that of Languedoc in 1629; that of Provence was in 1639 replaced by
communal assemblies, and that of Normandy was prorogued from 1639 to
1642. Not that Richelieu was hostile to them in principle; but he was
obliged at all hazards to find money for the upkeep of the army, and the
provincial states were a slow and heavy machine to put in motion.
Through an excessive reaction against the disintegration that had
menaced the kingdom after the dissolution of the League, he fell into
the abuse of over-centralization; and depriving the people of the habit
of criticizing governmental action, he taught them a fatal acquiescence
in uncontrolled and undisputed authority. Like one of those physical
forces which tend to reduce everything to a dead level, he battered down
alike characters and fortresses; and in his endeavours to abolish
faction, he killed that public spirit which, formed in the 16th century,
had already produced the _République_ of Bodin, de Thou's _History of
his Times_, La Boetie's _Contre un_, the _Satire Ménippée_, and Sully's
_Économies royales_.
Methods employed by Richelieu.
In order to establish this absolute despotism Richelieu created no new
instruments, but made use of a revolutionary institution of the 16th
century, namely "intendants" (q.v.), agents who were forerunners of the
commissaries of the Convention, gentlemen of the long robe of inferior
condition, hated by every one, and for that reason the more trustworthy.
He also drew most of the members of his special commissions from the
grand council, a supreme administrative tribunal which owed all its
influence to him.
The results.
However, having accomplished all these great things, the treasury was
left empty and the reforms were but ill-established; for Richelieu's
policy increased poverty, neglected the toiling and suffering peasants,
deserted the cause of the workers in order to favour the privileged
classes, and left idle and useless that bourgeoisie whose intellectual
activity, spirit of discipline, and civil and political culture would
have yielded solid support to a monarchy all the stronger for being
limited. Richelieu completed the work of Francis I.; he endowed France
with the fatal tradition of autocracy. This priest by education and by
turn of mind was indifferent to material interests, which were secondary
in his eyes; he could organize neither finance, nor justice, nor an
army, nor the colonies, but at the most a system of police. His method
was not to reform, but to crush. He was great chiefly in negotiation,
the art _par excellence_ of ecclesiastics. His work was entirely abroad;
there it had more continuity, more future, perhaps because only in his
foreign policy was he unhampered in his designs. He sacrificed
everything to it; but he ennobled it by the genius and audacity of his
conceptions, by the energetic tension of all the muscles of the body
politic.
External policy of Richelieu.
The Thirty Years' War in fact dominated all Richelieu's foreign policy;
by it he made France and unmade Germany. It was the support of Germany
which Philip II. had lacked in order to realize his Catholic empire; and
the election of the archduke Ferdinand II. of Styria as emperor gave
that support to his Spanish cousins (1619). Thenceforward all the forces
of the Habsburg monarchy would be united, provided that communication
could be maintained in the north with the Netherlands and in the south
with the duchy of Milan, so that there should be no flaw in the iron
vice which locked France in on either side. It was therefore Of the
highest importance to France that she should dominate the valleys of the
Alps and Rhine. As soon as Richelieu became minister in 1624 there was
an end to cordial relations with Spain. He resumed the policy of Henry
IV., confining his military operations to the region of the Alps, and
contenting himself at first with opposing the coalition of the Habsburgs
with a coalition of Venice, the Turks, Bethlen Gabor, king of Hungary,
and the Protestants of Germany and Denmark. But the revolts of the
French Protestants, the resentment of the nobles at his dictatorial
power, and the perpetual ferment of intrigues and treason in the court,
obliged him almost immediately to draw back. During these eight years,
however, Richelieu had pressed on matters as fast as possible.
Temporizing policy, except in Italy, 1624-1630.
While James I. of England was trying to get a general on the cheap in
Denmark to defend his son-in-law, the elector palatine, Richelieu was
bargaining with the Spaniards in the treaty of Monzon (March 1626); but
as the strained relations between France and England forced him to
conciliate Spain still further by the treaty of April 1627, the
Spaniards profited by this to carry on an intrigue with Rohan, and in
concert with the duke of Savoy, to occupy Montferrat when the death of
Vicenzo II. (December 26, 1627) left the succession of Mantua, under
the will of the late duke, to Charles Gonzaga, duke of Nevers, a
Frenchman by education and sympathy. But the taking of La Rochelle
allowed Louis to force the pass of Susa, to induce the duke of Savoy to
treat with him, and to isolate the Spaniards in Italy by a great Italian
league between Genoa, Venice and the dukes of Savoy and Mantua (April
1629). Unlike the Valois, Richelieu only desired to free Italy from
Spain in order to restore her independence.
The fact that the French Protestants in the Cévennes were again in arms
enabled the Habsburgs and the Spaniards to make a fresh attack upon the
Alpine passes; but after the peace of Alais Richelieu placed himself at
the head of forty thousand men, and stirred up enemies everywhere
against the emperor, victorious now over the king of Denmark as in 1621
over the elector palatine. He united Sweden, now reconciled with Poland,
and the Catholic and Protestant electors, disquieted by the edict of
Restitution and the omnipotence of Wallenstein; and he aroused the
United Provinces. But the disaffection of the court and the more extreme
Catholics made it impossible for him as yet to enter upon a struggle
against both Austria and Spain; he was only able to regulate the affairs
of Italy with much prudence. The intervention of Mazarin, despatched by
the pope, who saw no other means of detaching Italy from Spain than by
introducing France into the affair, brought about the signature of the
armistice of Rivalte on the 4th of September 1630, soon developed into
the peace of Cherasco, which re-established the agreement with the still
fugitive duke of Savoy (June 1631). Under the harsh tyranny of Spain,
Italy was now nothing but a lifeless corpse; young vigorous Germany was
better worth saving. So Richelieu's envoys, Brulart de Léon and Father
Joseph, disarmed[32] the emperor at the diet of Regensburg, while at the
same time Louis XIII. kept Casale and Pinerolo, the gates of the Alps.
Lastly, by the treaty of Fontainebleau (May 30th, 1631), Maximilian of
Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, engaged to defend the king of
France against all his enemies, even Spain, with the exception of the
emperor. Thus by the hand of Richelieu a union against Austrian
imperialism was effected between the Bavarian Catholics and the
Protestants who dominated in central and northern Germany.
Richelieu and Gustavus Adolphus.
Twice had Richelieu, by means of the purse and not by force of arms,
succeeded in reopening the passes of the Alps and of the Rhine. The
kingdom at peace and the Huguenot party ruined, he was now able to
engage upon his policy of prudent acquisitions and apparently
disinterested alliances. But Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, called
in by Richelieu and Venice to take the place of the played-out king of
Denmark, brought danger to all parties. He would not be content merely
to serve French interests in Germany, according to the terms of the
secret treaty of Bärwalde (June 1631); but, once master of Germany and
the rich valley of the Rhine, considered chiefly the interests of
Protestantism and Sweden. Neither the prayers nor the threats of
Richelieu, who wished indeed to destroy Spain but not Catholicism, nor
the death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen (1632), could repair the evils
caused by this immoderate ambition. A violent Catholic reaction against
the Protestants ensued; and the union of Spain and the Empire was
consolidated just when that of the Protestants was dissolved at
Nördlingen, despite the efforts of Oxenstierna (September 1634).
Moreover, Wallenstein, who had been urged by Richelieu to set up an
independent kingdom in Bohemia, had been killed on the 23rd of February
1634. In the course of a year Württemberg and Franconia were reconquered
from the Swedes; and the duke of Lorraine, who had taken the side of the
Empire, called in the Spanish and the imperial forces to open the road
to the Netherlands through Franche-Comté.
The French Thirty Years' War.
His allies no longer able to stand alone, Richelieu was obliged to
intervene directly (May 19th, 1635). By the treaty of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye he purchased the army of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar;
by that of Rivoli he united against Spain the dukes of Modena, Parma and
Mantua; he signed an open alliance with the league of Heilbronn, the
United Provinces and Sweden; and after these alliances military
operations began, Marshal de la Force occupying the duchy of Lorraine.
Richelieu attempted to operate simultaneously in the Netherlands by
joining hands with the Dutch, and on the Rhine by uniting with the
Swedes; but the bad organization of the French armies, the double
invasion of the Spaniards as far as Corbie and the imperial forces as far
as the gates of Saint-Jean-de-Losne (1636), and the death of his allies,
the dukes of Hesse-Cassel, Savoy and Mantua at first frustrated his
efforts. A decided success was, however, achieved between 1638 and 1640,
thanks to Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and afterwards to Guébriant, and to the
parallel action of the Swedish generals, Banér, Wrangel and Torstensson.
Richelieu obtained Alsace, Breisach and the forest-towns on the Rhine;
while in the north, thanks to the Dutch and owing to the conquest of
Artois, marshals de la Meilleraye, de Châtillon and de Brézé forced the
barrier of the Netherlands. Turin, the capital of Piedmont, was taken by
Henri de Lorraine, comte d'Harcourt; the alliance with rebellious
Portugal facilitated the occupation of Roussillon and almost the whole of
Catalonia, and Spain was reduced to defending herself; while the
embarrassments of the Habsburgs at Madrid made those of Vienna more
tractable. The diet of Regensburg, under the mediation of Maximilian of
Bavaria, decided in favour of peace with France, and on the 25th of
December 1641 the preliminary settlement at Hamburg fixed the opening of
negotiations to take place at Münster and Osnabrück. Richelieu's death
(December 4, 1642) prevented him from seeing the triumph of his policy,
but it can be judged by its results; in 1624 the kingdom had in the east
only the frontier of the Meuse to defend it from invasion; in 1642 the
whole of Alsace, except Strassburg, was occupied and the Rhine guarded by
the army of Guébriant. Six months later, on the 14th of May 1643, Louis
XIII. rejoined his minister in his true kingdom, the land of shades.
Mazarin, 1643-1661.
