Richelieu had been able to surmount these difficulties because he governed in the name of a king of full age, and against isolated adversaries; while Mazarin had the latter against him in a coalition which had lasted ten years, withRichelieu and Mazarin.the further disadvantages of his foreign origin and a royal minority at a time when every one was sick of government by ministers. He was the very opposite of Richelieu, as wheedling in his ways as the other had been haughty and scornful, as devoid of vanity and rancour as Richelieu had been full of jealous care for his authority; he was gentle where the other had been passionate and irritable, with an intelligence as great and more supple, and a far more grasping nature.
It was the fiscal question that arrayed against Mazarin a coalition of all petty interests and frustrated ambitions; this was always the Achilles’ heel of the French monarchy, which in 1648 was at the last extremity for money.Financial difficulties.All imposts were forestalled, and every expedient for obtaining either direct or indirect taxes had been exhausted by the methods of the financiers. As the country districts could yield nothing more, it became necessary to demand money from the Parisians and from the citizens of the various towns, and to search out and furbish up old disused edicts—edicts as to measures and scales of prices—at the very moment when the luxury and corruption of theparvenuswas insulting the poverty and suffering of the people, and exasperating all those officials who took their functions seriously.
A storm burst forth in the parlement against Mazarin as the patron of these expedients, the occasion for this being the edict of redemption by which the government renewed for nine years the “Paulette” which had now expired,Rebellion of the parlement.by withholding four years’ salary from all officers of the Great Council, of theChambres des comptes, and of theCour des aides. The parlement, although expressly exempted, associated itself with their protest by the decree of union of May 13, 1648, and deliberations in a body upon the reform of the state. Despite the queen’s express prohibition, the insurrectionary assembly of the Chambre Saint Louis criticized the whole financial system, founded as it was upon usury, claimed the right of voting taxes, respect for individual liberty, and the suppression of the intendants, who were a menace to the new bureaucratic feudalism. The queen, haughty and exasperated though she was, yielded for the time being, because the invasion of the Spaniards in the north, the arrest of Charles I. of England, and the insurrection of Masaniello at Naples made the moment a critical one for monarchies; but immediately after the victory at Lens she attempted acoup d’état, arresting the leaders, and among them Broussel, a popular member of the parlement (August 26, 1648). Paris at once rose in revolt—a Paris of swarming and unpoliced streets, that had been making French history ever since the reign of Henry IV., and that had not forgotten the barricades of the League. Once more a pretence of yielding had to be made, until Condé’s arrival enabled the court to take refuge at Saint-Germain (January 15, 1649).
Civil war now began against the rebellious coalition of greatThe Fronde (1648-1652).nobles, lawyers of the parlement, populace, and mercenaries just set free from the Thirty Years’ War. It lasted four years, for motives often as futile as the Grande Mademoiselle’s ambition to wed little Louis XIV., Cardinal de Retz’s red hat, or Madame de Longueville’s stool at the queen’s side; it was, as its name ofFrondeindicates, a hateful farce, played by grown-up children, in several acts.
Its first and shortest phase was the Fronde of the Parlement. At a period when all the world was a little mad, the parlement had imagined a loyalist revolt, and, though it raised an armed protest, this was not against the king butThe Fronde of the Parlement.against Mazarin and the persons to whom he had delegated power. But the parlement soon became disgusted with its allies—the princes and nobles, who had only drawn their swords in order to beg more effectively with arms in their hands; and the Parisian mob, whose fanaticism had been aroused by Paul de Gondi, a warlike ecclesiastic, a Catiline in a cassock, who preached the gospel at the dagger’s point. When a suggestion was made to the parlement to receive an envoy from Spain, the members had no hesitation in making terms with the court by the peace of Rueil (March 11, 1649), which ended the first Fronde.
As anentr’acte, from April 1649 to January 1650, came the affair of thePetits Maîtres: Condé, proud and violent; Gaston of Orleans, pliable and contemptible; Conti, the simpleton; and Longueville, the betrayed husband.The Fronde of the Princes.The victor of Lens and Charenton imagined that every one was under an obligation to him, and laid claim to a dictatorship so insupportable that Anne of Austria and Mazarin—assured by Gondi of the concurrence of the parlement and people—had him arrested. To defend Condé the great conspiracy of women was formed: Madame de Chevreuse, the subtle and impassioned princess palatine, and the princess of Condé vainly attempted to arouse Normandy, Burgundy and the mob of Bordeaux; while Turenne, bewitched by Madame de Longueville, allowed himself to become involved with Spain and was defeated at Rethel (December 15, 1650). Unfortunately, after his custom when victor, Mazarin forgot his promises—above all, Gondi’s cardinal’s hat. A union was effected between the two Frondes, that of the Petits Maîtres and that of the parlements, and Mazarin was obliged to flee for safety to the electorate of Cologne (February 1651), whence he continued to govern the queen and the kingdom by means of secret letters. But the heads of the two Frondes—Condé, now set free from prison at Havre, and Gondi who detested him—were not long in quarrelling fatally. Owing to Mazarin’s exile and to the king’s attainment of his majority (September 5, 1651) quiet was being restored, when the return of Mazarin, jealous of Anne of Austria, nearly brought about another reconciliation of all his opponents (January 1652). Condé resumed civil war with the support of Spain, because he was not given Mazarin’s place; but though he defeated the royal army at Bléneau, he was surprised at Étampes, and nearly crushed by Turenne at the gate of Saint-Antoine. Saved, however, by the Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston of Orleans, he lost Paris by the disaster of the Hôtel de Ville (July 4, 1652), where he had installed an insurrectionary government. A general weariness of civil war gave plenty of opportunity after this to the agents of Mazarin, who in order to facilitate peace made a pretence of exiling himself for a second time to Bouillon. Then came the final collapse: Condé having taken refuge in Spain for seven years, Gaston of Orleans being in exile, Retz in prison, and the parlement reduced to its judiciary functions only, the field was left open for Mazarin, who, four months after the king, re-entered in triumph that Paris which had driven him forth with jeers and mockery (February 1653).
