The two foundations of the absolute throne of Louis XIV
were terror and admiration: the terror of a power which had
subjugated the army, the church, the magistracy, the noblesse,
and the municipalities; the admiration of a power to which
literature and art, arms and fortune, rendered their richest
and their uninterrupted tribute. King-worship had never before
taken so entire a possession of any Christian state. Never had
the luxurious pomp of an Oriental court been so intimately and
so long associated with the energies, the refined tastes, and
the intellectual culture of an European sovereignty. During
fifty successive years, Louis continued to be the greatest
actor on the noblest stage, and in the presence of the most
enthusiastic audience, of the world.--STEPHEN.[p]
[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]
Never had there been at any court more intrigues and hopes than
during the last hours of Cardinal Mazarin. Women who had any pretence
to beauty were flattering themselves that they would now govern a
twenty-two-year-old prince whom love had already so far seduced as
to make him offer his crown to his mistress. The young courtiers had
hopes that the reign of the favourites would return; each minister was
expecting the first place; none of them thought that a king who had
been so excluded from affairs would dare take upon himself the burden
of government. Mazarin had prolonged the king’s childhood as far as he
could; and only for a short time had been giving him instructions, and
that because the king had demanded it. So far were they from expecting
to be governed by their sovereign, that of all those who had hitherto
worked with the prime minister there was none who asked the king when
he wished an audience. One and all asked, “To whom shall we now address
ourselves?”--and Louis XIV replied, “To me.”[b]
The secretary of state for war, Michel le Tellier, hastened with the
astounding piece of news to the queen-mother, who laughed in his face:
“In good faith, M. le Tellier, what do you think of it?” This resolution,
however, was nothing but the accomplishment of the advice twenty times
given by Mazarin, and if there was any cause for astonishment it was
not that the king took the advice but that he held to it; he was, as La
Bruyère says, “his own prime minister and exacted of the chief state
functionaries that they deal directly with him.” For thirty years he
worked regularly eight hours a day. He relates in his _Mémoires_,[f]
with legitimate pride, the effect produced by the announcement of his
assumption of authority, and he recommends his son in a few truly
eloquent words “not to forget that it is by work one reigns; to rule
without working is to be ungrateful and defiant towards God, unjust and
tyrannical towards man.”
But what is still more remarkable is that the young prince who so boldly
assumed the power had already mapped out his policy. Not only did Louis
XIV rule with the boundless power of some of his predecessors, but he
was the first to establish in France the theory of an absolute monarchy.
In his eyes royalty was a divine institution. Sovereigns were the
representatives of God upon earth--his inspired lieutenants; and on this
account participators, in a fashion, in his power and infallibility. And
as royalty, in making itself absolute, had kept to the old principle of
feudal law, that sovereignty and property are the same thing, Louis not
only believed himself master of his subjects, but the owner of their
possessions--a monstrous doctrine which carries us back to oriental
monarchies. At all events it did not seem to him that authority to
which he recognised no limits but those imposed by conscience and by
religion, ought to remain sterile. He wished it active and hard working;
he believed that kings had imperious duties to fulfil. It was thus that
Louis XIV understood his royal profession.[c] Nor can it be denied that
he carried out to a large extent in practice the theory of royalty that
he professed. He was destined to reign for fifty-four years after the
death of Mazarin; his reign in its entirety being one of the longest
in history. After Mazarin he had no minister whom he did not dominate:
he was king in fact as well as in name. He came to be by far the most
famous monarch of his time. His court at Versailles set a standard of
magnificence which other monarchs of that and succeeding ages strove to
imitate without hoping to rival.
In his political relations with his subjects, as has been said, Louis
came to represent the culmination of that autocratic system which for
generations had been almost steadily advancing in France,--a system which
had known such exponents as Louis XI, Francis I, and Henry IV; and which
Sully, Richelieu, and Mazarin had done so much to fortify. Nor did he
confine his theory to his own subjects. He came finally to feel almost
the same proprietary right in the affairs of Europe and he attempted
with the aid of his armies to dictate to foreign nations somewhat as he
dictated within the bounds of his own territory. And, having the good
fortune to be served by two great soldiers, Condé and Turenne, he was
enabled, notwithstanding his own rather meagre military talents, to carry
out the idea here also with some measure of success. It was a qualified
success, to be sure, for he did not secure the control of Holland at
which he aimed; he did not very greatly extend the boundaries of France;
and if his grandson was left finally in possession of the Spanish throne,
this was a victory tempered with the concession that the thrones of Spain
and France should never be consolidated. Nevertheless, to have embroiled
all Europe in war after war; to have been the central figure of a long
epoch; to have given his name to an important period of history; to have
placed that name in the small list of those rulers to whom posterity
concedes the title “Great,”--this surely is to have played the part of
king right royally.
This reign, then, is a curiously full and vital one. We shall best
understand it perhaps if we study it first from within, witnessing the
activities of the great monarch in his relations with his own people
before turning (in subsequent chapters) to the foreign relations of
the kingdom. As preliminary to this study of the economic and social
development of France during the long reign of Louis XIV, we must take
a glance at the interesting figure of the monarch himself. In the first
place it must be remembered that this remarkable man had a remarkable
heritage. He numbered among his direct ancestors not far removed such
remarkable characters as Henry IV of France, the German emperor Charles
V, and the Spanish sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella. This in itself
suggests a strange mixture of races in his ancestry. But further
examination of his ancestral tree reveals even more striking facts. It
appears that this greatest of French kings is, so far as his ancestral
blood is concerned, almost as much Spaniard or Italian as he is French;
and quite as much German. His father was born in France, his mother in
Spain; of his four grandparents one was born in France, one in Spain, one
in Italy, one in Germany. Of his thirty ancestors within four generations
only eight were born in France while ten were born in Germany or in the
yet farther outlying regions of Hungary and Bohemia; the remainder of the
company being distributed between Spain (and Portugal) and Italy. The
subtended table[111] showing details of the ancestry of Louis XIV for
four generations will make these facts clear at a glance. It is worthy
of careful study as illustrating in detail the heterogeneity of ethnic
elements that went to build up the personality of this cosmopolite.
Persons fond of generalising as to national characteristics will perhaps
feel that the more conspicuous traits of Louis’ personality are not
difficult to account for in the light of his conglomerate ancestry.
[Sidenote: [1661-1683 A.D.]]