But thanks to Mazarin, who completed his work, France gathered in the
harvest sown by Richelieu. At the outset no one believed that the new
cardinal would have any success. Every one expected from Anne of Austria
a change in the government which appeared to be justified by the
persecutions of Richelieu and the disdainful unscrupulousness of Louis
XIII. On the 16th of May the queen took the little four-year-old Louis
XIV. to the parlement of Paris which, proud of playing a part in
politics, hastened, contrary to Louis XIII.'s last will, to acknowledge
the command of the little king, and to give his mother "free, absolute
and entire authority." The great nobles were already looking upon
themselves as established in power, when they learnt with amazement that
the regent had appointed as her chief adviser, not Gaston of Orleans,
but Mazarin. The political revenge which in their eyes was owing to them
as a body, the queen claimed for herself alone, and she made it a
romantic one. This Spaniard of waning charms, who had been neglected by
her husband and insulted by Richelieu, now gave her indolent and
full-blown person, together with absolute power, into the hands of the
Sicilian. Whilst others were triumphing openly, Mazarin, in the shadow
and silence of the interregnum, had kept watch upon the heart of the
queen; and when the old party of Marie de' Medici and Anne of Austria
wished to come back into power, to impose a general peace, and to
substitute for the Protestant alliances an understanding with Spain, the
arrest of François de Vendôme, duke of Beaufort, and the exile of other
important nobles proved to the great families that their hour had gone
by (September 1643).
Treaties of Westphalia.
Mazarin justified Richelieu's confidence and the favour of Anne of
Austria. It was upon his foreign policy that he relied to maintain his
authority within the kingdom. Thanks to him, the duke of Enghien (Louis
de Bourbon, afterwards prince of Condé), appointed commander-in-chief at
the age of twenty-two, caused the downfall of the renowned Spanish
infantry at Rocroi; and he discovered Turenne, whose prudence tempered
Condé's overbold ideas. It was he too who by renewing the traditional
alliances and resuming against Bavaria, Ferdinand III.'s most powerful
ally, the plan of common action with Sweden which Richelieu had sketched
out, pursued it year after year: in 1644 at Freiburg im Breisgau,
despite the death of Guébriant at Rottweil; in 1645 at Nördlingen,
despite the defeat of Marienthal; and in 1646 in Bavaria, despite the
rebellion of the Weimar cavalry; to see it finally triumph at
Zusmarshausen in May 1648. With Turenne dominating the Eiser and the
Inn, Condé victorious at Lens, and the Swedes before the gates of
Prague, the emperor, left without a single ally, finally authorized his
plenipotentiaries to sign on the 24th of October 1648 the peace about
which negotiations had been going on for seven years. Mazarin had stood
his ground notwithstanding the treachery of the duke of Bavaria, the
defection of the United Provinces, the resistance of the Germans, and
the general confusion which was already pervading the internal affairs
of the kingdom.
The dream of the Habsburgs was shattered. They had wished to set up a
centralized empire, Catholic and German; but the treaties of Westphalia
kept Germany in its passive and fragmentary condition; while the
Catholic and Protestant princes obtained formal recognition of their
territorial independence and their religious equality. Thus disappeared
the two principles which justified the Empire's existence; the universal
sovereignty to which it laid claim was limited simply to a German
monarchy much crippled in its powers; and the enfranchisement of the
Lutherans and Calvinists from papal jurisdiction cut the last tie which
bound the Empire to Rome. The victors' material benefits were no less
substantial: the congress of Münster ratified the final cession of the
Three Bishoprics and the conquest of Alsace, and Breisach and
Philippsburg completed these acquisitions. The Spaniards had no longer
any hope of adding Luxemburg to their Franche-Comté; while the Holy
Roman Empire in Germany, taken in the rear by Sweden (now mistress of
the Baltic and the North Sea), cut off for good from the United
Provinces and the Swiss cantons, and enfeebled by the recognized right
of intervention in German affairs on the part of Sweden and France, was
now nothing but a meaningless name.
Mazarin had not been so fortunate in Italy, where in 1642 the Spanish
remained masters. Venice, the duchy of Milan and the duke of Modena were
on his side; the pope and the grand-duke of Tuscany were trembling, but
the romantic expedition of the duke of Guise to Naples, and the outbreak
of the Fronde, saved Spain, who had refused to take part in the treaties
of Westphalia and whose ruin Mazarin wished to compass.
State of the kingdom.
It was, however, easier for Mazarin to remodel the map of Europe than to
govern France. There he found himself face to face with all the
difficulties that Richelieu had neglected to solve, and that were now
once more giving trouble. The _Lit de Justice_ of the 18th of May 1643
had proved authority to remain still so personal an affair that the
person of the king, insignificant though that was, continued to be
regarded as its absolute depositary. Thus regular obedience to an
abstract principle was under Mazarin as incomprehensible to the idle and
selfish nobility as it had been under Richelieu. The parlement still
kept up the same extra-judicial pretensions; but beyond its judicial
functions it acted merely as a kind of town-crier to the monarchy,
charged with making known the king's edicts. Yet through its right of
remonstrance it was the only body that could legally and publicly
intervene in politics; a large and independent body, moreover, which had
its own demands to make upon the monarchy and its ministers. Richelieu,
by setting his special agents above the legal but complicated machinery
of financial administration, had so corrupted it as to necessitate
radical reform; all the more so because financial charges had been
increased to a point far beyond what the nation could bear. With four
armies to keep up, the insurrection in Portugal to maintain, and
pensions to serve the needs of the allies, the burden had become a
crushing one.
Richelieu and Mazarin.
Richelieu had been able to surmount these difficulties because he
governed in the name of a king of full age, and against isolated
adversaries; while Mazarin had the latter against him in a coalition
which had lasted ten years, with the further disadvantages of his
foreign origin and a royal minority at a time when every one was sick of
government by ministers. He was the very opposite of Richelieu, as
wheedling in his ways as the other had been haughty and scornful, as
devoid of vanity and rancour as Richelieu had been full of jealous care
for his authority; he was gentle where the other had been passionate and
irritable, with an intelligence as great and more supple, and a far more
grasping nature.
Financial difficulties.
It was the fiscal question that arrayed against Mazarin a coalition of
all petty interests and frustrated ambitions; this was always the
Achilles' heel of the French monarchy, which in 1648 was at the last
extremity for money. All imposts were forestalled, and every expedient
for obtaining either direct or indirect taxes had been exhausted by the
methods of the financiers. As the country districts could yield nothing
more, it became necessary to demand money from the Parisians and from
the citizens of the various towns, and to search out and furbish up old
disused edicts--edicts as to measures and scales of prices--at the very
moment when the luxury and corruption of the _parvenus_ was insulting
the poverty and suffering of the people, and exasperating all those
officials who took their functions seriously.
Rebellion of the parlement.
A storm burst forth in the parlement against Mazarin as the patron of
these expedients, the occasion for this being the edict of redemption by
which the government renewed for nine years the "Paulette" which had now
expired, by withholding four years' salary from all officers of the
Great Council, of the _Chambres des comptes_, and of the _Cour des
aides_. The parlement, although expressly exempted, associated itself
with their protest by the decree of union of May 13, 1648, and
deliberations in a body upon the reform of the state. Despite the
queen's express prohibition, the insurrectionary assembly of the Chambre
Saint Louis criticized the whole financial system, founded as it was
upon usury, claimed the right of voting taxes, respect for individual
liberty, and the suppression of the intendants, who were a menace to the
new bureaucratic feudalism. The queen, haughty and exasperated though
she was, yielded for the time being, because the invasion of the
Spaniards in the north, the arrest of Charles I. of England, and the
insurrection of Masaniello at Naples made the moment a critical one for
monarchies; but immediately after the victory at Lens she attempted a
_coup d'état_, arresting the leaders, and among them Broussel, a popular
member of the parlement (August 26, 1648). Paris at once rose in
revolt--a Paris of swarming and unpoliced streets, that had been making
French history ever since the reign of Henry IV., and that had not
forgotten the barricades of the League. Once more a pretence of yielding
had to be made, until Condé's arrival enabled the court to take refuge
at Saint-Germain (January 15, 1649).
The Fronde (1648-1652).
Civil war now began against the rebellious coalition of great nobles,
lawyers of the parlement, populace, and mercenaries just set free from
the Thirty Years' War. It lasted four years, for motives often as futile
as the Grande Mademoiselle's ambition to wed little Louis XIV., Cardinal
de Retz's red hat, or Madame de Longueville's stool at the queen's side;
it was, as its name of _Fronde_ indicates, a hateful farce, played by
grown-up children, in several acts.
The Fronde of the Parlement.
Its first and shortest phase was the Fronde of the Parlement. At a
period when all the world was a little mad, the parlement had imagined a
loyalist revolt, and, though it raised an armed protest, this was not
against the king but against Mazarin and the persons to whom he had
delegated power. But the parlement soon became disgusted with its
allies--the princes and nobles, who had only drawn their swords in order
to beg more effectively with arms in their hands; and the Parisian mob,
whose fanaticism had been aroused by Paul de Gondi, a warlike
ecclesiastic, a Catiline in a cassock, who preached the gospel at the
dagger's point. When a suggestion was made to the parlement to receive
an envoy from Spain, the members had no hesitation in making terms with
the court by the peace of Rueil (March 11, 1649), which ended the first
Fronde.
The Fronde of the Princes.
As an _entr'acte_, from April 1649 to January 1650, came the affair of
the _Petits Maîtres_: Condé, proud and violent; Gaston of Orleans,
pliable and contemptible; Conti, the simpleton; and Longueville, the
betrayed husband. The victor of Lens and Charenton imagined that every
one was under an obligation to him, and laid claim to a dictatorship so
insupportable that Anne of Austria and Mazarin--assured by Gondi of the
concurrence of the parlement and people--had him arrested. To defend
Condé the great conspiracy of women was formed: Madame de Chevreuse, the
subtle and impassioned princess palatine, and the princess of Condé
vainly attempted to arouse Normandy, Burgundy and the mob of Bordeaux;
while Turenne, bewitched by Madame de Longueville, allowed himself to
become involved with Spain and was defeated at Rethel (December 15,
1650). Unfortunately, after his custom when victor, Mazarin forgot his
promises--above all, Gondi's cardinal's hat. A union was effected
between the two Frondes, that of the Petits Maîtres and that of the
parlements, and Mazarin was obliged to flee for safety to the electorate
of Cologne (February 1651), whence he continued to govern the queen and
the kingdom by means of secret letters. But the heads of the two
Frondes--Condé, now set free from prison at Havre, and Gondi who
detested him--were not long in quarrelling fatally. Owing to Mazarin's
exile and to the king's attainment of his majority (September 5, 1651)
quiet was being restored, when the return of Mazarin, jealous of Anne of
Austria, nearly brought about another reconciliation of all his
opponents (January 1652). Condé resumed civil war with the support of
Spain, because he was not given Mazarin's place; but though he defeated
the royal army at Bléneau, he was surprised at Étampes, and nearly
crushed by Turenne at the gate of Saint-Antoine. Saved, however, by the
Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston of Orleans, he lost Paris by the
disaster of the Hôtel de Ville (July 4, 1652), where he had installed an
insurrectionary government. A general weariness of civil war gave plenty
of opportunity after this to the agents of Mazarin, who in order to
facilitate peace made a pretence of exiling himself for a second time to
Bouillon. Then came the final collapse: Condé having taken refuge in
Spain for seven years, Gaston of Orleans being in exile, Retz in prison,
and the parlement reduced to its judiciary functions only, the field was
left open for Mazarin, who, four months after the king, re-entered in
triumph that Paris which had driven him forth with jeers and mockery
(February 1653).