The task was now to repair these four years of madness and folly. The nobles who had hoped to set up the League again, half counting upon the king of Spain, were held in check by Mazarin with the golden dowries of hisThe administration of Mazarin.numerous nieces, and were now employed by him in warfare and in decorative court functions; while others, De Retz and La Rochefoucauld, sought consolation in their Memoirs or their Maxims, one for his mortifications and the other for his rancour as a statesman out of employment. The parlement, which had confused political power with judiciary administration, was given to understand, in the session of April 13, 1655, at Vincennes, that the era of political manifestations was over; and the money expended by Gourville, Mazarin’s agent, restored the members of the parlement to docility. The power of the state was confided to middle-class men, faithful servants during the evil days: Abel Servien, Michel le Tellier, Hugues de Lionne. Like Henry IV. after the League, Mazarin, after having conquered the Fronde, had to buy back bit by bit the kingdom he had lost, and, like Richelieu, he spread out a network of agents, thenceforward regular and permanent, who assured him of that security without which he could never have carried on his vast plunderings in peace and quiet. His imitator and superintendent, Fouquet, the Maecenas of the future Augustus, concealed this gambling policy beneath the lustre of the arts and the glamour of a literature remarkable forelevation of thought and vigour of style, and further characterized by the proud though somewhat restricted freedom conceded to men like Corneille, Descartes and Pascal, but soon to disappear.
It was also necessary to win back from Spain the territory which the Frondeurs had delivered up to her. Both countries, exhausted by twenty years of war, were incapable of bringing it to a successful termination, yet neitherWar with Spain.would be first to give in; Mazarin, therefore, disquieted by Condé’s victory at Valenciennes (1656), reknit the bond of Protestant alliances, and, having nothing to expect from Holland, he deprived Spain of her alliance with Oliver Cromwell (March 23, 1657). A victory in the Dunes by Turenne, now reinstalled in honour, and above all the conquest of the Flemish seaboard, were the results (June 1658); but when, in order to prevent the emperor’s intervention in the Netherlands, Mazarin attempted, on the death of Ferdinand III., to wrest the Empire from the Habsburgs, he was foiled by the gold of the Spanish envoy Peñaranda (1657). When the abdication of Christina of Sweden caused a quarrel between Charles Gustavus of Sweden and John Casimir of Poland, by which the emperor and the elector of Brandenburg hoped to profit, Mazarin (August 15, 1658) leagued the Rhine princes against them; while at the same time the substitution of Pope Alexander VII. for Innocent X., and the marriage of Mazarin’s two nieces with the duke of Modena and a prince of the house of Savoy, made Spain anxious about her Italian possessions. The suggestion of a marriage between Louis XIV. and a princess of SavoyPeace of the Pyrenees.decided Spain, now brought to bay, to accord him the hand of Maria Theresa as a chief condition of the peace of the Pyrenees (November 1659). Roussillon and Artois, with a line of strongholds constituting a formidable northern frontier, were ceded to France; and the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine under certain conditions was ratified. Thus from this long duel between the two countries Spain issued much enfeebled, while France obtained the preponderance in Italy, Germany, and throughout northern Europe, as is proved by Mazarin’s successful arbitration at Copenhagen and at Oliva (May-June 1660). That dream of Henry IV. and Richelieu, the ruin of Philip II.’s Catholic empire, was made a realized fact by Mazarin; but the clever engineer, dazzled by success, took the wrong road in national policy when he hoped to crown his work by the Spanish marriage.
The development of events had gradually enlarged the royal prerogative, and it now came to its full flower in the administrative monarchy of the 17th century. Of this system Louis XIV. was to be the chief exponent. HisLouis XIV. (1661-1715).reign may be divided into two very distinct periods. The death of Colbert and the revocation of the edict of Nantes brought the first to a close (1661-1683-1685); coinciding with the date when the Revolution in England definitely reversed the traditional system of alliances, and when the administration began to disorganize. In the second period (1685-1715) all the germs of decadence were developed until the moment of final dissolution.
In a monarchy so essentially personal the preparation of the heir to the throne for his position should have been the chief task. Anne of Austria, a devoted but unintelligent mother, knew no method of dealing with her son,Education of Louis XIV.save devotion combined with the rod. His first preceptors were nothing but courtiers; and the most intelligent, his valet Laporte, developed in the royal child’s mind his natural instinct of command, a very lively sense of his rank, and that nobly majestic air of master of the world which he preserved even in the commonest actions of his life. The continual agitations of the Fronde prevented him from persevering in any consistent application during those years which are the most valuable for study, and only instilled in him a horror of revolution, parliamentary remonstrance, and disorder of all kinds; so that this recollection determined the direction of his government. Mazarin, in his later years, at last taught him his trade as king by admitting him to the council, and by instructing him in the details of politics and of administration. In 1661 Louis XIV. was a handsome youth of twenty-two, of splendid health and gentle serious mien; eager for pleasure, but discreet and even dissimulating; his rather mediocre intellectual qualities relieved by solid common sense; fully alive to his rights and his duties.
The duties he conscientiously fulfilled, but he considered he need render no account of them to any one but his Maker, the last humiliation for God’s vicegerent being “to take the law from his people.” In the solemn language ofHis political ideas.the “Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin” he did but affirm the arbitrary and capricious character of his predecessors’ action. As for his rights, Louis XIV. looked upon these as plenary and unlimited. Representative of God upon earth, heir to the sovereignty of the Roman emperors, a universal suzerain and master over the goods and the lives of his vassals, he could conceive no other bounds to his authority than his own interests or his obligations towards God, and in this he was a willing believer of Bossuet. He therefore had but two aims: to increase his power at home and to enlarge his kingdom abroad. The army and taxation were the chief instruments of his policy. Had not Bodin, Hobbes and Bossuet taught that the force which gives birth to kingdoms serves best also to feed and sustain them? His theory of the state, despite Grotius and Jurieu, rejected as odious and even impious the notion of any popular rights, anterior and superior to his own. A realist in principle, Louis XIV. was terribly utilitarian and egotistical in practice; and he exacted from his subjects an absolute, continual and obligatory self-abnegation before his public authority, even when improperly exercised.
