THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN FRANCE
The history of France from the advent of Louis XI to that of Louis XIV
displays in its development constructive tendencies so definite and
constant that its edifice, at once harmonious and imposing, seems the
realisation of an architectural scheme perfectly in keeping with the
genius of France. Everything tended to that unification of the country,
to that union of the provinces the necessary consequence of which
must be the centralisation of administration and the concentration of
political power in the hands of the sovereign.
The idea of absolute monarchy has never been conceived and realised
in exactly the same way as in France. M. Jacques Bainville is fully
justified in holding that the kings of France made it their main duty
to concentrate all their efforts on identifying themselves and their
dynasty with the development and consolidation of the unification of
the country. But it has yet to be shown what is really the origin of a
conception of political reality that so far seems to be unique.
Monarchy was indeed just as absolute in Spain and in Austria. But
in both countries it remained comparatively feudal. So that the
_bourgeois_ origin ascribed by M. Bainville to the Capetian Monarchy,
its intimate relations with the Middle Class amounting to a sort of
mutual league against the great feudal lords, is sufficient to endow
it with the modern character that attracts the student, eager to
penetrate to the living core of the life of political institutions. It
could not, however, account for the rationality of its development,
for the harmony and beauty of its historical features. In the last
half of the sixteenth and all through the seventeenth century France
and her monarchy are endowed with a beauty that exercises a permanent
fascination. It would be true to say that the part played by France
at that time in the civilisation of the world was to a large degree
æsthetic.
Modern philosophy, above all in Italy, understands art as the
expression of the life of mind. Hence, a battle, a treaty of
peace, a law, a form of government, can be considered an artistic
masterpiece just as well as a poem or a monument. Now between the
coronation of Henry IV and that of Louis XIV the monarchy of France
perfectly expresses all that is positive and, therefore, historically
constructive in the life of the country. Its spiritual and practical
forces meet in the king’s person and receive thereby their historical
realisation.
“_L’Etat c’est moi_,” says Louis XIV. “_Cogito ergo sum_,” says
Descartes. The self-assertion of the king identifying the whole of
political reality with his empirical person is not without affinity
with the import of the Cartesian assumption in which the criterion of
certitude, the root of all reality, was identified with the individual
act of thinking. The self-assertion spontaneously coming on the lips of
the Sovereign and that coming out of the meditation of the philosopher
is one and the same thing. It is the consequence of sixteen centuries
of Christianity, and in their mathematical conciseness the two formulas
are the best proclamation of the genius of France in all its clear,
simple and luminous logic. They are, however, at the same time a
revelation of what is weak in that genius. To be so clear, so luminous
and so simple, French philosophy was bound to be abstract and radical.
The radicalness of mind common to the Jacobins and to the more modern
anti-clericals and democrats caused the elimination of the feudal class
as a factor in political life, a fact which was bound to carry in its
trail the political revolution of the eighteenth and the economic
one of the nineteenth century. When a government reduces a class to
political non-existence the part formerly discharged by that class must
be entrusted to another, which is bound to claim in exchange for the
support offered to the government in the struggle against the class
displaced the privileges previously granted to its rival for services
rendered to the state.
France one, under the government of one man. It bears a family likeness
to the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. Such an idea is great and
beautiful as _Horace_ and _Le Cid_. But it owes its grandeur to a
simplicity that condemns it to leave out much of political reality,
which is indeed as complex and multiform as life itself. Therefore,
though it is beautiful, its beauty is bound to be a tragic one. When
the concept had become a fact, when Louis XIV could say _l’Etat c’est
moi_; when France was at least one under her King, the French monarchy
was in the position of the bullet that has been shot right in the
bull’s-eye. The aim is perfectly caught, the steely little thing is
helplessly stuck there, useless. The funeral knell of absolute monarchy
is rung by this identification of the Sovereign with the State. As a
political institution it was perfect. Perfection is static and cannot,
therefore, belong to life, which moves towards perfection but never is
perfect.
Politically the feudal nobility was hewn down with the indifference
with which a venerable forest is razed to the ground to make a French
garden. The trouble was that society is not a garden which once laid
down can be kept by a succession of good gardeners in consonancy with
the plans of the architect. In France society was to go on living its
historical life of eternal alteration and formation. The political
abolition of the nobility was a most active ferment to breed more
speedily the modifications to come. The French nobility lost its
virtues; corrupted by the idleness enforced upon its members, it
infested the moral atmosphere and this in spite of the very remarkable
men produced by some of the old stocks. Soon the other classes required
its social elimination and they wanted it to be as radical as the
political annihilation had been. Undoubtedly the kings had been obliged
to destroy what should have been their natural support in order to
conform with the political conception that had been elaborated by
logical French minds. The king and his people making one without the
intervening links of classes—no constitution could be more simple; but
its realisation required the amputation of what is necessary to the
life of any monarchy.