The administration of Mazarin.
The task was now to repair these four years of madness and folly. The
nobles who had hoped to set up the League again, half counting upon the
king of Spain, were held in check by Mazarin with the golden dowries of
his numerous nieces, and were now employed by him in warfare and in
decorative court functions; while others, De Retz and La Rochefoucauld,
sought consolation in their Memoirs or their Maxims, one for his
mortifications and the other for his rancour as a statesman out of
employment. The parlement, which had confused political power with
judiciary administration, was given to understand, in the session of
April 13, 1655, at Vincennes, that the era of political manifestations
was over; and the money expended by Gourville, Mazarin's agent, restored
the members of the parlement to docility. The power of the state was
confided to middle-class men, faithful servants during the evil days:
Abel Servien, Michel le Tellier, Hugues de Lionne. Like Henry IV. after
the League, Mazarin, after having conquered the Fronde, had to buy back
bit by bit the kingdom he had lost, and, like Richelieu, he spread out a
network of agents, thenceforward regular and permanent, who assured him
of that security without which he could never have carried on his vast
plunderings in peace and quiet. His imitator and superintendent,
Fouquet, the Maecenas of the future Augustus, concealed this gambling
policy beneath the lustre of the arts and the glamour of a literature
remarkable for elevation of thought and vigour of style, and further
characterized by the proud though somewhat restricted freedom conceded
to men like Corneille, Descartes and Pascal, but soon to disappear.
War with Spain.
Peace of the Pyrenees.
It was also necessary to win back from Spain the territory which the
Frondeurs had delivered up to her. Both countries, exhausted by twenty
years of war, were incapable of bringing it to a successful termination,
yet neither would be first to give in; Mazarin, therefore, disquieted by
Condé's victory at Valenciennes (1656), reknit the bond of Protestant
alliances, and, having nothing to expect from Holland, he deprived Spain
of her alliance with Oliver Cromwell (March 23, 1657). A victory in the
Dunes by Turenne, now reinstalled in honour, and above all the conquest
of the Flemish seaboard, were the results (June 1658); but when, in
order to prevent the emperor's intervention in the Netherlands, Mazarin
attempted, on the death of Ferdinand III., to wrest the Empire from the
Habsburgs, he was foiled by the gold of the Spanish envoy Peñaranda
(1657). When the abdication of Christina of Sweden caused a quarrel
between Charles Gustavus of Sweden and John Casimir of Poland, by which
the emperor and the elector of Brandenburg hoped to profit, Mazarin
(August 15, 1658) leagued the Rhine princes against them; while at the
same time the substitution of Pope Alexander VII. for Innocent X., and
the marriage of Mazarin's two nieces with the duke of Modena and a
prince of the house of Savoy, made Spain anxious about her Italian
possessions. The suggestion of a marriage between Louis XIV. and a
princess of Savoy decided Spain, now brought to bay, to accord him the
hand of Maria Theresa as a chief condition of the peace of the Pyrenees
(November 1659). Roussillon and Artois, with a line of strongholds
constituting a formidable northern frontier, were ceded to France; and
the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine under certain conditions was
ratified. Thus from this long duel between the two countries Spain
issued much enfeebled, while France obtained the preponderance in Italy,
Germany, and throughout northern Europe, as is proved by Mazarin's
successful arbitration at Copenhagen and at Oliva (May-June 1660). That
dream of Henry IV. and Richelieu, the ruin of Philip II.'s Catholic
empire, was made a realized fact by Mazarin; but the clever engineer,
dazzled by success, took the wrong road in national policy when he hoped
to crown his work by the Spanish marriage.
Louis XIV. (1661-1715).
The development of events had gradually enlarged the royal prerogative,
and it now came to its full flower in the administrative monarchy of the
17th century. Of this system Louis XIV. was to be the chief exponent.
His reign may be divided into two very distinct periods. The death of
Colbert and the revocation of the edict of Nantes brought the first to a
close (1661-1683-1685); coinciding with the date when the Revolution in
England definitely reversed the traditional system of alliances, and
when the administration began to disorganize. In the second period
(1685-1715) all the germs of decadence were developed until the moment
of final dissolution.
Education of Louis XIV.
In a monarchy so essentially personal the preparation of the heir to the
throne for his position should have been the chief task. Anne of
Austria, a devoted but unintelligent mother, knew no method of dealing
with her son, save devotion combined with the rod. His first preceptors
were nothing but courtiers; and the most intelligent, his valet Laporte,
developed in the royal child's mind his natural instinct of command, a
very lively sense of his rank, and that nobly majestic air of master of
the world which he preserved even in the commonest actions of his life.
The continual agitations of the Fronde prevented him from persevering in
any consistent application during those years which are the most
valuable for study, and only instilled in him a horror of revolution,
parliamentary remonstrance, and disorder of all kinds; so that this
recollection determined the direction of his government. Mazarin, in his
later years, at last taught him his trade as king by admitting him to
the council, and by instructing him in the details of politics and of
administration. In 1661 Louis XIV. was a handsome youth of twenty-two,
of splendid health and gentle serious mien; eager for pleasure, but
discreet and even dissimulating; his rather mediocre intellectual
qualities relieved by solid common sense; fully alive to his rights and
his duties.
His political ideas.
The duties he conscientiously fulfilled, but he considered he need
render no account of them to any one but his Maker, the last humiliation
for God's vicegerent being "to take the law from his people." In the
solemn language of the "Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin" he
did but affirm the arbitrary and capricious character of his
predecessors' action. As for his rights, Louis XIV. looked upon these as
plenary and unlimited. Representative of God upon earth, heir to the
sovereignty of the Roman emperors, a universal suzerain and master over
the goods and the lives of his vassals, he could conceive no other
bounds to his authority than his own interests or his obligations
towards God, and in this he was a willing believer of Bossuet. He
therefore had but two aims: to increase his power at home and to enlarge
his kingdom abroad. The army and taxation were the chief instruments of
his policy. Had not Bodin, Hobbes and Bossuet taught that the force
which gives birth to kingdoms serves best also to feed and sustain them?
His theory of the state, despite Grotius and Jurieu, rejected as odious
and even impious the notion of any popular rights, anterior and superior
to his own. A realist in principle, Louis XIV. was terribly utilitarian
and egotistical in practice; and he exacted from his subjects an
absolute, continual and obligatory self-abnegation before his public
authority, even when improperly exercised.
The forms of Louis XIV.'s monarchy.
This deified monarch needed a new temple, and Versailles, where
everything was his creation, both men and things, adored its maker. The
highest nobility of France, beginning with the princes of the blood,
competed for posts in the royal household, where an army of ten thousand
soldiers, four thousand servants, and five thousand horses played its
costly and luxurious part in the ordered and almost religious pageant of
the king's existence. The "_anciennes cohues de France_," gay, familiar
and military, gave place to a stilted court life, a perpetual adoration,
a very ceremonious and very complicated ritual, in which the demigod
"pontificated" even "in his dressing-gown." To pay court to himself was
the first and only duty in the eyes of a proud and haughty prince who
saw and noted everything, especially any one's absence. Versailles,
where the delicate refinements of Italy and the grave politeness of
Spain were fused and mingled with French vivacity, became the centre of
national life and a model for foreign royalties; hence if Versailles has
played a considerable part in the history of civilization, it also
seriously modified the life of France. Etiquette and self-seeking became
the chief rules of a courtier's life, and this explains the division of
the nobility into two sections: the provincial squires, embittered by
neglect; and the courtiers, who were ruined materially and
intellectually by their way of living. Versailles sterilized all the
idle upper classes, exploited the industrious classes by its
extravagance, and more and more broke relations between king and
kingdom.
Louis XIV.'s ministers.
Royal despotism.
But however divine, the king could not wield his power unaided. Louis
XIV. called to his assistance a hierarchy of humbly submissive
functionaries, and councils over which he regularly presided. Holding
the very name of _roi fainéant_ in abhorrence, he abolished the office
of mayor of the palace--that is to say, the prime minister--thus
imposing upon himself work which he always regularly performed. In
choosing his collaborators his principle was never to select nobles or
ecclesiastics, but persons of inferior birth. Neither the immense
fortunes amassed by these men, nor the venality and robust vitality
which made their families veritable races of ministers, altered the fact
that De Lionne, Le Tellier, Louvois and Colbert were in themselves of no
account, even though the parts they played were much more important than
Louis XIV. imagined. This was the age of plebeians, to the great
indignation of the duke and peer Saint Simon. Mere reflected lights,
these satellites professed to share their master's honor of all
individual and collective rights of such a nature as to impose any check
upon his public authority. Louis XIV. detested the states-general and
never convoked them, and the parlements were definitely reduced to
silence in 1673; he completed the destruction of municipal liberties,
under pretext of bad financial administration; suffered no public, still
less private criticism; was ruthless when his exasperated subjects had
recourse to force; and made the police the chief bulwark of his
government. Prayers and resignation were the only solace left for the
hardships endured by his subjects. All the ties of caste, class,
corporation and family were severed; the jealous despotism of Louis XIV.
destroyed every opportunity of taking common action; he isolated every
man in private life, in individual interests, just as he isolated
himself more and more from the body social. Freedom he tolerated for
himself alone.