This deified monarch needed a new temple, and Versailles, where everything was his creation, both men and things, adored its maker. The highest nobility of France, beginning with the princes of the blood, competed for postsThe forms of Louis XIV.’s monarchy.in the royal household, where an army of ten thousand soldiers, four thousand servants, and five thousand horses played its costly and luxurious part in the ordered and almost religious pageant of the king’s existence. The “anciennes cohues de France,” gay, familiar and military, gave place to a stilted court life, a perpetual adoration, a very ceremonious and very complicated ritual, in which the demigod “pontificated” even “in his dressing-gown.” To pay court to himself was the first and only duty in the eyes of a proud and haughty prince who saw and noted everything, especially any one’s absence. Versailles, where the delicate refinements of Italy and the grave politeness of Spain were fused and mingled with French vivacity, became the centre of national life and a model for foreign royalties; hence if Versailles has played a considerable part in the history of civilization, it also seriously modified the life of France. Etiquette and self-seeking became the chief rules of a courtier’s life, and this explains the division of the nobility into two sections: the provincial squires, embittered by neglect; and the courtiers, who were ruined materially and intellectually by their way of living. Versailles sterilized all the idle upper classes, exploited the industrious classes by its extravagance, and more and more broke relations between king and kingdom.
But however divine, the king could not wield his power unaided. Louis XIV. called to his assistance a hierarchy of humbly submissive functionaries, and councils over which he regularly presided. Holding the very nameLouis XIV.’s ministers.ofroi fainéantin abhorrence, he abolished the office of mayor of the palace—that is to say, the prime minister—thus imposing upon himself work which he always regularly performed. In choosing his collaborators his principle was never to select nobles or ecclesiastics, but persons of inferior birth. Neither the immense fortunes amassed by these men, nor the venality and robust vitality which made their families veritable races of ministers, altered the fact that De Lionne, Le Tellier, Louvois and Colbert were in themselves of no account, even though the parts they played were much more important than Louis XIV. imagined. This was the age of plebeians, to the great indignation of the duke and peer Saint Simon. Merereflected lights, these satellites professed to share their master’sRoyal despotism.honor of all individual and collective rights of such a nature as to impose any check upon his public authority. Louis XIV. detested the states-general and never convoked them, and the parlements were definitely reduced to silence in 1673; he completed the destruction of municipal liberties, under pretext of bad financial administration; suffered no public, still less private criticism; was ruthless when his exasperated subjects had recourse to force; and made the police the chief bulwark of his government. Prayers and resignation were the only solace left for the hardships endured by his subjects. All the ties of caste, class, corporation and family were severed; the jealous despotism of Louis XIV. destroyed every opportunity of taking common action; he isolated every man in private life, in individual interests, just as he isolated himself more and more from the body social. Freedom he tolerated for himself alone.
His passion for absolutism made him consider himself master of souls as well as bodies, and Bossuet did nothing to contravene an opinion which was, indeed, common to every sovereign of his day. Louis XIV., like Philip II.,Louis XIV. and the Church.pretending to not only political but religious authority, would not allow the pope to share it, still less would he abide any religious dissent; and this gave rise to many conflicts, especially with the pope, at that time a temporal sovereign both at Rome and at Avignon, and as the head of Christendom bound to interfere in the affairs of France. Louis XIV.’s pride caused the first struggle, which turned exclusively upon questions of form, as in the affair of the Corsican Guard in 1662. The question of the right ofregale(right of the Crown to the revenues of vacant abbeys and bishoprics), which touched the essential rights of sovereignty, further inflamed the hostility between Innocent XI. and Louis XIV. Conformably with the traditions of the administrative monarchy in 1673, the king wanted to extend to the new additions to the kingdom his rights of receiving the revenues of vacant bishoprics and making appointments to their benefices, including taking oaths of fidelity from the new incumbents. A protest raised by the bishops of Pamiers and Aleth, followed by the seizure of their revenues, provoked the intervention of Innocent XI. in 1678; but the king was supported by the general assembly of the clergy, which declared that, with certain exceptions, theregaleextended over the whole kingdom (1681). The pope ignored the decisions of the assembly; so, dropping theregale, the king demanded that, to obviate further conflict, the assembly should define the limits of the authority due respectively to the king, the Church and the pope. This was the object of the Declaration of the FourDeclaration of the Four Articles.Articles: the pope has no power in temporal matters; general councils are superior to the pope in spiritual affairs; the rules of the Church of France are inviolable; decisions of the pope in matters of faith are only irrevocable by consent of the Church. The French laity transferred to the king this quasi-divine authority, which became the political theory of theancien régime; and since the pope refused to submit, or to institute the new bishops, the Sorbonne was obliged to interfere. The affair of the “diplomatic prerogatives,” when Louis XIV. was decidedly in the wrong, made relations even more strained (1687), and the idea of a schism was mooted with greater insistence than in 1681. The death of Innocent XI. in 1689 allowed Louis XIV. to engage upon negotiations rendered imperative by his check in the affair of the Cologne bishopric, where his candidate was ousted by the pope’s. In 1693, under the pontificate of Innocent XII., he went, like so many others, to Canossa.
Recipient now of immense ecclesiastical revenues, which, owing to the number of vacant benefices, constituted a powerful engine of government, Louis XIV. had immense power over the French Church. Religion began to be identified with the state; and the king combated heresy and dissent, not only as a religious duty, but as a matter of political expediency, unity of faith being obviously conducive to unity of law.
Richelieu having deprived the Protestants of all political guarantees for their liberty of conscience, an anti-Protestant party (directed by a cabal of religious devotees, theCompagnie du Saint Sacrement) determined to suppress it completely byLouis XIV. and the Protestants.conversions and by a jesuitical interpretation of the terms of the edict of Nantes. Louis XIV. made this impolitic policy his own. His passion for absolutism, a religious zeal that was the more active because it had to compensate for many affronts to public and private morals, the financial necessity of augmenting the free donations of the clergy, and the political necessity of relying upon that body in his conflicts with the pope, led the king between 1661 and 1685 to embark upon a double campaign of arbitrary proceedings with the object of nullifying the edict, conversions being procured either by force or by bribery. The promulgation and application of systematic measures from above had a response from below, from the corporation, the urban workshop, and the village street, which supported ecclesiastical and royal authority in its suppression of heresy, and frequently even went further: individual and local fanaticism co-operating with the head of the state, theintendants, and the military and judiciary authorities. Protestants were successively removed from the states-general, the consulates, the town councils, and even from the humblest municipal offices; they were deprived of the charge of their hospitals, their academies, their colleges and their schools, and were left to ignorance and poverty; while the intolerance of the clergy united with chicanery of procedure to invade their places of worship, insult their adherents, and put a stop to the practice of their ritual. Pellisson’s methods of conversion,Suppression of the edict of Nantes (1685).considered too slow, were accelerated by the violent persecution of Louvois and by the king’s galleys, until the day came when Louis XIV., deceived by the clergy, crowned his record of complaisant legal methods by revoking the edict of Nantes. This was the signal for a Huguenot renaissance, and the Camisards of the Cévennes held the royal armies in check from 1703 to 1711. Notwithstanding this, however, Louis XIV. succeeded only too well, since Protestantism was reduced both numerically and intellectually. He never perceived how its loss threw France back a full century, to the great profit of foreign nations; while neither did the Church perceive that she had been firing on her own troops.
