Again do we recognize the fine Italian hand in French politics.
Cardinal Mazarin was Minister during the regency of Anne of Austria,
directing and controlling the affairs of the Kingdom, less intent upon
the greatness of France than the greatness and magnificence of her
Prime Minister. At last the wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV.
settled himself upon the throne which Richelieu had rendered so exalted
and immovable.
Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in
him to make four Kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted
more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He
was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage,
dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a
magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties,
his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments.
No King more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more
glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he
desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He
crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every
manifestation of genius, but he signed the "Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes," and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his
subjects.
If the names of Marlborough and Maintenon could have been stricken out
of his life, the story might have had a different ending. From the
moment the great Duke checked his victorious army, his sun began to go
down; but it was Maintenon who most obscured its setting.
His unloved Queen, the Spanish Marie Therese, had borne his mad
infatuation for Louise la Valliere; la Valliere had carried her broken
heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de
Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her
household the pious widow of the poet Scarron, Madame de Maintenon,
(grand-daughter of d'Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation).
Grave, austere, ambitious, talented, she was not too much engrossed in
her duties as governess of de Montespan's children to find ways of
establishing an influence over the King.
This man who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the
Government, who was Ministers, Magistrates, Parliaments, all in one,
this central sun of whom Corneille, Moliere, Racine were but single
rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing
adventuress; her will his law. The hey-day of youth having passed, he
was beginning to be anxious about his soul. She artfully pricked his
conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.
She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was
to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith.
At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the
"Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and brutally stamped out
Protestantism.
A part of the scheme of penitence seems to have been that on the death
of poor Marie Therese, he should make her (de Maintenon) his lawful
wife, which he did privately; and his sun went down obscured by
crushing griefs and disappointments. His children swept away, the
prestige of success tarnished, this demigod was taken to pieces by
time's destroying fingers, quite as unceremoniously as are the rest of
us, hiding finally behind the bed-curtains while a kneeling courtier
passed to him his wig on the end of a stick, and at last lying down
like any other old dying sinner, overwhelmed with the vanity of earthly
things and with the vastness of eternity.
Still more would the dying moments of the Grand Monarque have been
embittered could he have foreseen into what hands his great inheritance
was passing.
Upon Louis XV. more than any other rests the responsibility of the
crisis which was approaching.
A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of
responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary
governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national
poverty, indulging in wildest extravagance,--such was the man in whom
was vested the authority rendered so absolute by Richelieu,--such the
man who opened up a pathway for the storm.
As for the nobility, their degradation may be imagined when it is said
there was as bitter rivalry between titled and illustrious fathers to
secure for their daughters the coveted position held by Madame de
Pompadour, as for the highest offices of State.
Could the upper ranks fall lower than this? Had not the kingdom
reached its lowest depths, where its foreign policy was determined by
the amount of consideration shown to Madame de Pompadour? But this
woman, whose friendship was artfully sought by the great Empress Maria
Theresa, was superseded, and the fresher charms of Madame du Barri
enslaved the King. The deposed favorite could not survive her fall,
and died of a broken heart. It is said that as Louis, looking from an
upper window of his palace, saw the coffin borne out in a drenching
rain, he smiled and said: "Ah, the Marquise has a bad day for her
journey." It may be imagined that the man who could be so pitiless to
the woman he had loved would feel little pity for the people whom he
had not loved, but whom he knew only as a remote, obscure something,
which held up the weight of his glory.
But this "obscure something" was undergoing strange transformation.
The greater light at the surface had sent some glimmering rays down
into the mass below, which began to awaken and to think. Misery,
hopeless and abject, was changing into rage and thirst for vengeance.
A new class had come into existence which was not noble, but with
highly trained intelligence it looked with contempt and loathing upon
the frivolous, half-educated nobles. Scorn was added to the ferment of
human passions beneath the surface, and when Voltaire had spoken, and
the restraints of religion were loosened, no living hand, not that of a
Richelieu nor a Louis XIV., could have averted the coming doom.
But--no one seems to have suspected what was approaching.
A wonderful literature had come into existence--not stately and classic
as in the age preceding,--but instinct with a new sort of life. The
highest speculations which can occupy the soul of man were handled with
marvellous lightness of touch and prismatic brilliancy of expression;
but all was negation. None tried to build; all to demolish. The
black-winged angel of Destruction was hovering over the land.
Then Rousseau tossed his dreamy abstractions into the quivering air,
and the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," was caught up by
the titled aristocracy as a charming idyllic toy, while Princes, Dukes,
and Marquises amused themselves with a dream of Arcadian simplicity, to
be attained in some indefinite way in some remote and equally
indefinite future. It was all a masquerade. No reality, no sincerity,
no convictions, good or evil. The only thing that was real was that an
over-taxed, impoverished people was exasperated and--hungry.
Did the King need new supplies for his unimaginable luxuries, they were
taxed. Was it necessary to have new accessions to French "glory," in
order to allay popular clamor or discontent, they must supply the men
to fight the glorious battles, and the means with which to pay them.
Every burden fell at last upon this lowest stratum of the State, the
nobility and clergy, while owning two-thirds of the land, being nearly
exempt from taxation.
And yet the King and nobility of France, in love with Rousseau's
theories, were airily discussing the "rights of man." Wolves and foxes
coming together to talk over the sacredness of the rights of
property--or the occupants of murderers' row growing eloquent over the
sanctity of human life! How incomprehensible that among those
quick-witted Frenchmen there seems not one to have realized that the
logical sequence of the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,"
must be, "Down with the Aristocrats!"
And so the surface which Richelieu had converted into adamant grew
thinner and thinner each day, until King and Court danced upon a mere
gilded crust, unconscious of the abysmal fires beneath. Some of those
powdered heads fell into the executioner's basket twenty-five years
later. Did they recall this time? Did Madame du Barri think of it,
did she exult at her triumph over de Pompadour, when she was dragged
shrieking and struggling to the guillotine?
And while France was thus weaving her future, what were the other
nations doing? England, sane, practical, with little time for
abstractions, and little said about "glory," was importing turnips,
converting agriculture into a science, and under the instruction of
exiled Huguenots, establishing marvellous industries. In the new
kingdom of Prussia, a half-savage, half-inspired King had been
importing artisans and skill of all sorts, reclaiming waste lands.
Living like a miser, he had indulged in but one luxury: an army, which
should be the best in the world. There was no powder, no patches at
his Court; where he thrashed with his own royal hands male and female
courtiers, starved, imprisoned, and cudgelled his son and heir to his
throne for playing on the violin; and, it is said, so terrified and
scarified his grenadiers with canes and cats that not one of them would
not have preferred facing the enemy to meeting his enraged sovereign,
had he done wrong.
Frederick was not a pleasant barbarian. But there is at least a ring
of sincerity about all this, which it is refreshing to recall after the
tinsel and depraved refinements of France under Louis XV., and
something too which gives promise, in spite of its brutality, of a
stalwart future.
Five years before the close of this miserable reign, an event occurred
seemingly of small importance to Europe. A child was born in an
obscure Italian household. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.