Louis XIV. and the Church.
Declaration of the Four Articles.
His passion for absolutism made him consider himself master of souls as
well as bodies, and Bossuet did nothing to contravene an opinion which
was, indeed, common to every sovereign of his day. Louis XIV., like
Philip II., pretending to not only political but religious authority,
would not allow the pope to share it, still less would he abide any
religious dissent; and this gave rise to many conflicts, especially with
the pope, at that time a temporal sovereign both at Rome and at Avignon,
and as the head of Christendom bound to interfere in the affairs of
France. Louis XIV.'s pride caused the first struggle, which turned
exclusively upon questions of form, as in the affair of the Corsican
Guard in 1662. The question of the right of _regale_ (right of the Crown
to the revenues of vacant abbeys and bishoprics), which touched the
essential rights of sovereignty, further inflamed the hostility between
Innocent XI. and Louis XIV. Conformably with the traditions of the
administrative monarchy in 1673, the king wanted to extend to the new
additions to the kingdom his rights of receiving the revenues of vacant
bishoprics and making appointments to their benefices, including taking
oaths of fidelity from the new incumbents. A protest raised by the
bishops of Pamiers and Aleth, followed by the seizure of their revenues,
provoked the intervention of Innocent XI. in 1678; but the king was
supported by the general assembly of the clergy, which declared that,
with certain exceptions, the _regale_ extended over the whole kingdom
(1681). The pope ignored the decisions of the assembly; so, dropping the
_regale_, the king demanded that, to obviate further conflict, the
assembly should define the limits of the authority due respectively to
the king, the Church and the pope. This was the object of the
Declaration of the Four Articles: the pope has no power in temporal
matters; general councils are superior to the pope in spiritual affairs;
the rules of the Church of France are inviolable; decisions of the pope
in matters of faith are only irrevocable by consent of the Church. The
French laity transferred to the king this quasi-divine authority, which
became the political theory of the _ancien régime_; and since the pope
refused to submit, or to institute the new bishops, the Sorbonne was
obliged to interfere. The affair of the "diplomatic prerogatives," when
Louis XIV. was decidedly in the wrong, made relations even more strained
(1687), and the idea of a schism was mooted with greater insistence than
in 1681. The death of Innocent XI. in 1689 allowed Louis XIV. to engage
upon negotiations rendered imperative by his check in the affair of the
Cologne bishopric, where his candidate was ousted by the pope's. In
1693, under the pontificate of Innocent XII., he went, like so many
others, to Canossa.
Recipient now of immense ecclesiastical revenues, which, owing to the
number of vacant benefices, constituted a powerful engine of government,
Louis XIV. had immense power over the French Church. Religion began to
be identified with the state; and the king combated heresy and dissent,
not only as a religious duty, but as a matter of political expediency,
unity of faith being obviously conducive to unity of law.
Louis XIV. and the Protestants.
Suppression of the edict of Nantes (1685).
Richelieu having deprived the Protestants of all political guarantees
for their liberty of conscience, an anti-Protestant party (directed by
a cabal of religious devotees, the _Compagnie du Saint Sacrement_)
determined to suppress it completely by conversions and by a jesuitical
interpretation of the terms of the edict of Nantes. Louis XIV. made this
impolitic policy his own. His passion for absolutism, a religious zeal
that was the more active because it had to compensate for many affronts
to public and private morals, the financial necessity of augmenting the
free donations of the clergy, and the political necessity of relying
upon that body in his conflicts with the pope, led the king between 1661
and 1685 to embark upon a double campaign of arbitrary proceedings with
the object of nullifying the edict, conversions being procured either by
force or by bribery. The promulgation and application of systematic
measures from above had a response from below, from the corporation, the
urban workshop, and the village street, which supported ecclesiastical
and royal authority in its suppression of heresy, and frequently even
went further: individual and local fanaticism co-operating with the head
of the state, the _intendants_, and the military and judiciary
authorities. Protestants were successively removed from the
states-general, the consulates, the town councils, and even from the
humblest municipal offices; they were deprived of the charge of their
hospitals, their academies, their colleges and their schools, and were
left to ignorance and poverty; while the intolerance of the clergy
united with chicanery of procedure to invade their places of worship,
insult their adherents, and put a stop to the practice of their ritual.
Pellisson's methods of conversion, considered too slow, were accelerated
by the violent persecution of Louvois and by the king's galleys, until
the day came when Louis XIV., deceived by the clergy, crowned his record
of complaisant legal methods by revoking the edict of Nantes. This was
the signal for a Huguenot renaissance, and the Camisards of the Cévennes
held the royal armies in check from 1703 to 1711. Notwithstanding this,
however, Louis XIV. succeeded only too well, since Protestantism was
reduced both numerically and intellectually. He never perceived how its
loss threw France back a full century, to the great profit of foreign
nations; while neither did the Church perceive that she had been firing
on her own troops.
Louis XIV. and the Jansenists.
The same order of ideas produced the persecution of the Jansenists, as
much a political as a religious sect. Founded by a bishop of Ypres on
the doctrine of predestination, and growing by persecution, it had
speedily recruited adherents among the disillusioned followers of the
Fronde, the Gallican clergy, the higher nobility, even at court, and
more important still, among learned men and thinkers, such as the great
Arnauld, Pascal and Racine. Pure and austere, it enjoined the strictest
morals in the midst of corruption, and the most dignified self-respect
in face of idolatrous servility. Amid general silence it was a
formidable and much dreaded body of opinion; and in order to stifle it
Louis XIV., the tool of his confessor, the Jesuit Le Tellier, made use
of his usual means. The nuns of Port Royal were in their turn subjected
to persecution, which, after a truce between 1666 and 1679, became
aggravated by the affair of the _regale_, the bishops of Aleth and
Pamiers being Jansenists. Port Royal was destroyed, the nuns dispersed,
and the ashes of the dead scattered to the four winds. The bull
_Unigenitus_ launched by Pope Clement XI. in 1713 against a Jansenist
book by Father Quesnel rekindled a quarrel, the end of which Louis XIV.
did not live to see, and which raged throughout the 18th century.
Louis XIV. and the Libertins.
Bossuet, Louis XIV.'s mouthpiece, triumphed in his turn over the
quietism of Madame Guyon, a mystic who recognized neither definite
dogmas nor formal prayers, but abandoned herself "to the torrent of the
forces of God." Fénelon, who in his _Maximes des Saints_ had given his
adherence to her doctrine, was obliged to submit in 1699; but Bossuet
could not make the spirit of authority prevail against the religious
criticism of a Richard Simon or the philosophical polemics of a Bayle.
He might exile their persons; but their doctrines, supported by the
scientific and philosophic work of Newton and Leibnitz, were to triumph
over Church and religion in the 18th century.
The chaos of the administrative system caused difficulties no less great
than those produced by opinions and creeds. Traditional rights,
differences of language, provincial autonomy, ecclesiastical assemblies,
parlements, governors, intendants--vestiges of the past, or promises for
the future--all jostled against and thwarted each other. The central
authority had not yet acquired a vigorous constitution, nor destroyed
all the intermediary authorities. Colbert now offered his aid in making
Louis XIV. the sole pivot of public life, as he had already become the
source of religious authority, thanks to the Jesuits and to Bossuet.
Colbert.
Colbert, an agent of Le Tellier, the honest steward of Mazarin's
dishonest fortunes, had a future opened to him by the fall of Fouquet
(1661). Harsh and rough, he compelled admiration for his delight in
work, his aptitude in disentangling affairs, his desire of continually
augmenting the wealth of the state, and his regard for the public
welfare without forgetting his own. Born in a draper's shop, this great
administrator always preserved its narrow horizon, its short-sighted
imagination, its taste for detail, and the conceit of the parvenu; while
with his insinuating ways, and knowing better than Fouquet how to keep
his distance, he made himself indispensable by his _savoir-faire_ and
his readiness for every emergency. He gradually got everything into his
control: finance, industry, commerce, the fine arts, the navy and
colonies, the administration, even the fortifications, and--through his
uncle Pussort--the law, with all the profits attaching to its offices.
Colbert and finance.
His first care was to restore the exhausted resources of the country and
to re-establish order in finance. He began by measures of liquidation:
the _Chambre ardente_ of 1661 to 1665 to deal with the farmers of the
revenue, the condemnation of Fouquet, and a revision of the funds. Next,
like a good man of business, Colbert determined that the state accounts
should be kept as accurately as those of a shop; but though in this
respect a great minister, he was less so in his manner of levying
contributions. He kept to the old system of revenues from the demesne
and from imposts that were reactionary in their effect, such as the
_taille_, aids, salt-tax (_gabelle_) and customs; only he managed them
better. His forest laws have remained a model. He demanded less of the
_taille_, a direct impost, and more from indirect aids, of which he
created the code--not, however, out of sympathy for the common people,
towards whom he was very harsh, but because these aids covered a greater
area and brought in larger returns. He tried to import more method into
the very unequal distribution of taxation, less brutality in collection,
less confusion in the fiscal machine, and more uniformity in the matter
of rights; while he diminished the debts of the much-involved towns by
putting them through the bankruptcy court. With revolutionary intentions
as to reform, this only ended, after several years of normal budgets, in
ultimate frustration. He could never make the rights over the drink
traffic uniform and equal, nor restrict privileges in the matter of the
_taille_; while he was soon much embarrassed, not only by the coalition
of particular interests and local immunities, which made despotism
acceptable by tempering it, but also by Louis XIV.'s two master-passions
for conquest and for building. To his great chagrin he was obliged to
begin borrowing again in 1672, and to have recourse to "_affaires
extraordinaires_"; and this brought him at last to his grave.
Colbert and industry.