Leaving such speculations, however, to whoever may choose to make them,
let us turn from the ancestry of the king to the king himself. “He had,”
says Kitchin,[q] “all the qualities which strike the eye: and was, as
Bolingbroke acutely remarked, ‘if not the greatest king, the best actor
of majesty at least that ever filled a throne’; as a king should be, he
was courteous, dignified, calm, and ‘debonair,’ firm in act and speech,
and constant: he had a great sense of duty and propriety; and said
himself that a king should act according to the dictates of good sense;
he cultivated that habitual discretion and seriousness of manner which
often cloak ignorance or want of capacity. He spoke but little, that
little, however, was to the point; he was reserved, was thought rather
stingy, did not often laugh. These characteristics were backed by one
marked quality, strength of will, which could be obstinacy: and were
all made subservient to one persistent passion, the inordinate desire
of reputation and glory.” Yet Kitchin sees in Louis, on the whole, a
“second-rate man,” distinctly inferior in many ways to his grandfather,
Henry IV. Thus he declares that “In no branch of his life’s work does
Louis show one spark of originality; even Voltaire confesses that there
was ‘more uprightness and dignity than spring’ in him: he had no boldness
and no enthusiasm: ‘he made war without being a warrior,’ decreed many
laws, but had not the slightest idea of legislation; he busied himself
with administration, but had no real organising gifts. He had that sure
mark which distinguishes the second-rate man from the great man: he
loved details for their own sake; he shrank instinctively from all that
was noble and strong; and chose the inferior agent in preference to the
better.”
It seems almost paradoxical to pronounce such a judgment as this upon
a monarch of such celebrity. Yet perhaps the judgment is not far from
just. Louis XIV had the good fortune to follow Henry IV and Richelieu
and Mazarin; the later years of his reign, in which he was in effect
gathering the harvest of his own sowing, are far less notable than
are the earlier ones during which he profited by the labours of his
forerunners. Yet after all allowances are made for Louis’ shortcomings
and for his mistakes, it seems futile to deny that the famous monarch who
for the space of almost three average generations dominated the European
situation had at least some of the elements of greatness.
With this introduction to the personality of Louis XIV, we are now
prepared to take up in detail the affairs of his government. First of
all, as has been said, we shall consider those measures through which
the internal prosperity of France was furthered during the early years
of the reign. In so doing we shall have occasion to see something of the
ministers who aided Louis in this work. There are no more Richelieus and
Mazarins; yet in Colbert we have a man not altogether unworthy to wear
the mantle of these great predecessors; nor are Le Tellier, Lionne, and
Fouquet by any means despicable.[a]
THE MINISTERS
The _clercs au secret_ who, in 1547, became ministers of state were
four in number; each of them administered not only certain affairs,
but all the affairs of certain provinces. They formed an impracticable
organisation. The religious wars, the troubles of Louis XIII’s minority,
prevented any change.[112]
In 1619 a single member of the ministry was charged with the conduct of
war and with the correspondence with the _chefs de corps_; another in
1626 had the foreign affairs. Finally under Louis XIV the ministry of the
king’s household was established for ecclesiastical affairs and those
of the navy. Important posts, raised to offices, that is to say, making
their holders irremovable--such as the chancellor-keeper of the seals,
chief of the magistracy, and controller-general of the finances--were
like two other ministries. The special functions allotted to each of the
four secretaries of state did not prevent them from keeping, for other
affairs, the old-time division by provinces which existed until the
Revolution.
The ministers whom Mazarin had left behind him were Pierre Séguier,
chancellor and keeper of the seals, a sort of irremovable minister who
was clever enough, by assuming no political importance, to make himself
regarded as necessary for fifty years; Michel le Tellier, secretary
of state for war, Hugues de Lionne who had charge of the marine (the
portfolio of which he kept till 1669) and of foreign affairs; and
Nicholas Fouquet, the superintendent of finance. The first two were
distinguished men, the third a superior man; as for the fourth, Fouquet,
by his encouragement of letters, he had acquired the reputation of
a generous Mæcenas, and he counted illustrious persons among his
friends--Pellisson, La Fontaine, Gourville, Madame de Sévigné and
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who have pleaded his cause before posterity
without gaining it. He had put, or rather left, the finances in extreme
disorder and he himself drew without scruple on the treasury. He was
increasing the king’s expenses and diminishing the receipts; finally,
what was still more serious, he seemed to seek supporters everywhere,
even amongst the great nobles, and he fortified the places of which he
held command as though to prepare for himself, in case of disgrace, an
impregnable retreat. He was almost a frondeur; he was certainly a knave.
Less was needed for Louis to strike him.
The king had a secret minister who every evening called his attention to
the errors and falsehoods of the superintendent. This was Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, born at Rheims in 1619 of an ancient family of tradesmen and
magistrates. He had been intendant to Mazarin, who before he died had
said to the king: “Sire, I owe you everything; but I think I am to some
extent discharging my debt when I give you Colbert.”[c]
This working together in secret was the cause of the catastrophe of
Fouquet, in which were involved many others. The fall of this minister,
who is much less to be reproached than is Cardinal Mazarin, teaches us
that it is not the privilege of everybody to commit the same faults.[b]
The precaution of disarming Fouquet was made in advance. His post
of general prosecutor assured him the privilege of being judged by
parliament; and the king put no trust, and for reason, in the justice
of parliament. Fouquet therefore was skilfully inveigled into selling
his post. It is said that he discarded his robe of office in the hope
of obtaining the _cordon bleu_, which the king did not wish any longer
to give to persons connected with justice. Moreover, he was counting on
becoming chancellor on the death of the aged Séguier. Of the 1,400,000
francs, the price of his office, he offered one million as a pure
gift to the king, who had expressed to him a desire for ready money.
He thus prepared the instruments of his own ruin. It was feared that
at the moment of his arrest his friends would attempt to get him to
Belle-Île and to agitate Brittany and Normandy where many malcontents
were under cover. A journey to Brittany was planned for the coming month
of September, under pretence of holding the provincial estate at Nantes
and of obtaining a greater gratuitous gift through the presence of the
king.[d]
Fouquet’s undoing was thus already resolved upon when the king accepted
the magnificent fête which the minister arranged for him at his house
at Vaux for August 17th, 1661. The palace and its gardens had cost him
about eighteen millions.[113] He had built the mansion twice over and
bought three hamlets whose area was included in the enormous gardens,
then considered the most beautiful in all Europe. The fountains of Vaux,
since relegated to mediocrity by those of Versailles, Marly, and St.
Cloud, were marvels in their day. But however magnificent the place,
its enormous cost proves that he had been served with as little economy
as he himself served the king. It was also true that St. Germain and
Fontainebleau, the only pleasure places used by the king, could not
compare in beauty with Vaux. Louis XIV felt this and it irritated him.
All over the mansion were to be seen the arms and motto of Fouquet--a
squirrel with these words, _Quo non ascendam?_ (To what point shall I not
mount?)