The same order of ideas produced the persecution of the Jansenists, as much a political as a religious sect. Founded by a bishop of Ypres on the doctrine of predestination, and growing by persecution, it had speedily recruitedLouis XIV. and the Jansenists.adherents among the disillusioned followers of the Fronde, the Gallican clergy, the higher nobility, even at court, and more important still, among learned men and thinkers, such as the great Arnauld, Pascal and Racine. Pure and austere, it enjoined the strictest morals in the midst of corruption, and the most dignified self-respect in face of idolatrous servility. Amid general silence it was a formidable and much dreaded body of opinion; and in order to stifle it Louis XIV., the tool of his confessor, the Jesuit Le Tellier, made use of his usual means. The nuns of Port Royal were in their turn subjected to persecution, which, after a truce between 1666 and 1679, became aggravated by the affair of theregale, the bishops of Aleth and Pamiers being Jansenists. Port Royal was destroyed, the nuns dispersed, and the ashes of the dead scattered to the four winds. The bullUnigenituslaunched by Pope Clement XI. in 1713 against a Jansenist book by Father Quesnel rekindled a quarrel, the end of which Louis XIV. did not live to see, and which raged throughout the 18th century.
Bossuet, Louis XIV.’s mouthpiece, triumphed in his turn over the quietism of Madame Guyon, a mystic who recognized neither definite dogmas nor formal prayers, but abandoned herself “to the torrent of the forces ofLouis XIV. and the Libertins.God.” Fénelon, who in hisMaximes des Saintshad given his adherence to her doctrine, was obliged to submit in 1699; but Bossuet could not make the spirit of authority prevail against the religious criticism of a Richard Simon or the philosophical polemics of a Bayle. He might exile their persons; but their doctrines, supported by thescientific and philosophic work of Newton and Leibnitz, were to triumph over Church and religion in the 18th century.
The chaos of the administrative system caused difficulties no less great than those produced by opinions and creeds. Traditional rights, differences of language, provincial autonomy, ecclesiastical assemblies, parlements, governors, intendants—vestiges of the past, or promises for the future—all jostled against and thwarted each other. The central authority had not yet acquired a vigorous constitution, nor destroyed all the intermediary authorities. Colbert now offered his aid in making Louis XIV. the sole pivot of public life, as he had already become the source of religious authority, thanks to the Jesuits and to Bossuet.
Colbert, an agent of Le Tellier, the honest steward of Mazarin’s dishonest fortunes, had a future opened to him by the fall of Fouquet (1661). Harsh and rough, he compelled admiration for his delight in work, hisColbert.aptitude in disentangling affairs, his desire of continually augmenting the wealth of the state, and his regard for the public welfare without forgetting his own. Born in a draper’s shop, this great administrator always preserved its narrow horizon, its short-sighted imagination, its taste for detail, and the conceit of the parvenu; while with his insinuating ways, and knowing better than Fouquet how to keep his distance, he made himself indispensable by hissavoir-faireand his readiness for every emergency. He gradually got everything into his control: finance, industry, commerce, the fine arts, the navy and colonies, the administration, even the fortifications, and—through his uncle Pussort—the law, with all the profits attaching to its offices.
His first care was to restore the exhausted resources of the country and to re-establish order in finance. He began by measures of liquidation: theChambre ardenteof 1661 to 1665 to deal with the farmers of the revenue,Colbert and finance.the condemnation of Fouquet, and a revision of the funds. Next, like a good man of business, Colbert determined that the state accounts should be kept as accurately as those of a shop; but though in this respect a great minister, he was less so in his manner of levying contributions. He kept to the old system of revenues from the demesne and from imposts that were reactionary in their effect, such as thetaille, aids, salt-tax (gabelle) and customs; only he managed them better. His forest laws have remained a model. He demanded less of thetaille, a direct impost, and more from indirect aids, of which he created the code—not, however, out of sympathy for the common people, towards whom he was very harsh, but because these aids covered a greater area and brought in larger returns. He tried to import more method into the very unequal distribution of taxation, less brutality in collection, less confusion in the fiscal machine, and more uniformity in the matter of rights; while he diminished the debts of the much-involved towns by putting them through the bankruptcy court. With revolutionary intentions as to reform, this only ended, after several years of normal budgets, in ultimate frustration. He could never make the rights over the drink traffic uniform and equal, nor restrict privileges in the matter of thetaille; while he was soon much embarrassed, not only by the coalition of particular interests and local immunities, which made despotism acceptable by tempering it, but also by Louis XIV.’s two master-passions for conquest and for building. To his great chagrin he was obliged to begin borrowing again in 1672, and to have recourse to “affaires extraordinaires”; and this brought him at last to his grave.
Order was for Colbert the prime condition of work. He desired all France to set to work as he did “with a contented air and rubbing his hands for joy”; but neither general theories nor individual happiness preoccupiedColbert and industry.his attention. He made economy truly political: that is to say, the prosperity of industry and commerce afforded him no other interest than that of making the country wealthy and the state powerful. Louis XIV.’s aspirations towards glory chimed in very well with the extremely positive views of his minister; but here too Colbert was an innovator and an unsuccessful one. He wanted to give 17th-century France the modern and industrial character which the New World had imprinted on the maritime states; and he created industry on a grand scale with an energy of labour, a prodigious genius for initiative and for organization; while, in order to attract a foreign clientèle, he imposed upon it the habits of meticulous probity common to a middle-class draper. But he maintained the legislation of the Valois, who placed industry in a state of strict dependency on finance, and he instituted a servitude of labour harder even than that of individuals; his great factories of soap, glass, lace, carpets and cloth had the same artificial life as that of contemporary Russian industry, created and nourished by the state. It was therefore necessary, in order to compensate for the fatal influence of servitude, that administrative protection should be lavished without end upon the royal manufactures; moreover, in the course of its development, industry on a grand scale encroached in many ways upon the resources of smaller industries. After Colbert’s day, when the crutches lent by privilege were removed, his achievements lost vigour; industries that ministered to luxury alone escaped decay; the others became exhausted in struggling against the persistent and teasing opposition of the municipal bodies and the bourgeoisie—conceited, ignorant and terrified at any innovation—and against the blind and intolerant policy of Louis XIV.