Order was for Colbert the prime condition of work. He desired all France
to set to work as he did "with a contented air and rubbing his hands for
joy"; but neither general theories nor individual happiness preoccupied
his attention. He made economy truly political: that is to say, the
prosperity of industry and commerce afforded him no other interest than
that of making the country wealthy and the state powerful. Louis XIV.'s
aspirations towards glory chimed in very well with the extremely
positive views of his minister; but here too Colbert was an innovator
and an unsuccessful one. He wanted to give 17th-century France the
modern and industrial character which the New World had imprinted on the
maritime states; and he created industry on a grand scale with an energy
of labour, a prodigious genius for initiative and for organization;
while, in order to attract a foreign clientèle, he imposed upon it the
habits of meticulous probity common to a middle-class draper. But he
maintained the legislation of the Valois, who placed industry in a state
of strict dependency on finance, and he instituted a servitude of labour
harder even than that of individuals; his great factories of soap,
glass, lace, carpets and cloth had the same artificial life as that of
contemporary Russian industry, created and nourished by the state. It
was therefore necessary, in order to compensate for the fatal influence
of servitude, that administrative protection should be lavished without
end upon the royal manufactures; moreover, in the course of its
development, industry on a grand scale encroached in many ways upon the
resources of smaller industries. After Colbert's day, when the crutches
lent by privilege were removed, his achievements lost vigour; industries
that ministered to luxury alone escaped decay; the others became
exhausted in struggling against the persistent and teasing opposition of
the municipal bodies and the bourgeoisie--conceited, ignorant and
terrified at any innovation--and against the blind and intolerant policy
of Louis XIV.
Colbert and commerce.
Colbert, in common with all his century, believed that the true secret
of commerce and the indisputable proof of a country's prosperity was to
sell as many of the products of national industry to the foreigner as
possible, while purchasing as little as possible. In order to do this,
he sometimes figured as a free-trader and sometimes as a protectionist,
but always in a practical sense; if he imposed prohibitive tariffs, in
1664 and 1667, he also opened the free ports of Marseilles and Dunkirk,
and engineered the _Canal du midi_. But commerce, like industry, was
made to rely only on the instigation of the state, by the intervention
of officials; here, as throughout the national life, private initiative
was kept in subjection and under suspicion. Once more Colbert failed;
with regard to internal affairs, he was unable to unify weights and
measures, or to suppress the many custom-houses which made France into a
miniature Europe; nor could he in external affairs reform the consulates
of the Levant. He did not understand that, in order to purge the body of
the nation from its traditions of routine, it would be necessary to
reawaken individual energy in France. He believed that the state, or
rather the bureaucracy, might be the motive power of national activity.
Colbert and the colonies.
His colonial and maritime policy was the newest and most fruitful part
of his work. He wished to turn the eyes of contemporary adventurous
France towards her distant interests, the wars of religion having
diverted her attention from them to the great profit of English and
Dutch merchants. Here too he had no preconceived ideas; the royal and
monopolist companies were never for him an end but a means; and after
much experimenting he at length attained success. In the course of
twenty years he created many dependencies of France beyond sea. To her
colonial empire in America he added the greater part of Santo Domingo,
Tobago and Dominica; he restored Guiana; prepared for the acquisition of
Louisiana by supporting Cavelier de la Salle; extended the suzerainty of
the king on the coast of Africa from the Bay of Arguin to the shores of
Sierra Leone, and instituted the first commercial relations with India.
The population of the Antilles doubled; that of Canada quintupled; while
if in 1672 at the time of the war with Holland Louis XIV. had listened
to him, Colbert would have sacrificed his pride to the acquisition of
the rich colonies of the Netherlands. In order to attach and defend
these colonies Colbert created a navy which became his passion; he took
convicts to man the galleys in the Mediterranean, and for the fleet in
the Atlantic he established the system of naval reserve which still
obtains. But, in the 18th century, the monarchy, hypnotized by the
classical battlefields of Flanders and Italy, madly squandered the
fruits of Colbert's work as so much material for barter and exchange.
Colbert and the administration.
In the administration, the police and the law, Colbert preserved all the
old machinery, including the inheritance of office. In the great
codification of laws, made under the direction of his uncle Pussort, he
set aside the parlement of Paris, and justice continued to be
ill-administered and cruel. The police, instituted in 1667 by La Reynie,
became a public force independent of magistrates and under the direct
orders of the ministers, making the arbitrary royal and ministerial
authority absolute by means of _lettres de cachet_ (q.v.), which were
very convenient for the government and very terrible for the individuals
concerned.
Provincial administration was no longer modified; it was regularized.
The intendant became the king's factotum, not purchasing his office but
liable to dismissal, the government's confidential agent and the real
repository of royal authority, the governor being only for show (see
INTENDANT).
Ruin of Colbert's work.
Colbert's system went on working regularly up to the year 1675; from
that time forward he was cruelly embarrassed for money, and, seeking new
sources of revenue, begged for subsidies from the assembly of the
clergy. He did not succeed either in stemming the tide of expense, nor
in his administration, being in no way in advance of his age, and not
perceiving that decisive reform could not be achieved by a government
dealing with the nation as though it were inert and passive material,
made to obey and to pay. Like a good Cartesian he conceived of the state
as an immense machine, every portion of which should receive its impulse
from outside--that is from him, Colbert. Leibnitz had not yet taught
that external movement is nothing, and inward spirit everything. As the
minister of an ambitious and magnificent king, Colbert was under the
hard necessity of sacrificing everything to the wars in Flanders and the
pomp of Versailles--a gulf which swallowed up all the country's
wealth;--and, amid a society which might be supposed submissively docile
to the wishes of Louis XIV., he had to retain the most absurd financial
laws, making the burden of taxation weigh heaviest on those who had no
other resources than their labour, whilst landed property escaped free
of charge. Habitual privation during one year in every three drove the
peasants to revolt: in Boulonnais, the Pyrenees, Vivarais, in Guyenne
from 1670 onwards and in Brittany in 1675. Cruel means of repression
assisted natural hardships and the carelessness of the administration in
depopulating and laying waste the countryside; while Louis XIV.'s
martial and ostentatious policy was even more disastrous than pestilence
and famine, when Louvois' advice prevailed in council over that of
Colbert, now embittered and desperate. The revocation of the edict of
Nantes vitiated through a fatal contradiction all the efforts of the
latter to create new manufactures; the country was impoverished for the
benefit of the foreigner to such a point that economic conditions began
to alarm those private persons most noted for their talents, their
character, or their regard for the public welfare; such as La Bruyère
and Fénelon in 1692, Bois-Guillebert in 1697 and Vauban in 1707. The
movement attracted even the ministers, Boulainvilliers at their head,
who caused the intendants to make inquiry into the causes of this
general ruin. There was a volume of attack upon Colbert; but as the
fundamental system remained unchanged, because reform would have
necessitated an attack upon privilege and even upon the constitution of
the monarchy, the evil only went on increasing. The social condition of
the time recalls that of present-day Morocco, in the high price of
necessaries and the extortions of the financial authorities; every man
was either soldier, beggar or smuggler.
Recourse to revolutionary measures.
Under Pontchartrain, Chamillard and Desmarets, the expenses of the two
wars of 1688 and 1701 attained to nearly five milliards. In order to
cover this recourse was had as usual, not to remedies, but to
palliatives worse than the evil: heavy usurious loans, debasement of the
coinage, creation of stocks that were perpetually being converted, and
ridiculous charges which the bourgeois, sickened with officialdom,
would endure no longer. Richelieu himself had hesitated to tax labour;
Louis XIV. trod the trade organizations under foot. It was necessary to
have recourse to revolutionary measures, to direct taxation, ignoring
all class distinction. In 1695 the graduated poll-tax was a veritable
_coup d'état_ against privileged persons, who were equally brought under
the tax; in 1710 was added the tithe (_dixième_), a tax upon income from
all landed property. Money scarce, men too were lacking; the institution
of the militia, the first germ of obligatory enlistment, was a no less
important innovation. But these were only provisionary and desperate
expedients, superposed upon the old routine, a further charge in
addition to those already existing; and this entirely mechanical system,
destructive of private initiative and the very sources of public life,
worked with difficulty even in time of peace. As Louis XIV. made war
continually the result was the same as in Spain under Philip II.:
depopulation and bankruptcy within the kingdom and the coalitions of
Europe without.
Foreign policy of Louis XIV.
In 1660 France was predominant in Europe; but she aroused no jealousy
except in the house of Habsburg, enfeebled and divided against itself.
It was sufficient to remain faithful to the practical policy of Henry
IV., of Richelieu and of Mazarin: that of moderation in strength. This
Louis XIV. very soon altered, while yet claiming to continue it; he
superseded it by one principle: that of replacing the proud tyranny of
the Habsburgs of Spain by another. He claimed to lay down the law
everywhere, in the preliminary negotiations between his ambassador and
the Spanish ambassador in London, in the affair of the salute exacted
from French vessels by the English, and in that of the Corsican guard in
Rome; while he proposed to become the head of the crusade against the
Turks in the Mediterranean as in Hungary.
The eclipse of the great idea of the balance of power in Europe was no
sudden affair; the most flourishing years of the reign were still
enlightened by it: witness the repurchase of Dunkirk from Charles II. in
1662, the cession of the duchies of Bar and of Lorraine and the war
against Portugal. But soon the partial or total conquest of the Spanish
inheritance proved "the grandeur of his beginnings and the meanness of
his end." Like Philip the Fair and like Richelieu, Louis XIV. sought
support for his external policy in that public opinion which in internal
matters he held so cheap; and he found equally devoted auxiliaries in
the jurists of his parlements.
War of Devolution, 1667.
It was thus that the first of his wars for the extension of frontiers
began, the War of Devolution. On the death of his father-in-law, Philip
IV. of Spain, he transferred into the realm of politics a civil custom
of inheritance prevailing in Brabant, and laid claim to Flanders in the
name of his wife Maria Theresa. The Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667), in
which he was by way of supporting the United Provinces without engaging
his fleet, retarded this enterprise by a year. But after his mediation
in the treaty of Breda (July 1667), when Hugues de Lionne, secretary of
state for foreign affairs, had isolated Spain, he substituted soldiers
for the jurists and cannon for diplomacy in the matter of the queen's
rights.
The secretary of state for war, Michel le Tellier, had organized his
army; and thanks to his great activity in reform, especially after the
Fronde, Louis XIV. found himself in possession of an army that was well
equipped, well clothed, well provisioned, and very different from the
rabble of the Thirty Years' War, fitted out by dishonest jobbing
contractors. Severe discipline, suppression of fraudulent interference,
furnishing of clothes and equipment by the king, regulation of rank
among the officers, systematic revictualling of the army, settled means
of manufacturing and furnishing arms and ammunition, placing of the army
under the direct authority of the king, abolition of great military
charges, subordination of the governors of strongholds, control by the
civil authority over the soldiers effected by means of paymasters and
commissaries of stores; all this organization of the royal army was the
work of le Tellier.