The king interpreted the device for himself; the ambition of the motto
did not serve to appease the monarch. The courtiers remarked that the
squirrel was everywhere painted pursued by a snake which was the arms
of Colbert. The fête was far beyond those which Mazarin had given, not
only in magnificence but in taste. The _Facheux_ of Molière was presented
for the first time: Pellisson had written the prologue, which was much
admired.[b]
The king said to the queen-mother in anger, “Ah, madame, shall we not
make this fellow disgorge his prey?” And he was tempted to have the
minister arrested on the spot; however, he restrained himself.[c]
On the 5th of September, during the prearranged sojourn of the court of
Nantes, D’Artagnan, captain of the musketeers, laid hands on Fouquet
as he was leaving the cabinet of the king, put him into a coach and
conducted him under a strong escort to the château of Angers. He had the
greatest difficulty in protecting the superintendent during the journey
from the fury of the people. All his houses were sealed and his property
was seized. Among the latter were found directions as to what his friends
should do in case he was arrested. The plan, like those that Cardinal
de Retz had made several times, consisted in procuring for him places,
money, and presses by means of which France could be inundated with
pamphlets. Fouquet was transferred without delay to Vincennes and brought
before a chamber of justice.[e]
He was accused of wasting the revenues, which was only too true, and of
plotting against the safety of the state, which was never proved. At the
end of three years nine judges gave their voices for death, thirteen
others for banishment. The king, aggravating the penalty, changed it
into perpetual imprisonment and Fouquet was incarcerated in the citadel
of Pinerolo, where he died after nineteen years of captivity (March 23,
1680).[c]
_The Man with the Iron Mask_
For a long time Fouquet’s end remained a mystery; and even Voltaire,
writing little more than a half century afterwards, says, “We do not
know where died the unfortunate man, whose least actions in the days of
his power made a stir.” For this reason attempts were afterwards made to
connect Fouquet with one of the most extraordinary episodes of the secret
history of Louis XIV’s reign.[a]
We know that a masked and unknown prisoner, object of an extraordinary
surveillance, died in 1703 in the Bastille, whither he had been brought
from the Îsle Ste. Marguerite in 1698 (and was buried under the name
of Marchiali). He had been detained about ten years in these islands,
and traces of his existence are found in the fortress of Exilles and
at Pinerolo as far back as 1681. Now no great personage disappeared
in Europe about this time. What powerful motive had the government of
Louis XIV for concealing this mysterious visage from human sight? Many
explanations more or less chimeric, more or less plausible, have been
attempted of the “man with the iron mask” (an erroneous term; the mask
was not of iron but of black velvet; it was probably one of those _loups_
so long in use). In 1837 Le Bibliophile Jacob (Paul la Croix) published
an ingenious volume to prove that Fouquet was passed off as dead,
sequestered anew, and, masked, dragged from fortress to fortress until
his death in 1703.[d]
Many other theories have been advanced to account for this person’s
identity. It has been said that he was a twin brother of Louis XIV,
who had been made to disappear; the count de Vermandois, natural son
of Louis XIV and Mademoiselle de la Vallière, who was imprisoned for
having struck the dauphin; the duke de Beaufort, who disappeared at the
siege of Candia (1669); the duke of Monmouth, nephew of James II; Count
Girolamo Mattioli, minister of Mantua, who was abducted from Turin for
having prevented his master from selling Casale to the king of France
(this hypothesis is sustained by Topin[g]); or Giovanni di Gonzaga,
Mattioli’s secretary; a son of Anne of Austria by Buckingham or Mazarin;
the Armenian patriarch Avedick; and, according to a recent theory of M.
Bazeries, a certain general De Bulonde, imprisoned for raising the siege
of Candia in spite of Catinat’s orders.[h] But the very multiplicity of
theories sufficiently shows the doubtful character of each and all of
them; and the identification of the man with the iron mask still holds a
place among the most curious of the unsolved enigmas of history.[a]
THE MINISTRY OF COLBERT
The great trial of Fouquet involved another victim: Pellisson was
condemned to restore 200,000 livres. But he was one of those skilful
persons who, having fallen, always rise. From having been a Calvinist he
became a Catholic and perhaps died a Protestant; from being Fouquet’s
friend he became the favourite of the king [Louis XIV] and drew up his
_Mémoires_[f] in which he speaks of the superintendent’s thefts, and he
founded a prize at the Academy for an annual eulogy of Louis XIV. Thanks
to his verses and his prose, which were supple like his conduct, he was
very successful in money matters. In 1677 he was in receipt of 75,000
livres, just the same sum as Vauban received, without counting abbeys
and priories. Finally he was a kind of prime minister and had charge of
the funds devoted to the conversion of heretics, and yet he brought so
much dignity into his office that posterity has forgotten in him the man
of business and only remembers the man of letters. Colbert succeeded
Fouquet with the title of controller-general. In 1666 Michel le Tellier
left his charge to his son, the celebrated Louvois; the first ministry of
Louis XIV was thus complete.
Colbert directed five of the French departments of administration: the
king’s household, with the fine arts, the finances, agriculture, with
commerce, public works, and, after 1669, the navy--a crushing weight
under which he did not succumb.
“Jean Baptiste Colbert,” says a contemporary, “had naturally a frowning
countenance. His hollow eyes and thick eyebrows gave him an air of
austerity and rendered him at first sight savage and forbidding; but
afterwards when one came to know him, he was sufficiently facile,
expeditious, and immutably steadfast. He was persuaded that good faith
is the solid foundation of all business. Infinite application and an
insatiable desire to learn took with him the place of knowledge. He was
a restorer of the finances, which on his accession to the ministry he
found in a very bad condition. A solid but ponderous intelligence, born
principally for calculation, he disentangled all the embarrassments which
the superintendents and royal treasurers had purposely introduced into
the accounts in order that they might fish in troubled waters.” Let us
add that this austere and hard financier, “this man of marble,” as Gui
Patin calls him, had a heart. “We must be careful of every five sous in
matters which are not of necessity,” he wrote to Louis XIV, “and lavish
millions when it is a question of your glory. A useless banquet costing
3,000 livres gives me incredible pain; and when it is a question of
millions of gold for the affair of Poland, I would sell all my goods, I
would pledge my wife and children, and I would go on foot all my life to
provide them.”
_Reorganisation of the Finances_
The finances, indeed, had fallen back into the chaos from which Sully
had rescued them. The public debt was four hundred and thirty millions,
the revenues were swallowed up three years in advance, and out of
eighty-four millions in annual imposts the treasury received scarcely
thirty-five. Colbert began by annulling or reimbursing at the rate of
purchase eight millions of bonds on the Hôtel-de-Ville, which had been
acquired at an insignificant price, and caused the _chambre de police_
to make an investigation of the malversations committed by officers of
finance during the last twenty-five years; the very curés had to press
their parishioners to denounce abuses. The money lenders who had taken
advantage of the necessities of the state to lend to it at usurious
interest were made to disgorge their profits; the fines rose to one
hundred and ten millions; several money lenders were hanged. These were
measures in harmony with the spirit of the times but not in accordance
with good policy; the surest way for the state to avoid having to submit
to burdensome contracts in evil days is to hold, in good ones, to a
promise once given, because there are no usurers save for those who are
suspected of not paying their debts.