Colbert, in common with all his century, believed that the true secret of commerce and the indisputable proof of a country’s prosperity was to sell as many of the products of national industry to the foreigner as possible, whileColbert and commerce.purchasing as little as possible. In order to do this, he sometimes figured as a free-trader and sometimes as a protectionist, but always in a practical sense; if he imposed prohibitive tariffs, in 1664 and 1667, he also opened the free ports of Marseilles and Dunkirk, and engineered theCanal du midi. But commerce, like industry, was made to rely only on the instigation of the state, by the intervention of officials; here, as throughout the national life, private initiative was kept in subjection and under suspicion. Once more Colbert failed; with regard to internal affairs, he was unable to unify weights and measures, or to suppress the many custom-houses which made France into a miniature Europe; nor could he in external affairs reform the consulates of the Levant. He did not understand that, in order to purge the body of the nation from its traditions of routine, it would be necessary to reawaken individual energy in France. He believed that the state, or rather the bureaucracy, might be the motive power of national activity.
His colonial and maritime policy was the newest and most fruitful part of his work. He wished to turn the eyes of contemporary adventurous France towards her distant interests, the wars of religion having diverted herColbert and the colonies.attention from them to the great profit of English and Dutch merchants. Here too he had no preconceived ideas; the royal and monopolist companies were never for him an end but a means; and after much experimenting he at length attained success. In the course of twenty years he created many dependencies of France beyond sea. To her colonial empire in America he added the greater part of Santo Domingo, Tobago and Dominica; he restored Guiana; prepared for the acquisition of Louisiana by supporting Cavelier de la Salle; extended the suzerainty of the king on the coast of Africa from the Bay of Arguin to the shores of Sierra Leone, and instituted the first commercial relations with India. The population of the Antilles doubled; that of Canada quintupled; while if in 1672 at the time of the war with Holland Louis XIV. had listened to him, Colbert would have sacrificed his pride to the acquisition of the rich colonies of the Netherlands. In order to attach and defend these colonies Colbert created a navy which became his passion; he took convicts to man the galleys in the Mediterranean, and for the fleet in the Atlantic he established the system of naval reserve which still obtains. But, in the 18th century, the monarchy, hypnotized by the classical battlefieldsof Flanders and Italy, madly squandered the fruits of Colbert’s work as so much material for barter and exchange.
In the administration, the police and the law, Colbert preserved all the old machinery, including the inheritance of office. In the great codification of laws, made under the direction of his uncle Pussort, he set aside the parlement ofColbert and the administration.Paris, and justice continued to be ill-administered and cruel. The police, instituted in 1667 by La Reynie, became a public force independent of magistrates and under the direct orders of the ministers, making the arbitrary royal and ministerial authority absolute by means oflettres de cachet(q.v.), which were very convenient for the government and very terrible for the individuals concerned.
Provincial administration was no longer modified; it was regularized. The intendant became the king’s factotum, not purchasing his office but liable to dismissal, the government’s confidential agent and the real repository of royal authority, the governor being only for show (seeIntendant).
Colbert’s system went on working regularly up to the year 1675; from that time forward he was cruelly embarrassed for money, and, seeking new sources of revenue, begged for subsidies from the assembly of the clergy.Ruin of Colbert’s work.He did not succeed either in stemming the tide of expense, nor in his administration, being in no way in advance of his age, and not perceiving that decisive reform could not be achieved by a government dealing with the nation as though it were inert and passive material, made to obey and to pay. Like a good Cartesian he conceived of the state as an immense machine, every portion of which should receive its impulse from outside—that is from him, Colbert. Leibnitz had not yet taught that external movement is nothing, and inward spirit everything. As the minister of an ambitious and magnificent king, Colbert was under the hard necessity of sacrificing everything to the wars in Flanders and the pomp of Versailles—a gulf which swallowed up all the country’s wealth;—and, amid a society which might be supposed submissively docile to the wishes of Louis XIV., he had to retain the most absurd financial laws, making the burden of taxation weigh heaviest on those who had no other resources than their labour, whilst landed property escaped free of charge. Habitual privation during one year in every three drove the peasants to revolt: in Boulonnais, the Pyrenees, Vivarais, in Guyenne from 1670 onwards and in Brittany in 1675. Cruel means of repression assisted natural hardships and the carelessness of the administration in depopulating and laying waste the countryside; while Louis XIV.’s martial and ostentatious policy was even more disastrous than pestilence and famine, when Louvois’ advice prevailed in council over that of Colbert, now embittered and desperate. The revocation of the edict of Nantes vitiated through a fatal contradiction all the efforts of the latter to create new manufactures; the country was impoverished for the benefit of the foreigner to such a point that economic conditions began to alarm those private persons most noted for their talents, their character, or their regard for the public welfare; such as La Bruyère and Fénelon in 1692, Bois-Guillebert in 1697 and Vauban in 1707. The movement attracted even the ministers, Boulainvilliers at their head, who caused the intendants to make inquiry into the causes of this general ruin. There was a volume of attack upon Colbert; but as the fundamental system remained unchanged, because reform would have necessitated an attack upon privilege and even upon the constitution of the monarchy, the evil only went on increasing. The social condition of the time recalls that of present-day Morocco, in the high price of necessaries and the extortions of the financial authorities; every man was either soldier, beggar or smuggler.