His son, François Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois, had one sole
merit, that of being his father's pupil. A parvenu of the middle
classes, he was brutal in his treatment of the lower orders and a
sycophant in his behaviour towards the powerful; prodigiously active,
ill-obeyed--as was the custom--but much dreaded. From 1677 onwards he
did but finish perfecting Louis XIV.'s army in accordance with the
suggestions left by his father, and made no fundamental changes: neither
the definite abandonment of the feudal _arrière-ban_ and of
recruiting--sources of disorder and insubordination--nor the creation of
the militia, which allowed the nation to penetrate into all the ranks of
the army, nor the adoption of the gun with the bayonet,--which was to
become the _ultima ratio_ of peoples as the cannon was that of
sovereigns--nor yet the uniform, intended to strengthen _esprit de
corps_, were due to him. He maintained the institutions of the day,
though seeking to diminish their abuse, and he perfected material
details; but misfortune would have it that instead of remaining a great
military administrator he flattered Louis XIV.'s megalomania, and thus
caused his perdition.
The triple alliance of the Hague.
Under his orders Turenne conquered Flanders (June-August 1667); and as
the queen-mother of Spain would not give in, Condé occupied Franche
Comté in fourteen days (February 1668). But Europe rose up in wrath; the
United Provinces and England, jealous and disquieted by this near
neighbourhood, formed with Sweden the triple alliance of the Hague
(January 1668), ostensibly to offer their mediation, though in reality
to prevent the occupation of the Netherlands. Following the advice of
Colbert and de Lionne, Louis XIV. appeared to accede, and by the treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle he preserved his conquests in Flanders (May 1668).
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.
War with Holland.
Peace of Nijmwegen, 1678.
This peace was neither sufficient nor definite enough for Louis XIV.;
and during four years he employed all his diplomacy to isolate the
republic of the United Provinces in Europe, as he had done for Spain. He
wanted to ruin this nation both in a military and an economic sense, in
order to annex to French Flanders the rest of the Catholic Netherlands
allotted to him by a secret treaty for partitioning the Spanish
possessions, signed with his brother-in-law the emperor Leopold on the
19th of January 1668. Colbert--very envious of Holland's
wealth--prepared the finances, le Tellier the army and de Lionne the
alliances. In vain did the grand-pensionary of the province of Holland,
Jan de Witt, offer concessions of all kinds; both England, bound by the
secret treaty of Dover (January 1670), and France had need of this war.
Avoiding the Spanish Netherlands, Louis XIV. effected the passage of the
Rhine in June 1672; and the disarmed United Provinces, which had on
their side only Brandenburg and Spain, were occupied in a few days. The
brothers de Witt, in consequence of their fresh offer to treat at any
price, were assassinated; the broken dykes of Muiden arrested the
victorious march of Condé and Turenne; while the popular and military
party, directed by the stadtholder William of Orange, took the upper
hand and preached resistance to the death. "The war is over," said the
new secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arnauld de Pomponne; but
Louvois and Louis XIV. said no. The latter wished not only to take
possession of the Netherlands, which were to be given up to him with
half of the United Provinces and their colonial empire; he wanted "to
play the Charlemagne," to re-establish Catholicism in that country as
Philip II. had formerly attempted to do, to occupy all the territory as
far as the Lech, and to exact an annual oath of fealty. But the
patriotism and the religious fanaticism of the Dutch revolted against
this insupportable tyranny. Power had passed from the hands of the
burghers of Amsterdam into those of William of Orange, who on the 30th
of August 1673, profiting by the arrest of the army brought about by the
inundation and by the fears of Europe, joined in a coalition with the
emperor, the king of Spain, the duke of Lorraine, many of the princes of
the Empire, and with England, now at last enlightened as to the projects
of Catholic restoration which Louis XIV. was planning with Charles II.
It was necessary to evacuate and then to settle with the United
Provinces, and to turn against Spain. After fighting for five years
against the whole of Europe by land and by sea, the efforts of Turenne,
Condé and Duquesne culminated at Nijmwegen in fresh acquisitions (1678).
Spain had to cede to Louis XIV., Franche Comté, Dunkirk and half of
Flanders. This was another natural and glorious result of the treaty of
the Pyrenees. The Spanish monarchy was disarmed.
Truce of Ratisbon.
But Louis XIV. had already manifested that unmeasured and restless
passion for glory, that claim to be the exclusive arbiter of western
Europe, that blind and narrow insistence, which were to bear out his
motto _"Seul contre tous."_ Whilst all Europe was disarming he kept his
troops, and used peace as a means of conquest. Under orders from Colbert
de Croissy the jurists came upon the scene once more, and their unjust
decrees were sustained by force of arms. The _Chambres de Réunion_
sought for and joined to the kingdom those lands which were not actually
dependent upon his new conquests, but which had formerly been so: such
as Saarbrücken, Deux Ponts (Zweibrücken) and Montbéliard in 1680,
Strassburg and Casale in 1681. The power of the house of Habsburg was
paralysed by an invasion of the Turks, and Louis XIV. sent 35,000 men
into Belgium; while Luxemburg was occupied by Créqui and Vauban. The
truce of Ratisbon (Regensburg) imposed upon Spain completed the work of
the peace of Nijmwegen (1684); and thenceforward Louis XIV.'s terrified
allies avoided his clutches while making ready to fight him.
William of Orange.
League of Augsburg.
This was the moment chosen by Louis XIV.'s implacable enemy, William of
Orange, to resume the war. His surprise of Marshal Luxembourg near Mons,
after the signature of the peace of Nijmwegen, had proved that in his
eyes war was the basis, of his authority in Holland and in Europe. His
sole arm of support amidst all his allies was not the English monarchy,
sold to Louis XIV., but Protestant England, jealous of France and uneasy
about her independence. Being the husband of the duke of York's
daughter, he had an understanding in this country with Sunderland,
Godolphin and Temple--a party whose success was retarded for several
years by the intrigues of Shaftesbury. But Louis XIV. added mistake to
mistake; and the revocation of the edict of Nantes added religious
hatreds to political jealousies. At the same time the Catholic powers
responded by the league of Augsburg (July 1686) to his policy of
unlimited aggrandisement. The unsuccessful attempts of Louis XIV. to
force his partisan Cardinal Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg (see
FÜRSTENBERG: _House_) into the electoral see of Cologne; the bombardment
of Genoa; the humiliation of the pope in Rome itself by the marquis de
Lavardin; the seizure of the Huguenot emigrants at Mannheim, and their
imprisonment at Vincennes under pretext of a plot, precipitated the
conflict. The question of the succession in the Palatinate, where Louis
XIV. supported the claims of his sister-in-law the duchess of Orleans,
gave the signal for a general war. The French armies devastated the
Palatinate instead of attacking William of Orange in the Netherlands,
leaving him free to disembark at Torbay, usurp the throne of England,
and construct the Grand Alliance of 1689.
War of the Grand Alliance.
Peace of Ryswick.
Far from reserving all his forces for an important struggle elsewhere,
foreshadowed by the approaching death of Charles II. of Spain, Louis
XIV., isolated in his turn, committed the error of wasting it for a
space of ten years in a war of conquest, by which he alienated all that
remained to him of European sympathy. The French armies, notwithstanding
the disappearance of Condé and Turenne, had still glorious days before
them with Luxembourg at Fleurus, at Steenkirk and at Neerwinden
(1690-1693), and with Catinat in Piedmont, at Staffarda, and at
Marsaglia; but these successes alternated with reverses. Tourville's
fleet, victorious at Beachy Head, came to grief at La Hogue (1692); and
though the expeditions to Ireland in favour of James II. were
unsuccessful, thanks to the Huguenot Schomberg, Jean Bart and
Duguay-Trouin ruined Anglo-Dutch maritime commerce. Louis XIV. assisted
in person at the sieges of Mons and Namur, operations for which he had a
liking, because, like Louvois, who died in 1691, he thought little of
the French soldiery in the open field. After three years of strife,
ruinous to both sides, he made the first overtures of peace, thus
marking an epoch in his foreign policy; though William took no unfair
advantage of this, remaining content with the restitution of places
taken by the _Chambres de Réunion_, except Strassburg, with a
frontier-line of fortified places for the Dutch, and with the official
deposition of the Stuarts. But the treaty of Ryswick (1697) marked the
condemnation of the policy pursued since that of Nijmwegen. While
signing this peace Louis XIV. was only thinking of the succession in
Spain. By partitioning her in advance with the other strong powers,
England and Holland, by means of the treaties of the Hague and of London
(1698-1699),--as he had formerly done with the emperor in 1668,--he
seemed at first to wish for a pacific solution of the eternal conflict
between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, and to restrict himself to the
perfecting of his natural frontiers; but on the death of Charles II. of
Spain (1700) he claimed everything in favour of his grandson, the duke
of Anjou, now appointed universal heir, though risking the loss of all
by once more letting himself fall into imprudent and provocative action
in the dynastic interest.
War of the Spanish Succession.
English public opinion, desirous of peace, had forced William III. to
recognize Philip V. of Spain; but Louis XIV.'s maintenance of the
eventual right of his grandson to the crown of France, and the expulsion
of the Dutch, who had not recognized Philip V., from the Barrier towns,
brought about the Grand Alliance of 1701 between the maritime Powers and
the court of Vienna, desirous of partitioning the inheritance of Charles
II. The recognition of the Old Pretender as James III., king of England,
was only a response to the Grand Alliance, but it drew the English
Tories into an inevitable war. Despite the death of William III. (March
19, 1702) his policy triumphed, and in this war, the longest in the
reign, it was the names of the enemy's generals, Prince Eugène of Savoy,
Mazarin's grand-nephew, and the duke of Marlborough, which sounded in
the ear, instead of Condé, Turenne and Luxembourg. Although during the
first campaigns (1701-1703) in Italy, in Germany and in the Netherlands
success was equally balanced, the successors of Villars--thanks to the
treason of the duke of Savoy--were defeated at Höchstädt and Landau, and
were reduced to the defensive (1704). In 1706 the defeats at Ramillies
and Turin led to the evacuation of the Netherlands and Italy, and
endangered the safety of Dauphiné. In 1708 Louis XIV. by a supreme
effort was still able to maintain his armies; but the rout at Oudenarde,
due to the misunderstanding between the duke of Burgundy and Vendôme,
left the northern frontier exposed, and the cannons of the Dutch were
heard at Marly. Louis XIV. had to humble himself to the extent of asking
the Dutch for peace; but they forgot the lesson of 1673, and revolted by
their demands at the Hague, he made a last appeal to arms and to the
patriotism of his subjects at Malplaquet (September 1709). After this
came invasion. Nature herself conspired with the enemy in the disastrous
winter of 1709.