Colbert was the true creator of the budget. Hitherto money had been
dispensed haphazard, without consulting the receipts of the treasury.
He was the first to draw up annually a provisional statement divided
into two chapters in which the probable revenues and expenses were
set down beforehand. When a secretary of state had a disbursement to
make he signed an order for the intended payment; the persons receiving
it presented it at the office of the controller-general’s department,
when the payment of the sum was charged on a particular fund and this
assignment was presented for the king’s signature.
Colbert modified the form and assessment of the imposts. The _taille_,
or tax on landed property, was personal, that is it was paid by the
_roturiers_ and in certain circumstances two or three times in the same
year. He wished to make it real as it was in the south, as it now is
everywhere--that is to say, payable on the landed property, whoever the
holders might be. In 1661 it had reached fifty-three millions; he brought
it back to thirty-two. Amid the troubles of the Fronde many persons had
been ennobled on their own authority or had bought titles of nobility
for a few crowns; these were so many privileged individuals added to the
real ones. As early as 1662 Molière in the _École des femmes_ had laughed
at this vanity which cost the people dear. A royal ordinance revoked all
the letters of nobility granted within the last thirty years: Gros-Pierre
was obliged to show his titles and had none, and nearly forty thousand
families amongst the richest in the parishes were once more subjected
to the impost which proportionately lightened the burdens of their
neighbours.
[Illustration: COLBERT
(1619-1683)]
The controller-general rightfully preferred to the _taille_ the _aides_
or indirect taxes to which all contributed. He diminished the price of
salt, a commodity of the first necessity to the poor; but he increased
or created taxes on coffee, tobacco, wines, cards, etc., and from one
million five hundred thousand francs brought them up to twenty-one
millions. Thus the indirect taxes, some of which have been so vigorously
attacked in our own day, had their origin in an idea of justice and
equality.
He disliked loans, not because he did not understand the advantage of
borrowing at a low price to repay burdensome debts, but he dreaded giving
Louis XIV facilities for burdening the future to the advantage of the
present. On leaving the council in which the first loan was decided
on, in 1672, he bitterly reproached Lamoignon for having approved this
measure. “Do you know as I do the man with whom we have to deal, his
passion for display, for great enterprises, for all kinds of expenses?
Here is a free course opened for loans and by consequence for unlimited
expenditure and taxes. You shall answer for it to the nation and to
posterity.”
In truth a time was to come when Colbert would be no longer there and
Louis XIV would borrow at 400 per cent. At least the great minister
tried to protect the treasury against the exigencies of the financiers
by inviting the small capitalists to pour their funds directly, without
costly intermediaries, into a loan account which he established for the
purpose and into which the money flowed.[c]
Colbert’s efforts extended into so many fields that it is impossible to
follow them in detail. His service to agriculture was most beneficial. He
exempted very large families from paying tithes, and forbade the seizure
of implements and beasts of labour for non-payment of taxes. He improved
the breeds of horses and cattle by crossing them with imported animals.
His code for water highways and forests is still largely in force.
He assisted industry by sparing no means of obtaining the manufacturing
secrets of neighbouring countries. In 1669, says Duruy,[c] there were
42,220 looms and more than 60,000 workers in wool alone. The draperies
of Sedan, Louviers, Abbeville, and Elbeuf were unrivalled in Europe;
tin plate, steel, faience, and morocco leather, which had largely been
imported, were now made in France; the cloth and serges of Holland,
Genoese point, and velvets were imitated and equalled, the carpets of
Persia and Turkey surpassed at the Savonnerie, at Aubusson, and at
Beauvais. The rich silken stuffs shot with gold and silver were made at
Tours and at Lyons; at Tour-la-Ville (near Cherbourg) and at Paris they
made finer glassware than at Venice. The tapestries of Flanders yielded
to those of the Gobelins.
For commerce the great minister did much by regulating customs and
reducing tariffs. He made Dunkirk, Bayonne, and Marseilles free ports,
and was the projector of the Burgundian canal opened in 1692, and built
between 1664 and 1681, that connected the Mediterranean at Cette with
the Garonne (and consequently the ocean) at Toulouse. Henry IV’s council
of commerce was re-established in 1665 and the king presided over its
fortnightly meetings.
At that period the Dutch and the English were far ahead of the French
in foreign trade. The better to compete with these rivals Colbert
substituted privileged associations for the isolated efforts of
individuals. “He established,” says Duruy,[c] “five great companies
modelled on the English and Dutch societies; those of the _Indes
Orientales_ and the _Indes Occidentales_ in 1664; the _Compagnie du Nord_
and the _Compagnie du Levant_ in 1666, and the _Compagnie du Sénégal_ in
1673, according them exclusive commercial monopolies and granting them
considerable loans. He wished to restore life to the colonial system,
much neglected since the days of Richelieu. The French now possessed only
Canada, with Acadia, Cayenne, the Île de Bourbon [Île de Réunion], and
several establishments in Madagascar and the Indies. Colbert purchased,
for less than a million, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Grenada,
and the Grenadines, Marie Galante, St. Martin, St. Christopher, St.
Bartholomew, Santa Cruz, and Tortuga (Île de la Tortue) in the West
Indies. He placed under the protection of France the French filibusters
of Santo Domingo who had seized the western portion of the island (1664).
He planted new colonies in Cayenne (1677) and in Canada (1665). He took
Newfoundland in order to control the entrance to the St. Lawrence, and
began the occupation of the magnificent valley of the Mississippi, which
had just been explored by that adventurous captain, Robert de la Salle
(1680). In Africa he wrested Gorée in Senegal from the Dutch in 1665 and
took possession of the east coast of Madagascar. In Asia the _Compagnie
des Indes_ established itself at Surat and Chandarnagar and afterwards
at Pondicherry,” but to offset these achievements he was short-sighted
enough to close the colonial ports to foreign vessels and to forbid in
1669 the importation of sugar and tobacco from Brazil.
Colbert also revived the navy and established the naval inscription by
which the people of these maritime provinces, in return for certain
advantages, furnished the necessary recruits for the navy, dividing them
according to age and family position into different classes (the _régime
des classes_). He likewise instituted in 1672 the corps of marine guards,
composed of one thousand gentlemen, in order to have good officers, a
school of cannoneers for good marksmen, a school of hydrography, and a
board of naval construction.