Under Pontchartrain, Chamillard and Desmarets, the expenses of the two wars of 1688 and 1701 attained to nearly five milliards. In order to cover this recourse was had as usual, not to remedies, but to palliatives worse than the evil: heavy usurious loans,Recourse to revolutionary measures.debasement of the coinage, creation of stocks that were perpetually being converted, and ridiculous charges which the bourgeois, sickened with officialdom, would endure no longer. Richelieu himself had hesitated to tax labour; Louis XIV. trod the trade organizations under foot. It was necessary to have recourse to revolutionary measures, to direct taxation, ignoring all class distinction. In 1695 the graduated poll-tax was a veritablecoup d’étatagainst privileged persons, who were equally brought under the tax; in 1710 was added the tithe (dixième), a tax upon income from all landed property. Money scarce, men too were lacking; the institution of the militia, the first germ of obligatory enlistment, was a no less important innovation. But these were only provisionary and desperate expedients, superposed upon the old routine, a further charge in addition to those already existing; and this entirely mechanical system, destructive of private initiative and the very sources of public life, worked with difficulty even in time of peace. As Louis XIV. made war continually the result was the same as in Spain under Philip II.: depopulation and bankruptcy within the kingdom and the coalitions of Europe without.
In 1660 France was predominant in Europe; but she aroused no jealousy except in the house of Habsburg, enfeebled and divided against itself. It was sufficient to remain faithful to the practical policy of Henry IV., ofForeign policy of Louis XIV.Richelieu and of Mazarin: that of moderation in strength. This Louis XIV. very soon altered, while yet claiming to continue it; he superseded it by one principle: that of replacing the proud tyranny of the Habsburgs of Spain by another. He claimed to lay down the law everywhere, in the preliminary negotiations between his ambassador and the Spanish ambassador in London, in the affair of the salute exacted from French vessels by the English, and in that of the Corsican guard in Rome; while he proposed to become the head of the crusade against the Turks in the Mediterranean as in Hungary.
The eclipse of the great idea of the balance of power in Europe was no sudden affair; the most flourishing years of the reign were still enlightened by it: witness the repurchase of Dunkirk from Charles II. in 1662, the cession of the duchies of Bar and of Lorraine and the war against Portugal. But soon the partial or total conquest of the Spanish inheritance proved “the grandeur of his beginnings and the meanness of his end.” Like Philip the Fair and like Richelieu, Louis XIV. sought support for his external policy in that public opinion which in internal matters he held so cheap; and he found equally devoted auxiliaries in the jurists of his parlements.
It was thus that the first of his wars for the extension of frontiers began, the War of Devolution. On the death of his father-in-law, Philip IV. of Spain, he transferred into the realm of politics a civil custom of inheritanceWar of Devolution, 1667.prevailing in Brabant, and laid claim to Flanders in the name of his wife Maria Theresa. The Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667), in which he was by way of supporting the United Provinces without engaging his fleet, retarded this enterprise by a year. But after his mediation in the treaty of Breda (July 1667), when Hugues de Lionne, secretary of state for foreign affairs, had isolated Spain, he substituted soldiers for the jurists and cannon for diplomacy in the matter of the queen’s rights.
The secretary of state for war, Michel le Tellier, had organized his army; and thanks to his great activity in reform, especially after the Fronde, Louis XIV. found himself in possession of an army that was well equipped, well clothed, well provisioned, and very different from the rabble of the Thirty Years’ War, fitted out by dishonest jobbing contractors. Severe discipline, suppression of fraudulent interference, furnishing of clothes and equipment by the king, regulation of rank among the officers, systematic revictualling of the army, settled means of manufacturing and furnishing arms and ammunition, placing of the army under the direct authority of the king, abolition of great military charges, subordination of the governors of strongholds, control by the civil authority over the soldiers effected by means of paymasters and commissaries of stores; all this organization of the royal army was the work of le Tellier.
His son, François Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois, had one sole merit, that of being his father’s pupil. A parvenu of the middle classes, he was brutal in his treatment of the lower orders and a sycophant in his behaviour towards the powerful; prodigiously active, ill-obeyed—as was the custom—but much dreaded. From 1677 onwards he did but finish perfecting Louis XIV.’s army in accordance with the suggestions left by his father, and made no fundamental changes: neither the definite abandonment of the feudalarrière-banand of recruiting—sources of disorder and insubordination—nor the creation of the militia, which allowed the nation to penetrate into all the ranks of the army, nor the adoption of the gun with the bayonet,—which was to become theultima ratioof peoples as the cannon was that of sovereigns—nor yet the uniform, intended to strengthenesprit de corps, were due to him. He maintained the institutions of the day, though seeking to diminish their abuse, and he perfected material details; but misfortune would have it that instead of remaining a great military administrator he flattered Louis XIV.’s megalomania, and thus caused his perdition.
Under his orders Turenne conquered Flanders (June-August 1667); and as the queen-mother of Spain would not give in, Condé occupied Franche Comté in fourteen days (February 1668). But Europe rose up in wrath; theThe triple alliance of the Hague.United Provinces and England, jealous and disquieted by this near neighbourhood, formed with Sweden the triple alliance of the Hague (January 1668), ostensibly to offer their mediation, though in reality to prevent the occupation of the Netherlands. Following the advice of Colbert and de Lionne, Louis XIV. appeared to accede, and by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle he preserved his conquests in Flanders (May 1668).
This peace was neither sufficient nor definite enough for Louis XIV.; and during four years he employed all his diplomacy to isolate the republic of the United Provinces inPeace of Aix-la-Chapelle.War with Holland.Europe, as he had done for Spain. He wanted to ruin this nation both in a military and an economic sense, in order to annex to French Flanders the rest of the Catholic Netherlands allotted to him by a secret treaty for partitioning the Spanish possessions, signed with his brother-in-law the emperor Leopold on the 19th of January 1668. Colbert—very envious of Holland’s wealth—prepared the finances, le Tellier the army and de Lionne the alliances. In vain did the grand-pensionary of the province of Holland, Jan de Witt, offer concessions of all kinds; both England, bound by the secret treaty of Dover (January 1670), and France had need of this war. Avoiding the Spanish Netherlands, Louis XIV. effected the passage of the Rhine in June 1672; and the disarmed United Provinces, which had on their side only Brandenburg and Spain, were occupied in a few days. The brothers de Witt, in consequence of their fresh offer to treat at any price, were assassinated; the broken dykes of Muiden arrested the victorious march of Condé and Turenne; while the popular and military party, directed by the stadtholder William of Orange, took the upper hand and preached resistance to the death. “The war is over,” said the new secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arnauld de Pomponne; but Louvois and Louis XIV. said no. The latter wished not only to take possession of the Netherlands, which were to be given up to him with half of the United Provinces and their colonial empire; he wanted “to play the Charlemagne,” to re-establish Catholicism in that country as Philip II. had formerly attempted to do, to occupy all the territory as far as the Lech, and to exact an annual oath of fealty. But the patriotism and the religious fanaticism of the Dutch revolted against this insupportable tyranny. Power had passed from the hands of the burghers of Amsterdam into those of William of Orange, who on the 30thPeace of Nijmwegen, 1678.of August 1673, profiting by the arrest of the army brought about by the inundation and by the fears of Europe, joined in a coalition with the emperor, the king of Spain, the duke of Lorraine, many of the princes of the Empire, and with England, now at last enlightened as to the projects of Catholic restoration which Louis XIV. was planning with Charles II. It was necessary to evacuate and then to settle with the United Provinces, and to turn against Spain. After fighting for five years against the whole of Europe by land and by sea, the efforts of Turenne, Condé and Duquesne culminated at Nijmwegen in fresh acquisitions (1678). Spain had to cede to Louis XIV., Franche Comté, Dunkirk and half of Flanders. This was another natural and glorious result of the treaty of the Pyrenees. The Spanish monarchy was disarmed.