Descartes and the Roi-Soleil are so adequate an expression of their
epoch that they may be considered as the characters of the prologue
to the tragedy that was to bring the next century to its close. M.
Jacques Maritain has rightly bestowed on Descartes the epithet of
revolutionary, but it could be extended to Louis XIV if one did not
run the risk of seeming paradoxical. For both their self-assertions,
politically and theoretically absolute, are equally anti-religious and
anti-historical. The position assumed by Mind whenever man is really
religious implies self-negation. If God is, He must be infinite and
Man, by comparison, nothing; at least such is the logical sequence
of the doctrines upheld by most religious people. And when Mind is
speculatively too poor to realise the necessity of the religious moment
in which man bows down to everything that is not his beloved self and
accepts the law that such recognition begets, man can turn to history
and trace there intuitively (as the first great thinker of Italy has
done), the part played by each one of mind’s activities. Religion
then appears independently of personal conviction, a constant element
in the life of man, more or less preponderant, always there, as the
recognition of all that is to man not-self. It is where modern thought
has failed to realise this, either theoretically or historically, that
it knows only the first term of the relation which is the basis of
every social organisation. Liberty and law are correlative terms just
as are light and shadow. Liberty is the claim of the subject and law
springs from the recognition of the object. Louis XIV and Descartes,
thanks to their unbounded selfishness, assert emphatically their
empirical individuality. For them the self swallows up the other term
the not-self, that the modern world after them seems to ignore.
Descartes was endowed with the most precious gifts that make the
scientist and the thinker. Yet it can be said that his greatest
fortune lay in the fact that he embodies most perfectly all that
is characteristic of the French mind. Foreigners, even when their
knowledge of his language is far from perfect, can take his _Discours
sur la Méthode_ and read it with perfect ease and a feeling of
intellectual and æsthetic well-being. To read this and to walk through
the park of Versailles are equally indispensable to understand that
great century in France. And both walk and reading make very much the
same impression.
It is true that the reader will easily pick up in the Cartesian
theories ideas known to St. Augustin and to the Scholastic Doctors
against whom Descartes reacted so violently. The visitor might just as
well notice in the park or on the noble façade of the palace lines and
decorative patterns reminding him of the Renaissance Villas seen in
Italy, but this does not deprive the palace and its setting of their
purely French character. The fact is that the seventeenth century with
the last half of the sixteenth and the first of the eighteenth, appears
in the life of Mind, i.e. in history, as an Anglo-French period,
whereas the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth had been in
their artistic and intellectual production mainly Italian.
The ideas elaborated in France and in England had come from everywhere
and from all centuries, Italy being chiefly the historical and natural
agent of communication, a sort of historical point of convergence
between antiquity and modern times as she is geographically between
east and west.
The idea of originality, without playing upon words, can be called the
“original sin” of our modern world; born from the contempt of Bacon and
Descartes for the past, it is ending now in Futurism and Bolshevism.
To attempt to create something new without roots in the past in art,
politics, science or philosophy is not merely absurd, it is impossible.
The living dialectic we term history displays each of its moments as
the logical sequence of the preceding one and the elaborating stage of
the next. The work of Descartes will live as long as our intellectual
life lasts. Yet this very work, in which he inaugurates the
anti-historical method, is the best illustration of the law of history,
displaying as it does the riches of a mind in which were interwoven the
legacies of the past and the germs of all that was to be subjective and
positive in the philosophy of several centuries.
Louis XIV brought a political form to the precision of a mathematical
formula, that is to say he made it absolute and by so doing rendered
the evolution, characteristic of all social organisation, impossible
for the monarchy he represented. That which is absolute is unalterable.
To be absolute this French monarchy had to be static; whereas every
political system must be dynamic. Perfection is the negation of
development. The person of Louis XIV was the perfect realisation of
France’s ideal of an absolute Sovereign and as such it was, therefore,
the conclusion of the process which had brought him to the throne.
The method of English empiricism, which consisted, after Bacon, in
looking at the exterior world with wide open eyes to get a notion of
reality based on sense knowledge, was taken up in France with as much
enthusiasm as the theories of Descartes were taken up in England. The
two countries balanced each other, France tending to the unity of
man’s consciousness, England to the full realisation of the world of
senses. Life obviously is neither of these but their combination or
more properly their synthesis. So that the mutual influence of both
countries is the best illustration of the life of mind, single in its
development, multiform in its manifestation.
What is tragic in the philosophy of Descartes is almost perfectly
illustrated in his own life. No one has more eloquently proclaimed the
subjectivity of life and reality than he has through his own scholarly
selfishness. Only Louis XIV could be his rival in this self-assertion.