For the encouragement of the fine arts and the sciences, the Academy
of Inscriptions and Belle-Lettres was founded in 1663, the Academy of
Science in 1666, the Academy of Music (1669), the Academy of Architecture
in 1671. A school of fine arts established at Rome (1667) received the
prize pupils of the Academy of Painting in Paris who copied on canvas
or in marble the masterpieces of antiquity. The cabinet of medals
founded also a school for the study of oriental languages. The Royal
Library received many additions and the Mazarine Library was opened to
the public. The Jardin des Plantes was enlarged and the foundation of
academies in the provinces encouraged. All the famous littérateurs and
artists of the day were generally pensioned, including many from foreign
countries who were induced to take up their residence in France.[a]
_Michelet’s Estimate of Colbert_
The king in 1683 was relieved of Colbert. He pressed heavily upon him,
forced him to reckon, was always talking of making the receipts balance
the expenditures. In his long ministry of twenty years he had passed
through two phases. During the first he tried to live on the revenue;
during the second, dragged on and compelled, he borrowed and lived on
the future. One moment he lightened the taxes and nevertheless collected
ninety millions; but the king spent one hundred millions.
Between him and the king there was a dispute about everything: concerning
buildings--he condemned Versailles: concerning religion--he upheld the
Protestant manufacturers. He died from his public disgrace--died because
he could do nothing and had lost hope. Ridiculous quarrels were forced
upon him. The king reproached him for the expense of Versailles, which
had been built in spite of his advice to the contrary.[114]
He died, detested and cursed. It was found necessary to bury him at
night to protect his body from the insults of the populace. Songs were
composed, _ponts neufs_ on the death of the tyrant. Was this word wrongly
applied? Not at all. This great man had been the tyrant of France in two
ways at once--tyrant through his position, the times, and the necessity
of things; tyrant through his violence in well doing and his impatience,
through his impulsiveness of will.
The war and Louvois, the king and the court, Versailles and the immense
waste had been blamed very justly. But there was something else. The
situation was tyrannical. Colbert built on a foundation already ruined,
on that of the misery which grew in that century without anything being
able to stop it--political and moral causes come from afar, above all,
the indolence of the nobility and of the Catholics, which after having
ruined Spain was about to ruin France. Mazarin had killed Colbert
in advance. The tax placed by the league of notables on the small
landholder, which was doubled about 1648, compelled him to sell his
field to the lord of the parish. But these fields, gathered together
under idle hands, produced little. Under Colbert there was a famine
every three years. To sustain the army and the working classes with
ease, he himself kept the wheat at a low price, almost always forbidding
its exportation, thus discouraging agricultural labour. From 1600 to
1700 every manufactured article quintupled in value. Wheat alone was
treated as a natural product, in connection with which labour would avail
nothing; nothing was done for it; it remained at the same price. That
evil of Spain, the hatred of work, the taste for a life of ease had for
a long time been inoculated in France. Colbert revolved in the circle
of a fatal contradiction. He wanted to discourage idleness, he said; he
struck at the false nobles. With what? With the authority of the king--of
the king of nobles, who, attracting everything to the court, “ennobling”
the nation, drew it into idleness. The dead and unproductive life of the
courtier, of the priest, more and more deadened everything.
This man of work was devoured by three great unproductive classes:
the nobles, who more and more lived on the state; the officials, whom
the progress of order brought into existence; the third class, the
permanent army, enormously increased. Now, the king drawing little or
nothing from the large rich body, that is the clergy, Colbert, triply
crushed, was obliged to create a productive class, to over-stimulate
work by driving industry abroad. War of customs duties, and soon a war
of armies, resulted. He himself, who was so interested in maintaining
peace, actively engaged in the war against Holland, and expected to gain
something from it for the navy and for industry.
History can cite nothing greater or more terrible than his sudden
improvisation of the marine. It astonishes, it frightens, both by
material enormity and by moral violence. Colbert demanded from France
the severest sacrifice which had ever been asked of her (before the
conscription[115]).
He showed the same vehement impatience in commercial regulations, in the
improvisation of a French industry. He was justly indignant at seeing an
ingenious people, very artistic in many things, awaiting and receiving
from elsewhere all the products of the useful arts. Manufactories are not
only a product of wealth but of education also, a special development of
certain faculties, of a certain aptitude. A people who did only one thing
would be very low in the scale of nations. Colbert awakened and revealed
in the French people an unknown aptitude; he caused a new art to burst
forth, that above all, which puts good taste and elegance into all the
requirements for the fitting out of a house, which relieves material life
by a noble gleam of mind. It was splendid, it was grand of him. But the
means were less happy. On the one hand, this budding industry he wanted
perfect all at once; that young plant which could not grow without the
liberties of life he confined and choked with tyrannical precautions.
Almost at the outset, his regulations were laws of terror (even to
putting a person in the pillory for defective merchandise, 1670). By
requiring this perfection he hoped to gain credit for French goods abroad
and to make people buy them with confidence. But, on the other hand, he
prevented the manufacture of goods of inferior quality, to satisfy the
less pretentious needs of the poorer classes.
The grandeur of this industrial creation has been told wonderfully well;
but not its fall, its prompt decadence. It perished both from the
general poverty (no more buyers) and from emigration (the producers left
even before the death of Colbert). His last glances beheld the decay of
the edifice which was soon to crumble to pieces.
The great historian of France for the end of this century is Pesant de
Boisguillebert. He is not acquainted with ancient times and he is wrong
in thinking that evils date from 1660. He is none the less truthful and
admirable in the picture he gives of the misery of the country and of
the crying abuses which continued even under Colbert. The three fiscal
terrors (_tailles_, _aides_, _douanes_) are found there in characters
of fire. One must see the unfortunate peasant collectors, who raise the
land-tax and are responsible for it, march through the village. They go
only together in companies for fear of being killed. But it is impossible
to take away anything from him who has nothing. Everything falls back
upon the collectors. The king’s bailiff seizes their cattle, the village
flocks, then even their persons. They are imprisoned.
[Illustration: COSTUME OF A NOBLEMAN, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
The case of the aides is much worse. The clerks, become merchants, make
a fierce war on the merchants who wish to buy wine from the vine grower
and not from them. All communication is broken off. “Everything which
comes from Japan quadruples its price, merely on account of the distance.
But everything here which passes from one province to another becomes
twenty times dearer, twenty-four times. Wine for a sou at Orleans is
worth twenty-four at Rouen. The salesman alone is six times more terrible
than pirates and tempests, than a sea of four thousand leagues.” France
pulls up its vines. The people no longer drink anything but water. The
custom-house has killed foreign commerce. No merchant dares any longer to
put himself in the hands of a receiver, who brings a suit against him if
he wishes and who is judged only by his own judges.