Peace of Utrecht, 1713.
What saved Louis XIV. was not merely his noble constancy of resolve, the
firmness of the marquis de Torcy, secretary of state for foreign
affairs, the victory of Vendôme at Villaviciosa, nor the loyalty of his
people. The interruption of the conferences at Gertruydenberg having
obliged the Whigs and Marlborough to resign their power into the hands
of the Tories, now sick of war, the death of the emperor Joseph I.
(April 1711), which risked the reconstruction of Charles V.'s colossal
and unwieldy monarchy upon the shoulders of the archduke Charles, and
Marshal Villars' famous victory of Denain (July 1712) combined to render
possible the treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden (1713-1714). These
gave Italy and the Netherlands to the Habsburgs, Spain and her colonies
to the Bourbons, the places on the coast and the colonial commerce to
England (who had the lion's share), and a royal crown to the duke of
Savoy and the elector of Brandenburg. The peace of Utrecht was to
France what the peace of Westphalia had been to Austria, and curtailed
the former acquisitions of Louis XIV.
End of Louis XIV.'s reign.
The ageing of the great king was betrayed not only by the fortune of war
in the hands of Villeroy, la Feuillade, or Marsin; disgrace and misery
at home were worse than defeat. By the strange and successive deaths of
the Grand Dauphin (1711), the duke and duchess of Burgundy (1712)--who
had been the only joy of the old monarch--and of his two grandsons
(1712-1714), it seemed as though his whole family were involved under
the same curse. The court, whose sentimental history has been related by
Madame de la Fayette, its official splendours by Loret, and its
intrigues by the duc de Saint-Simon, now resembled an infirmary of
morose invalids, presided over by Louis XIV.'s elderly wife, Madame de
Maintenon, under the domination of the Jesuit le Tellier. Neither was it
merely the clamours of the people that arose against the monarch. All
the more remarkable spirits of the time, like prophets in Israel,
denounced a tyranny which put Chamillart at the head of the finances
because he played billiards well, and Villeroy in command of the armies
although he was utterly untrustworthy; which sent the "patriot" Vauban
into disgrace, banished from the court Catinat, the Père la Pensée,
"exiled" to Cambrai the too clear sighted Fénelon, and suspected Racine
of Jansenism and La Fontaine of independence.
Disease and famine; crushing imposts and extortions; official debasement
of the currency; bankruptcy; state prisons; religious and political
inquisition; suppression of all institutions for the safe-guarding of
rights; tyranny by the intendants; royal, feudal and clerical oppression
burdening every faculty and every necessary of life; "monstrous and
incurable luxury"; the horrible drama of poison; the twofold adultery of
Madame de Montespan; and the narrow bigotry of Madame de Maintenon--all
concurred to make the end of the reign a sad contrast with the splendour
of its beginning. When reading Molière and Racine, Bossuet and Fénelon,
the campaigns of Turenne, or Colbert's ordinances; when enumerating the
countless literary and scientific institutions of the great century;
when considering the port of Brest, the Canal du Midi, Perrault's
colonnade of the Louvre, Mansart's Invalides and the palace of
Versailles, and Vauban's fine fortifications--admiration is kindled for
the radiant splendour of Louis XIV.'s period. But the art and literature
expressed by the genius of the masters, reflected in the tastes of
society, and to be taken by Europe as a model throughout a whole
century, are no criterion of the social and political order of the day.
They were but a magnificent drapery of pomp and glory thrown across a
background of poverty, ignorance, superstition, hypocrisy and cruelty;
remove it, and reality appears in all its brutal and sinister nudity.
The corpse of Louis XIV., left to servants for disposal, and saluted all
along the road to Saint Denis by the curses of a noisy crowd sitting in
the _cabarets_, celebrating his death by drinking more than their fill
as a compensation for having suffered too much from hunger during his
lifetime--such was the coarse but sincere epitaph which popular opinion
placed on the tomb of the "Grand Monarque." The nation, restive under
his now broken yoke, received with a joyous anticipation, which the
future was to discount, the royal infant whom they called Louis the
Well-beloved, and whose funeral sixty years later was to be greeted with
the same proofs of disillusionment.
Character of the eighteenth century.
The death of Louis XIV. closed a great era of French history; the 18th
century opens upon a crisis for the monarchy. From 1715 to 1723 came the
reaction of the Regency, with its marvellous effrontery, innovating
spirit and frivolous immorality. From 1723 to 1743 came the
mealy-mouthed despotism of Cardinal Fleury, and his apathetic policy
within and without the kingdom. From 1743 to 1774 came the personal rule
of Louis XV., when all the different powers were in conflicts--the
bishops and parlement quarrelling, the government fighting against the
clergy and the magistracy, and public opinion in declared opposition to
the state. Till at last, from 1774 to 1789, came Louis XVI. with his
honest illusions. his moral pusillanimity and his intellectual
impotence, to aggravate still further the accumulated errors of ages and
to prepare for the inevitable Revolution.
The Regency (1715-1723).
The 18th century, like the 17th, opened with a political _coup d'état_.
Louis XV. was five years old, and the duke of Orleans held the regency.
But Louis XIV. had in his will delegated all the power of the government
to a council on which the duke of Maine, his legitimated son, had the
first, but Madame de Maintenon and the Jesuits the predominant place.
This collective administration, designed to cripple the action of the
regent, encountered a twofold opposition from the nobles and the
parlement; but on the 2nd of September 1715 the emancipated parlement
set aside the will in favour of the duke of Orleans, who thus together
with the title of regent had all the real power. He therefore
reinstituted the parlement in its ancient right of remonstrance
(suspended since the declarations of 1667 and 1673), and handed over
ministerial power to the nobility, replacing the secretaries of state by
six councils composed in part of great nobles, on the advice of the
famous duc de Saint-Simon. The duc de Noailles, president of the council
of finance, had the direction of this "Polysynodie."
Philip of Orleans.
The duke of Orleans, son of the princess palatine and Louis XIV.'s
brother, possessed many gifts--courage, intelligence and agility of
mind--but he lacked the one gift of using these to good advantage. The
political crisis that had placed him in power had not put an end to the
financial crisis, and this, it was hoped, might be effected by
substituting partial and petty bankruptcies for the general bankruptcy
cynically advocated by Saint-Simon. The reduction of the royal revenues
did not suffice to fill the treasury; while the establishment of a
chamber of justice (March 1716) had no other result than that of
demoralizing the great lords and ladies already mad for pleasure, by
bringing them into contact with the farmers of the revenue who purchased
impunity from them. A very clever Scotch adventurer named John Law
(q.v.) now offered his assistance in dealing with the enormous debt of
more than three milliards, and in providing the treasury. Being well
acquainted with the mechanism of banking, he had adopted views as to
cash, credit and the circulation of values which contained an admixture
of truth and falsehood. Authorized after many difficulties to organize a
private bank of deposit and account, which being well conceived
prospered and revived commerce, Law proposed to lighten the treasury by
the profits accruing to a great maritime and colonial company. Payment
for the shares in this new Company of the West, with a capital of a
hundred millions, was to be made in credit notes upon the government,
converted into 4% stock. These aggregated funds, needed to supply the
immense and fertile valley of the Mississippi, and the annuities of the
treasury destined to pay for the shares, were non-transferable. Law's
idea was to ask the bank for the floating capital necessary, so that the
bank and the Company of the West were to be supplementary to each other;
this is what was called Law's system. After the chancellor D'Aguesseau
and the duc de Noailles had been replaced by D'Argenson alone, and after
the _lit de justice_ of the 26th of August 1718 had deprived the
parlement, hostile to Law, of the authority left to it, the bank became
royal and the Company of the West universal. But the royal bank, as a
state establishment, asked for compulsory privilege to increase the
emission of its credit notes, and that they should receive a premium
upon all metallic specie. The Company of the Indies became the grantee
for the farming of tobacco, the coinage of metals, and farming in
general; and in order to procure funds it multiplied the output of
shares, which were adroitly launched and became more and more sought for
on the exchange in the rue Quincampoix. This soon caused a frenzy of
stock-jobbing, which disturbed the stability of private fortunes and
social positions, and depraved customs and manners with the seductive
notion of easily obtained riches. The nomination of Law to the
controller-generalship, re-established for his benefit on the
resignation of D'Argenson (January 5, 1720), let loose still wilder
speculation; till the day came when he could no longer face the
terrible difficulty of meeting both private irredeemable shares with a
variable return, and the credit notes redeemable at sight and guaranteed
by the state. Gold and silver were proscribed; the bank and the company
were joined in one; the credit notes and the shares were assimilated.
But credit cannot be commanded either by violence or by expedients;
between July and September 1720 came the suspension of payments, the
flight of Law, and the disastrous liquidation which proved once again
that respect for the state's obligations had not yet entered into the
law of public finance.
The Anglo-Dutch Alliance.