The self-centred monarch, the self-centred scholar, can vie with each
other. Therefore he may be held to be just as anti-religious and
anti-historical as Louis XIV; the one could not forget the majesty, the
other the genius, with which he felt himself invested to bow down in
worship of the King of Kings, in worship of the Word of eternal thought.
Yet both were believers and convinced Roman Catholics. The
contradiction of fact thus introduced in their lives find its most
exquisite expression in the vow of Descartes, when he pledged himself
to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loreto if he could get rid of all
the duties that fell to him as a soldier, as a man of the world. They
prevented him from attending freely to the satisfaction of his longing
for scientific researches. Hence his impatience to retire from this
vast world, full of rights and duties, where men suffer and require
help and love. The anti-religiousness of such feeling need not be
emphasised, it is obviously worse than that of many people who, calling
themselves atheists, were drawn into deifying nature or their own
negation of God!
To tell man that he has only to turn his mind inwards to find in
the most intimate recess of his soul the criterion of Truth and
consequently of Justice, is a most Christian saying. But in the works
of St. Augustin, where Descartes found it, it implies either the belief
in God’s presence in the heart of every believer, or the immanence
of the transcendental self in every empirical self, whereas in
Descartes’ own writings and mind neither of the two is to be found. His
rationalism seems brutally to reject belief outside philosophy, outside
the theoretical and intellectual world altogether. It only _seems_ to
do so, because it is one of the first stepping-stones of Idealism, but
of this he could not even dream and he went on establishing between
will and knowledge such a relation that every rational act ought to
be good and every irrational one bad. Hence the duty of vulgarising
rational thinking through education, which was to become paramount in
pedagogy and politics. Hence again the radicalness of the difference
between educated and uneducated which was to produce in our modern
democracies a class difference far stronger than that of the Middle
Ages when a man could be made squire or even knight provided he proved
his personal valour in actual deeds.
English philosophy received through Hobbes all the rationalism it
needed to balance the excessive empiricism of Bacon and the world was
ready for Illuminism, which, originating in England, became one of the
greatest and noblest movements recorded in history in spite of its many
flaws.
Italy could not, indeed, offer anything to make up for such rationalism
and empiricism. With her political virility the whole country was daily
losing its speculative originality and fecundity, for as Vincenzo Cuoco
was to realise a century and a half later, the two manifestations of
man’s genius, political and theoretical, usually go hand in hand. The
intellectual gifts of Italian scholars were wasted in academic pastimes
or devoted to works of erudition, which prepared for the genius of Vico
the materials of his historical vision of reality, but were of little
avail to counteract the impatience displayed by France and England,
turning their backs upon history in order to feel free to shake off the
yoke of every traditional authority. Feeling, intention, worship, so
many elements of spiritual life, were almost discarded to make room for
the goddess Reason.
Art and Religion were thus denied in their essence. Art could only be
at best didactic or hedonistic, it was, therefore, considered at the
service either of thought as a means of vulgarisation of scientific
knowledge, or of sensation as capable of causing agreeable emotions.
As to Religion it was disposed of in a more radical way. Theoretically
misrepresented, historically ignored, it was to be tolerated by English
philosophy for practical reasons as a political instrument and as the
best educative force. It had been useful and necessary in the centuries
of dark ignorance, but to the century that was to call itself the age
of light it was a hindrance, an impediment of which mankind was to be
rid at all cost. Illuminism, that is to say the enlightenment of the
people, and the anti-religiousness of the philosophers were identified.
The war waged against religion was confused with the war waged against
ignorance. One step only was needed to make of ignorance a synonym for
religion.
Nobody waited to enquire why religion was everywhere and why it was
always a factor in social life; nobody anyway could have answered the
question as it would have implied historical research, a synthetic
view of history, for which no one was fit. The Italians lacked the
philosophical basis for such work, France and England lacked the turn
of mind necessary to do it with intelligence. Germany was still in her
teens until Leibniz came to proclaim the intellectual coming of age of
his country. Thus religion was a puzzling problem to philosophers and
the lack of intelligence towards this enigmatic X was to breed a great
many political difficulties. Religion alone could have made up for the
oncoming individualism, first social, then economic, which threatened
universal destruction.
Man was raised to the honours of the altar, hailed as ultimate reality
in what is most negative and empirical in him. His intellectual
activity was to become the principle of reality, which indeed it is
in so far as it is transcendental and, therefore, divine. But the
seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries could only know this activity
as far as it is empirical and, therefore, non-divine. Illuminism, with
all its generosity and noble impulses, was unable to realise what
transcends the reason and experience of every single man. It was to be
the lot of Germany and, above all, Italy to conceive in speculative
form the life of Mind and to realise the natural function of religion
throughout history.