Thus the people, thus Colbert, remained the miserable slaves of the
financiers, of the general farmers of the taxes, of negotiators, of
partisans more powerful than the king. Colbert, on his coming to power,
had had the good fortune to hang several of them. In vain. They survived
and flourished and in the end strangled him; much worse, they caused
his name to be cursed. Under Mazarin there was absolute chaos. Under
Colbert there was relative order. The old abuses subsisted, but with
the odious force of order which an established government lent to them.
Under Mazarin France, miserable and in rags, still drank wine; but under
Colbert it drank water.
Progress was an evil. Under Colbert, the farming of the taxes was not
given out to favourites, but was sold at auction, to the highest bidder,
and thus it brought in more. Yes, but on the condition that the farmers
were permitted to use the terrible severity which made tax collecting a
war. In his mortal effort Colbert thus acted against himself. She escaped
him, however, do what he would--this France whom he wished to cure,
tormented by _recors_, eaten up by bailiffs’ men, expropriated, sold, and
executed.
The great malediction under which he died troubled him on his death-bed.
A letter from the king came to him and he did not wish to read it. “If I
had done for God,” said he, “what I have done for this man, I would be
sure of being saved, and I do not know where I am going.” We know it,
hero! You are going into glory. You remain in the heart of France. Great
nations, who judge with time like God, are as equitable as he, valuing
the labour less according to the result than in proportion to the effort,
the grandeur of the desire.[l]
After Colbert’s death his ministry was divided. The marquis of Seignelay,
his son, had the navy; the finances were intrusted to Claude le Pelletier
(1683-1689), later by the count de Pontchartrain (1689-1699); these last
succeeded but did not replace him. After 1689 the general penury was
such, that Louis was obliged to send to the mint the masterpieces in
chiselled silver which adorned Versailles.
LOUVOIS
[Sidenote: [1666-1691 A.D.]]
Colbert had organised peace; Louvois, “the greatest and most brutal of
clerks,” organised war. François Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois,
was born in 1641. At the age of fifteen years he entered the office
of his father, the secretary of state, and was initiated by a long
apprenticeship into the science of military administration, to which he
brought an activity equal to that of Colbert. When Louis XIV determined
to assume the rule, Louvois became the real minister of war, although he
did not succeed his father, Michel le Tellier, till 1666. He reformed the
army, and his reforms lasted as long as the old monarchy. If he preserved
the system of voluntary enlistment which had been in practice for three
centuries, he diminished abuses and dangers by a more exact discipline
and more severe regulations. He established uniforms by ordering that
each regiment should be distinguished by the colour of its clothes and
by various marks (1670). He introduced the use of copper pontoons for
crossing rivers; he instituted magazines of food and supplies, barracks,
military hospitals, the Hôtel des Invalides, all things almost unknown
before his time. He created the corps of engineers whence came the great
Vauban’s best pupils; schools of artillery at Douai, Metz, and Strasburg,
the companies of grenadiers in the infantry, the regiments of hussars in
the cavalry, and lastly cadet companies, a species of military school for
the _gentilshommes_.
The army still showed the spirit of feudal times. The soldier belonged
less to the king than to his colonel; the cavalry was given too much
importance and the nobility would serve only in it. From this reign the
French infantry became and long remained the first in the world. Louvois
required it to march in step and substituted the gun and bayonet for the
pike which was still prevalent; but it was not till after his time that
Vauban succeeded in making the gun at once a weapon for projectiles and a
weapon for fencing, and so rendered it the most formidable instrument of
destruction which was ever put into the hands of men.
He made a revolution in the army by the _ordre du tableau_ and by the
creation of the service of inspection. He did not destroy the venality
of offices which had been introduced into the army, and was exercised
almost entirely to the profit of the nobles; but in order to merit
promotion it was no longer sufficient for them to have ancestors--they
must have services; and the grades, from the rank of colonel, became the
prize of seniority--an excellent reform in those days, which would be
so now no longer. The hatred of the nobility pursued the minister who
was degrading “those born to command others, on the pretext that it is
reasonable to learn to obey in order to command; who wished to accustom
seigneurs to equality and to mingle with all the world indiscriminately.”
Louvois, with inflexible firmness, required that each should perform his
duty; to secure this he instituted inspectors-general who made the king’s
authority and his own everywhere present; and severe rebukes awaited
negligent officers.
He created recreation camps, a ruinous innovation when these assemblies
of troops were only a spectacle to divert the ladies of the court and
the king’s _ennui_, but an excellent school for officers and generals
when preparing for the great manœuvres of war. It was only after his
death that the order of St. Louis was instituted (1693) for the purpose
of bestowing honours as a reward for military services--this time
without distinction of birth, but not without distinction of religion;
the reformed could not obtain it. By such measures France was able to
have under arms, in the war of Flanders, 125,000 men; for that with
Holland, 180,000; before Ryswick, 300,000; during the War of the Spanish
Succession, 450,000.
VAUBAN
There was one point, the only one, perhaps, on which the minister of war
and the minister of marine were in accord: namely, the fortification
of the kingdom. To accomplish this immense work they found the man who
is, with Colbert, the greatest of this reign. Le Prestre de Vauban was
a _gentilhomme_ of no great family, who was born at Saulieu in Burgundy
in 1633. His father died in the service, leaving him only his name. A
prior of the neighbourhood took him in and brought him up. When he had
completed his seventeenth year the Fronde was in full swing. Eleven of
his brothers, uncles, and relatives were under arms; one morning Vauban
ran away and hastened to join the Great Condé, who received him as a
cadet and soon made him an officer.
Vauban fought well; he studied more. The good prior had given him some
notions of geometry; he developed them and these first acquirements
decided his vocation. Having passed into the royal army he served under
the chevalier de Clerville, the most renowned engineer of that time, and
at twenty-five directed the works during the sieges of Gravelines, Ypres,
and Oudenarde. In 1668 his reputation was so great that Louis XIV charged
him with the fortification of Dunkirk. This first work of the young
engineer was a masterpiece: two moles projecting over six thousand feet
into the water and defended by formidable batteries created a harbour
where nature had put only an unfavourable shore. The waters inside and
those of the high tides skilfully manipulated, incessantly hollowed
the channel and restored to the sea the mud it brought up. Henceforth
Vauban was the indispensable man whom every general demanded when he
had a siege to make. In time of war he took towns; in time of peace he
fortified them. It has been calculated that he worked on 300 old towns,
that he constructed 33 new ones, that he conducted 53 sieges, and was
present at 140 important actions. He was several times wounded; for in
order to reconnoitre the situation of a place and to spare the blood of
his soldiers, he exposed himself in such a manner as to call forth the
accusation of temerity, had not his cool and deliberate courage been like
the fulfilment of a duty.