Reaction on a no less extensive scale characterized foreign policy
during the Regency. A close alliance between France and her ancient
enemies, England and Holland, was concluded and maintained from 1717 to
1739: France, after thirty years of fighting, between two periods of
bankruptcy; Holland reinstalled in her commercial position; and England,
seeing before her the beginning of her empire over the seas--all three
had an interest in peace. On the other hand, peace was imperilled by
Philip V. of Spain and by the emperor (who had accepted the portion
assigned to them by the treaty of Utrecht, while claiming the whole), by
Savoy and Brandenburg (who had profited too much by European conflicts
not to desire their perpetuation), by the crisis from which the maritime
powers of the Baltic were suffering, and by the Turks on the Danube. The
dream of Cardinal Alberoni, Philip V.'s minister, was to set fire to all
this inflammable material in order to snatch therefrom a crown of some
sort to satisfy the maternal greed of Elizabeth Farnese; and this he
might have attained by the occupation of Sardinia and the expedition to
Sicily (1717-1718), if Dubois, a priest without a religion, a greedy
parvenu and a diplomatist of second rank, though tenacious and full of
resources as a minister, had not placed his common sense at the disposal
of the regent's interests and those of European peace. He signed the
triple alliance at the Hague, succeeding with the assistance of
Stanhope, the English minister, in engaging the emperor therein, after
attempting this for a year and a half. Whilst the Spanish fleet was
destroyed before Syracuse by Admiral Byng, the intrigue of the Spanish
ambassador Cellamare with the duke of Maine to exclude the family of
Orleans from the succession on Louis XV.'s death was discovered and
repressed; and Marshal Berwick burned the dockyards at Pasajes in Spain.
Alberoni's dream was shattered by the treaty of London in 1720.
Seized in his turn with a longing for the cardinal's hat, Dubois paid
for it by the registering of the bull _Unigenitus_ and by the
persecution of the Jansenists which the regent had stopped. After the
majority of Louis XV. had been proclaimed on the 16th of February 1723,
Dubois was the first to depart; and four months after his disappearance
the duke of Orleans, exhausted by his excesses, carried with him into
the grave that spirit of reform which he had compromised by his
frivolous voluptuousness (December 2, 1723).
Ministry of the duc de Bourbon.
The Regency had been the making of the house of Orleans; thenceforward
the question was how to humble it, and the duc de Bourbon, now prime
minister--a great-grandson of the great Condé, but a narrow-minded man
of limited intelligence, led by a worthless woman--set himself to do so.
The marquise de Prie was the first of a series of publicly recognized
mistresses; from 1723 to 1726 she directed foreign policy and internal
affairs despite the king's majority, moved always more by a spirit of
vengeance than by ambition. This sad pair were dominated by the
self-interested and continual fear of becoming subject to the son of the
Regent, whom they detested; but danger came upon them from elsewhere.
They found standing in their way the very man who had been the author of
their fortunes, Louis XV.'s tutor, uneasy in the exercise of a veiled
authority; for the churchman Fleury knew how to wait, on condition of
ultimately attaining his end. Neither the festivities given at Chantilly
in honour of the king, nor the dismissal (despite the most solemn
promises) of the Spanish infanta, who had been betrothed to Louis XV.,
nor yet the young king's marriage to Maria Leszczynska (1725)--a
marriage negotiated by the marquise de Prie in order to bar the throne
from the Orleans family--could alienate the sovereign from his old
master. The irritation kept up by the agents of Philip V., incensed by
this affront, and the discontent aroused by the institutions of the
_cinquantième_ and the militia, by the re-establishment of the feudal
tax on Louis XV.'s joyful accession, and by the resumption of a
persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists which had apparently
died out, were cleverly exploited by Fleury; and a last ill-timed
attempt by the queen to separate the king from him brought about the
fall of the duc de Bourbon, very opportunely for France, in June 1726.
Cardinal Fleury, 1726-1743.
From the hands of his unthinking pupil Fleury eventually received the
supreme direction of affairs, which he retained for seventeen years. He
was aged seventy-two when he thus obtained the power which had been his
unmeasured though not ill-calculated ambition. Soft-spoken and polite,
crafty and suspicious, he was pacific by temperament and therefore
allowed politics to slumber. His turn for economics made Orry,[33] the
controller-general of finance, for long his essential partner. The
latter laboured at re-establishing order in fiscal affairs; and various
measures like the impost of the _dixième_ upon all property save that of
the clergy, together with the end of the corn famine, sufficed to
restore a certain amount of well-being. Religious peace was more
difficult to secure; in fact politico-religious quarrels dominated all
the internal policy of the kingdom during forty years, and gradually
compromised the royal authority. The Jesuits, returned to power in 1723
with the duc de Bourbon and in 1726 with Fleury, rekindled the old
strife regarding the bull _Unigenitus_ in opposition to the Gallicans
and the Jansenists. The retractation imposed upon Cardinal de Noailles,
and his replacement in the archbishopric of Paris by Vintimille, an
unequivocal Molinist, excited among the populace a very violent
agitation against the court of Rome and the Jesuits, the prelude to a
united Fronde of the Sorbonne and the parlement. Fleury found no other
remedy for this agitation--in which appeal was made even to
miracles--than _lits de justice_ and _lettres de cachet_; Jansenism
remained a potent source of trouble within the heart of Catholicism.
Fleury's foreign policy.
This worn-out septuagenarian, who prized rest above everything, imported
into foreign policy the same mania for economy and the same sloth in
action. He naturally adopted the idea of reconciling Louis XIV.'s
descendants, who had all been embroiled ever since the Polish marriage.
He succeeded in this by playing very adroitly on the ambition of
Elizabeth Farnese and her husband Philip V., who was to reign in France
notwithstanding any renunciation that might have taken place. Despite
the birth of a dauphin (September 1729), which cut short the Spanish
intrigues, the reconciliation was a lasting one (treaty of Seville); it
led to common action in Italy, and to the installation of Spanish
royalties at Parma, Piacenza, and soon after at Naples. Fleury,
supported by the English Hanoverian alliance, to which he sacrificed the
French navy, obliged the emperor Charles VI. to sacrifice the trade of
the Austrian Netherlands to the maritime powers and Central Italy to the
Bourbons, in order to gain recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction. The
question of the succession in France lay dormant until the end of the
century, and Fleury thought he had definitely obtained peace in the
treaty of Vienna (1731).
War of the Polish Succession (1733-1738).
The war of the Polish succession proved him to have been deceived. On
the death of Augustus II. of Saxony, king of Poland, Louis XV.'s
father-in-law had been proclaimed king by the Polish diet. This was an
ephemeral success, ill-prepared and obtained by taking a sudden
advantage of national sentiment; it was soon followed by a check, owing
to a Russian and German coalition and the baseness of Cardinal Fleury,
who, in order to avoid intervening, pretended to tremble before an
imaginary threat of reprisals on the part of England. But Chauvelin, the
keeper of the seals, supported by public opinion, avenged on the Rhine
and the Po the unlucky heroism of the comte de Plélo at Dànzig,[34] the
vanished dream of the queen, the broken word of Louis XV., and the
treacherous abandonment of Poland. Fleury never forgave him for this:
Chauvelin had checkmated him with war; he checkmated Chauvelin with
peace, and hastened to replace Marshals Berwick and Villars by
diplomatists. The third treaty of Vienna (1738), the reward of so much
effort, would only have claimed for France the little duchy of Bar, had
not Chauvelin forced Louis XV. to obtain Lorraine for his
father-in-law--still hoping for the reversion of the crown; but Fleury
thus rendered impossible any influence of the queen, and held Stanislaus
at his mercy. In order to avenge himself upon Chauvelin he sacrificed
him to the cabinets of Vienna and London, alarmed at seeing him revive
the national tradition in Italy.
The Eastern question.
Fleury hardly had time to breathe before a new conflagration broke out
in the east. The Russian empress Anne and the emperor Charles VI. had
planned to begin dismembering the Turkish empire. More fortunate than
Plélo, Villeneuve, the French ambassador at Constantinople, endeavoured
to postpone this event, and was well supported; he revived the courage
of the Turks and provided them with arms, thanks to the comte de
Bonneval (q.v.), one of those adventurers of high renown whose influence
in Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century is one of the
most piquant features of that period. The peace of Belgrade (September
1739) was, by its renewal of the capitulations, a great material success
for France, and a great moral victory by the rebuff to Austria and
Russia.
War of the Austrian Succession.
France had become once more the arbiter of Europe, when the death of the
emperor Charles VI. in 1740 opened up a new period of wars and
misfortunes for Europe and for the pacific Fleury. Everyone had signed
Charles VI.'s Pragmatic Sanction, proclaiming the succession-rights of
his daughter, the archduchess Maria Theresa; but on his death there was
a general renunciation of signatures and an attempt to divide the
heritage. The safety of the house of Austria depended on the attitude of
France; for Austria could no longer harm her. Fleury's inclination was
not to misuse France's traditional policy by exaggerating it, but to
respect his sworn word; he dared not press his opinion, however, and
yielded to the fiery impatience of young hot-heads like the two
Belle-Isles, and of all those who, infatuated by Frederick II., felt
sick of doing nothing at Versailles and were backed up by Louis XV.'s
bellicose mistresses. He had to experience the repeated defections of
Frederick II. in his own interests, and the precipitate retreat from
Bohemia. He had to humble himself before Austria and the whole of
Europe; and it was high time for Fleury, now fallen into second
childhood, to vanish from the scene (January 1743).
Personal rule of Louis XV.
Louis XV. was at last to become his own prime minister and to reign
alone; but in reality he was more embarrassed than pleased by the
responsibility incumbent upon him. He therefore retained the persons who
had composed Fleury's staff; though instead of being led by a single one
of them, he fell into the hands of several, who disputed among
themselves for the ascendancy: Maurepas, incomparable in little things,
but neglectful of political affairs; D'Argenson, bold, and strongly
attached to his work as minister of war; and the cardinal de Tencin, a
frivolous and worldly priest. Old Marshal de Noailles tried to incite
Louis XV. to take his kingship in earnest, thinking to cure him by war
of his effeminate passions; and, in the spring of 1744, the king's grave
illness at Metz gave a momentary hope of reconciliation between him and
the deserted queen. But the duc de Richelieu, a roué who had joined
hands with the sisters of the house of Nesle and was jealous of Marshal
de Noailles, soon regained his lost ground; and, under the influence of
this panderer to his pleasures, Louis XV. settled down into a life of
vice. Holding aloof from active affairs, he tried to relieve the
incurable boredom of satiety in the violent exercise of hunting, in
supper-parties with his intimates, and in spicy indiscretions. Brought
up religiously and to shun the society of women, his first experiences
in adultery had been made with many scruples and intermittently. Little
by little, however, jealous of power, yet incapable of exercising it to
any purpose, he sank into a sensuality which became utterly shameless
under the influence of his chief mistress the duchesse de Châteauroux.
Madame de Pompadour.