But Louis XIV. had already manifested that unmeasured and restless passion for glory, that claim to be the exclusive arbiter of western Europe, that blind and narrow insistence, which were to bear out his mottoTruce of Ratisbon.“Seul contre tous.” Whilst all Europe was disarming he kept his troops, and used peace as a means of conquest. Under orders from Colbert de Croissy the jurists came upon the scene once more, and their unjust decrees were sustained by force of arms. TheChambres de Réunionsought for and joined to the kingdom those lands which were not actually dependent upon his new conquests, but which had formerly been so: such as Saarbrücken, Deux Ponts (Zweibrücken) and Montbéliard in 1680, Strassburg and Casale in 1681. The power of the house of Habsburg was paralysed by an invasion of the Turks, and Louis XIV. sent 35,000 men into Belgium; while Luxemburg was occupied by Créqui and Vauban. The truce of Ratisbon (Regensburg) imposed upon Spain completed the work of the peace of Nijmwegen (1684); and thenceforward Louis XIV.’s terrified allies avoided his clutches while making ready to fight him.
This was the moment chosen by Louis XIV.’s implacable enemy, William of Orange, to resume the war. His surprise of Marshal Luxembourg near Mons, after the signatureWilliam of Orange.of the peace of Nijmwegen, had proved that in his eyes war was the basis, of his authority in Holland and in Europe. His sole arm of support amidst all his allies was not the English monarchy, sold to Louis XIV., but Protestant England, jealous of France and uneasy about her independence. Being the husband of the duke of York’s daughter, he had an understanding in this country with Sunderland, Godolphin and Temple—a party whose success was retarded for several years by the intrigues of Shaftesbury. But Louis XIV. added mistake to mistake; and the revocation of the edict of Nantes added religious hatreds to political jealousies. At the same time theLeague of Augsburg.Catholic powers responded by the league of Augsburg (July 1686) to his policy of unlimited aggrandisement. The unsuccessful attempts of Louis XIV. to force his partisan Cardinal Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg (seeFürstenberg:House) into the electoral see of Cologne; the bombardment of Genoa; the humiliation of the pope in Rome itself by the marquis de Lavardin; the seizure of the Huguenot emigrants at Mannheim, and their imprisonment at Vincennes under pretext of a plot, precipitated the conflict. The question of the succession in the Palatinate, where Louis XIV. supported the claims of his sister-in-law the duchess of Orleans, gave the signal for a general war. The French armies devastated the Palatinate instead of attacking William of Orange in the Netherlands, leaving him free to disembark at Torbay, usurp the throne of England, and construct the Grand Alliance of 1689.
Far from reserving all his forces for an important struggle elsewhere, foreshadowed by the approaching death of Charles II. of Spain, Louis XIV., isolated in his turn, committed the error of wasting it for a space of ten years in aWar of the Grand Alliance.war of conquest, by which he alienated all that remained to him of European sympathy. The French armies, notwithstanding the disappearance of Condé and Turenne, had still glorious days before them with Luxembourg at Fleurus, at Steenkirk and at Neerwinden (1690-1693), and with Catinat in Piedmont, at Staffarda, and at Marsaglia; but these successes alternated with reverses. Tourville’s fleet, victorious at Beachy Head, came to grief at La Hogue (1692); and though the expeditions to Ireland in favour of James II. were unsuccessful, thanks to the Huguenot Schomberg, Jean Bart and Duguay-Trouinruined Anglo-Dutch maritime commerce. Louis XIV. assisted in person at the sieges of Mons and Namur, operations for which he had a liking, because, like Louvois, who died in 1691, he thought little of the French soldiery in the open field. After three years of strife, ruinous to both sides, he made the first overtures of peace, thus marking an epoch in his foreign policy; though William took no unfair advantage of this, remaining content with the restitution of places taken by theChambres de Réunion, except Strassburg, with a frontier-line of fortifiedPeace of Ryswick.places for the Dutch, and with the official deposition of the Stuarts. But the treaty of Ryswick (1697) marked the condemnation of the policy pursued since that of Nijmwegen. While signing this peace Louis XIV. was only thinking of the succession in Spain. By partitioning her in advance with the other strong powers, England and Holland, by means of the treaties of the Hague and of London (1698-1699),—as he had formerly done with the emperor in 1668,—he seemed at first to wish for a pacific solution of the eternal conflict between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, and to restrict himself to the perfecting of his natural frontiers; but on the death of Charles II. of Spain (1700) he claimed everything in favour of his grandson, the duke of Anjou, now appointed universal heir, though risking the loss of all by once more letting himself fall into imprudent and provocative action in the dynastic interest.