Vauban, who fortified towns, knew still better how to take them. He
introduced the use of hollow cannon-balls for dispersing earth; ricochet
firing to dismount the artillery of the besieged and destroy the angles
of the bastions; above all he perfected the parallels at the siege of
Maestricht in 1673. These parallels joined the trenches which converged
towards the town, and gave the attack the advantage over the defence.
Vauban went forward slowly but surely; he marched under cover by lines on
which the troops were in a position to render each other mutual support,
did not hurry on attacks when he could dispense with them, took pains
to spare the soldiers, who had previously been flung away, and attained
his object incomparably more quickly and with fewer losses, because
he first silenced the enemy’s fire and left on the ramparts neither a
tenable point nor a cannon in condition to be fired. There was no longer
any impregnable fortress and it was easy to look forward to the day when
every well-besieged town would be taken. It is to him that we also owe
the invention of the socket which allows the infantry to fire whilst
still keeping the bayonet at the end of the gun.
SÉGUIER, LEGISLATIVE WORKS
[Sidenote: [1665-1685 A.D.]]
In a memorial handed to the king, August 15th, 1665, Colbert had proposed
to remodel the whole legislation so that there should be in France
but one law, one system of weights and measures; in addition he asked
for gratuitous justice, the abolition of the venality of offices, the
price of which was reckoned at four hundred and twenty millions, and
the diminution of the number of monks, and the encouragement of useful
callings.
A commission was appointed. When the members had held a meeting and at
last brought their task to a conclusion they discussed the matter with
eminent members of the parliament in the presence of the ministers,
under the presidency of the chancellor Séguier, sometimes under that of
the king. Six codes were the result of these deliberations: in 1667 the
civil ordinance or Code Louis which abolished some iniquitous procedure
belonging to the justice of the Middle Ages, “true witness of human
imbecility,” says Montaigne, shortened its delays and regulated the form
of the registers of births, marriages, and deaths which, it was ordered,
were to be deposited at the office of each law-court; in 1669 that of
Rivers and Forests which continues in its principal dispositions; in 1670
the ordinance of Criminal Instruction which the parliaments accepted only
after many _lettres de cachet_ and decrees of exile; it restricted the
application of the torture and various cases of provisional imprisonment,
fixed rights of jurisdiction so that none might be deprived of his
natural judges, laid down identical rules for all tribunals, thus
preparing the way for unity of principle by means of unity of form, but
did not yet allow either counsel or defender for the accused in capital
cases, preserved the atrocity of earlier penalties, the wheel and
quartering, and still made the penalty disproportionate to the crime; in
1673 the ordinance of Commerce, a true title to glory for Colbert; in
1681 that of the Navy and the Colonies, which has formed the common law
of the nations of Europe and serves them to this day as maritime law;
in 1685 the Black Code, which regulated the condition of negroes in the
French colonies.
These ordinances form the greatest work of codification executed from
Justinian to Napoleon. Some portions of them are still in operation.
LIONNE, FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND DIPLOMACY
[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]
If Colbert and Louvois, by the re-establishment of the finances, the
creation of a navy, and the reform of the army, allowed Louis XIV to
make war successfully, Lionne, secretary of state for foreign affairs,
prepared that success by his negotiations. “He had,” says Choisy, “a
superior genius: his understanding, naturally keen and penetrating,
had been still further sharpened in the affairs in which the cardinal
had early employed him.” Saint-Simon, who was no flatterer, also says
that he did everything with a skill and superiority quite unequalled.
The king indeed watched closely over this branch; he himself wrote the
first despatches to his ambassadors; he often wrote minutes of the most
important letters with his own hand, and he always had the instructions
sent in his name read aloud to him.
When Lionne died in 1671 the king gave him as successor the marquis de
Pomponne who had conducted several embassies with success and was then in
Sweden, whose king he had succeeded in detaching from the Dutch alliance.
Pomponne directed all the negotiations which terminated in the Peace of
Nimeguen. “But,” said Louis XIV, “the office I gave him was found to be
too great and extensive for him. I was obliged to order him to retire,
because everything that passed through his hands lost something of the
grandeur and force which are needed in executing the orders of a king of
France who is not unfortunate.”
TRIUMPH OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY
Some of these ministers of Louis XIV, especially Colbert and Louvois,
were certainly great administrators; they were not, they could not be,
great statesmen. Colbert himself aimed at making France richer only in
order to render the king more powerful; and all laboured to constitute
the excessive centralisation which enveloped the whole country, its
industry and commerce, the arms and the brain, with a thousand bonds of a
minute regulation, so that the initiative of the ministers was everywhere
substituted for the action of individuals and communities. The result of
this system was to be that France would live less by her own vitality
than by that of her government. When age and sickness should freeze that
ever-present hand all would decline. A great people would be subjected to
the vicissitudes of one man’s existence.
[Illustration: A COURT COSTUME, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
If the administration of the realm was as much the work of Louis XIV’s
ministers as his own, one thing belonged to him alone: this was the
general direction he gave to the government and to society--the skilful
and energetic manner with which he knew how to control all other powers,
to annul them, and make them to serve his greatness; it was in fact
that art of ruling which no other prince, in Saint-Simon’s[i] judgment,
possessed to a greater degree. We have already seen his ideas on the
rights of sovereigns; he had summed them up in that phrase attributed to
him, it is said, in his youth, at the end of the Fronde: “_L’État, c’est
moi_--The State, it is I.”[116]
He believed this; everybody believed it with him, and the church taught
it. Bossuet founded the divine right of the monarchy on maxims drawn from
the Scriptures. “Oh kings, ye are gods,” exclaimed the great bishop at
the very moment that Lebrun was filling Versailles with the apotheosis of
Louis XIV. While he lived there was but one uncontrolled and limitless
will--his own. The states-general might have recalled other wills, but he
never convoked it; he punished those that spoke of it, and when, at the
Treaty of Utrecht, the allies, still defying his ambition, tried to exact
that the conditions of peace should be ratified by a national assembly,
he haughtily refused and declared that he regarded the demand as an
insult to the majesty of the throne. The minority of the provinces had
their own estates, but he suppressed many of them. Those which remained,
as in Languedoc, Burgundy, Provence, Brittany, etc., never assembled
except to execute the orders of the ministers. Whatever remained of
municipal liberty disappeared like that of the provinces. The king,
coining money with the ancient rights dear to the towns, changed the
mayoralties into hereditary offices and sold them to the highest bidders.
An edict of 1683 placed the financial administration of the towns under
the direction of the intendants. Their finances did not improve. The
communities were made responsible for the payment of the _taille_ as the
_curiates_ had been under the Roman emperors. Former fiscal arrangements
had ruined the magistrates. The new one held them exempt, but ruined the
communes.
A phrase sums up this entire policy--unfortunately it was spoken by
Colbert: “It is not well,” he wrote to a governor, charging him to let an
elective magistracy fall into desuetude, “that some one should speak in
the name of all.”
_Submission of Parliament_
Royalty had taken five centuries to undermine the great body of the
feudal aristocracy, and the better to perfect this work had formed with
its own hands another body--that of the judiciary order. In the sixteenth
century they spoke of the parliaments as “the strong columns on which the
monarchy is supported,” but in the seventeenth the new royalty wished for
no other support than its absolute power.
Nevertheless, thanks to the sale of offices, which left the same offices
in the same hands, thanks to the dignity of the magistrate’s lives, to
the political rôles they had played on several occasions, to the _esprit
de corps_ which had quickly been established in the bosom of the great
judiciary companies, there had been raised alongside the nobility of
the sword a nobility of the robe, which seemed quite as troublesome as
the other because it already had its souvenirs and regrets. It was not
always easily managed. It parried attacks with that force of inertia
peculiar to assemblies of aged men, which is difficult to overcome at a
time when tradition stands for law. The spirit of opposition, everywhere
punished, took refuge here--political opposition, scarcely sensible
in the parliament of Paris, provincial opposition in the others, all
religious opposition, under the form of Jansenism. One of Louis XIV’s
ideas which he sought to realise with the greatest perseverance was to
transform the parliaments into simple courts of appeal, to put his state
councils over them, even the parliament of Paris which had brought about
the Fronde. In an edict of 1667 he proscribed it from enregistering
ordinances within a week and he suffered no remonstrance. The following
year he had torn from the parliament registers the records of all its
deliberations during the civil war, in order to efface even the memory of
its old-time pretensions. Besides this he changed its title of sovereign
court into that of superior court, as if the first were a usurpation of
royal sovereignty.
_Submission of the Nobility_
It appeared a more difficult task to reduce the nobles. Cardinal
Richelieu had razed their fortresses and cut off the heads of some of
the most unruly. Mazarin had bought them or vanquished them by ruse.
Louis XIV made himself their master by drawing them around him by his
fêtes, dragging them from their domains, where they thought too often of
their ancestors and still felt themselves free, filling his antechamber
and household posts with the descendants of those who had made his
fathers tremble, and forming for royalty such brilliant cortèges as the
representative of God on earth would wish to be surrounded by.
If they had titles and honours they had no political influence in the
state. In his councils, the king, after the death of Mazarin, admitted
but a single one of the old noblesse, the duke de Beauvilliers, governor
of the royal children; and he chose all his ministers from those of
middle conditions, in order, according to Saint-Simon’s[i] forceful
expression, to be able “to plunge them into the depths of nothingness
from which he had drawn them.” The French nobility never knew how, like
that of England, to become a political class; it was never anything but a
military caste.
_The Third Estate_
Louis XIV preferred, following in this the ancient monarchical
traditions, to be served by the middle class, more educated and,
moreover, more devoted, because it did not yet feel the inconveniences
of absolute power, as it had been feeling for centuries those of the
feudal régime. Louis turned over to it all the financial, political, and
judicial functions; he established it peacefully in the administration of
the realm; he pushed it energetically towards commerce and industry--two
forces of the new era--and the regard he had for those _petites gens_
named Boileau, Racine, Molière, announced the coming substitution of
the rights of intellect for those of birth. Louis XIV thus unknowingly
paved the way for democracy in France and the Revolution. However he must
not be regarded as a sort of bourgeois king, a _roi des maltôtiers_,
as Saint-Simon[i] disdainfully calls him. His policy, the high idea
he had of his person, the rigorous ceremonial which made a sort of
redoubtable and inaccessible divinity of him, the _carrousels_, the
brilliant fêtes--none of these recalls to mind the modest pictures of
constitutional monarchies.[117] More than that, those nobodies whom Louis
made his councillors, his ambassadors, and his secretaries of state
quitted their plebeian state before entering his court. They became the
marquis de Louvois, the count de Pontchartrain, the marquis de Torcy.
While working with the bourgeois, the grandson of Henry IV always had the
desire to remain the king of the noblemen.
LOUIS XIV AND THE CHURCH
[Sidenote: [1661-1685 A.D.]]
Louis XIV conducted himself towards the clergy as he had done towards the
nobility--in honouring them he watched to see that they robbed him of
none of his power. The great lords, with but few exceptions, were removed
from the church as they had been from the administration. Therefore the
aristocratic Saint-Simon[i] reproaches Louis “with having ruined the
episcopacy by filling it with seminarian pedants and their pupils without
education and without birth”--a strange reproach from the mouth of a man
who had lived with Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier, and Massillon, the eternal
honour of the French church.
[Illustration: STREET COSTUME, TIME OF LOUIS XIV
(From an old French print)]
The clergy was therefore under Louis XIV one force the more at the
disposal of royalty. In the affair of the _régale_, the bishops even
upheld the king against Rome. The _régale_ was the king’s right to enjoy
the revenues of certain benefices, bishoprics, and archbishoprics, during
vacancies in the sees. In 1673 an edict declared all the French sees
subject to the _régale_. Two bishops refused to obey and their action
was approved by the pope. Louis XIV, to end the dispute, convoked an
assembly of French clergy which adopted, in 1682, under the inspiration
of Bossuet, four propositions which were registered by the courts and
the faculty of theology. They were in substance: God gave to St. Peter
and his successors no power, direct or indirect, over temporal affairs.
The Gallican church approves those decrees of the Council of Constance
which declare the œcumenical councils superior to the pope in spiritual
affairs. The rules and customs received in the kingdom and in the
Gallican church must remain unalterable. The pope’s decisions, in matter
of doctrine, shall not be irreformable until the church has accepted them.
Innocent XI neither approved nor quashed these resolutions, but he
refused to grant bulls of investiture to those bishops, appointed by
the government, who had been members of the assembly. The consequence
was that at his death there were twenty dioceses without heads. The
matter was, however, brought to a conclusion in 1693 by a compromise.
Innocent XII granted the bulls of investiture and the king ceased to
impose upon the theological faculties the obligation of teaching the four
propositions of 1682.
_The Protestants_
The dissenters profited nothing by the quarrel with the court of Rome.[c]
Since the Peace of Alais the Protestants, being deprived of their
political organisation, of their “towns of security,” and of everything
which had helped to form them into a party, had been living in obscurity,
doing their best to make their enemies forget them, and carefully
abstaining from taking any part in the civil troubles of the time. During
the Fronde not one of them had shown any sign of life. Their attitude
towards the government was that of a child in disgrace, and towards
the Catholics that of a disdainful enemy. They persisted in isolating
themselves from the rest of the nation, and continued to correspond with
their friends in England and Holland. They were law-abiding, peaceable,
and industrious citizens, and contributed their full share to the
greatness and prosperity of their country by their courage and their
energy.