English public opinion, desirous of peace, had forced William III. to recognize Philip V. of Spain; but Louis XIV.’s maintenance of the eventual right of his grandson to the crown of France, and the expulsion of the Dutch, who hadWar of the Spanish Succession.not recognized Philip V., from the Barrier towns, brought about the Grand Alliance of 1701 between the maritime Powers and the court of Vienna, desirous of partitioning the inheritance of Charles II. The recognition of the Old Pretender as James III., king of England, was only a response to the Grand Alliance, but it drew the English Tories into an inevitable war. Despite the death of William III. (March 19, 1702) his policy triumphed, and in this war, the longest in the reign, it was the names of the enemy’s generals, Prince Eugène of Savoy, Mazarin’s grand-nephew, and the duke of Marlborough, which sounded in the ear, instead of Condé, Turenne and Luxembourg. Although during the first campaigns (1701-1703) in Italy, in Germany and in the Netherlands success was equally balanced, the successors of Villars—thanks to the treason of the duke of Savoy—were defeated at Höchstädt and Landau, and were reduced to the defensive (1704). In 1706 the defeats at Ramillies and Turin led to the evacuation of the Netherlands and Italy, and endangered the safety of Dauphiné. In 1708 Louis XIV. by a supreme effort was still able to maintain his armies; but the rout at Oudenarde, due to the misunderstanding between the duke of Burgundy and Vendôme, left the northern frontier exposed, and the cannons of the Dutch were heard at Marly. Louis XIV. had to humble himself to the extent of asking the Dutch for peace; but they forgot the lesson of 1673, and revolted by their demands at the Hague, he made a last appeal to arms and to the patriotism of his subjects at Malplaquet (September 1709). After this came invasion. Nature herself conspired with the enemy in the disastrous winter of 1709.
What saved Louis XIV. was not merely his noble constancy of resolve, the firmness of the marquis de Torcy, secretary of state for foreign affairs, the victory of Vendôme at Villaviciosa, nor the loyalty of his people. The interruption of the conferences at Gertruydenberg having obliged the Whigs and Marlborough to resign their power into the hands of the Tories, now sick of war, the death of the emperor Joseph I. (April 1711), which risked the reconstruction of Charles V.’s colossal and unwieldy monarchy upon the shoulders of the archduke Charles, and Marshal Villars’ famous victory of Denain (July 1712) combined to render possiblePeace of Utrecht, 1713.the treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden (1713-1714). These gave Italy and the Netherlands to the Habsburgs, Spain and her colonies to the Bourbons, the places on the coast and the colonial commerce to England (who had the lion’s share), and a royal crown to the duke of Savoy and the elector of Brandenburg. The peace of Utrecht was to France what the peace of Westphalia had been to Austria, and curtailed the former acquisitions of Louis XIV.
The ageing of the great king was betrayed not only by the fortune of war in the hands of Villeroy, la Feuillade, or Marsin; disgrace and misery at home were worse than defeat. By the strange and successive deaths of the GrandEnd of Louis XIV.’s reign.Dauphin (1711), the duke and duchess of Burgundy (1712)—who had been the only joy of the old monarch—and of his two grandsons (1712-1714), it seemed as though his whole family were involved under the same curse. The court, whose sentimental history has been related by Madame de la Fayette, its official splendours by Loret, and its intrigues by the duc de Saint-Simon, now resembled an infirmary of morose invalids, presided over by Louis XIV.’s elderly wife, Madame de Maintenon, under the domination of the Jesuit le Tellier. Neither was it merely the clamours of the people that arose against the monarch. All the more remarkable spirits of the time, like prophets in Israel, denounced a tyranny which put Chamillart at the head of the finances because he played billiards well, and Villeroy in command of the armies although he was utterly untrustworthy; which sent the “patriot” Vauban into disgrace, banished from the court Catinat, the Père la Pensée, “exiled” to Cambrai the too clear sighted Fénelon, and suspected Racine of Jansenism and La Fontaine of independence.
Disease and famine; crushing imposts and extortions; official debasement of the currency; bankruptcy; state prisons; religious and political inquisition; suppression of all institutions for the safe-guarding of rights; tyranny by the intendants; royal, feudal and clerical oppression burdening every faculty and every necessary of life; “monstrous and incurable luxury”; the horrible drama of poison; the twofold adultery of Madame de Montespan; and the narrow bigotry of Madame de Maintenon—all concurred to make the end of the reign a sad contrast with the splendour of its beginning. When reading Molière and Racine, Bossuet and Fénelon, the campaigns of Turenne, or Colbert’s ordinances; when enumerating the countless literary and scientific institutions of the great century; when considering the port of Brest, the Canal du Midi, Perrault’s colonnade of the Louvre, Mansart’s Invalides and the palace of Versailles, and Vauban’s fine fortifications—admiration is kindled for the radiant splendour of Louis XIV.’s period. But the art and literature expressed by the genius of the masters, reflected in the tastes of society, and to be taken by Europe as a model throughout a whole century, are no criterion of the social and political order of the day. They were but a magnificent drapery of pomp and glory thrown across a background of poverty, ignorance, superstition, hypocrisy and cruelty; remove it, and reality appears in all its brutal and sinister nudity. The corpse of Louis XIV., left to servants for disposal, and saluted all along the road to Saint Denis by the curses of a noisy crowd sitting in thecabarets, celebrating his death by drinking more than their fill as a compensation for having suffered too much from hunger during his lifetime—such was the coarse but sincere epitaph which popular opinion placed on the tomb of the “Grand Monarque.” The nation, restive under his now broken yoke, received with a joyous anticipation, which the future was to discount, the royal infant whom they called Louis the Well-beloved, and whose funeral sixty years later was to be greeted with the same proofs of disillusionment.
The death of Louis XIV. closed a great era of French history; the 18th century opens upon a crisis for the monarchy. From 1715 to 1723 came the reaction of the Regency, with its marvellous effrontery, innovating spirit and frivolousCharacter of the eighteenth century.immorality. From 1723 to 1743 came the mealy-mouthed despotism of Cardinal Fleury, and his apathetic policy within and without the kingdom. From 1743 to 1774 came the personal rule of Louis XV., when all the different powers were in conflicts—the bishops and parlement quarrelling, the government fighting against the clergy and the magistracy, and public opinion in declared opposition to the state. Till at last, from 1774 to 1789, came Louis XVI. with his honest illusions.his moral pusillanimity and his intellectual impotence, to aggravate still further the accumulated errors of ages and to prepare for the inevitable Revolution.
The 18th century, like the 17th, opened with a politicalcoup d’état. Louis XV. was five years old, and the duke of Orleans held the regency. But Louis XIV. had in his will delegated all the power of the government to aThe Regency (1715-1723).council on which the duke of Maine, his legitimated son, had the first, but Madame de Maintenon and the Jesuits the predominant place. This collective administration, designed to cripple the action of the regent, encountered a twofold opposition from the nobles and the parlement; but on the 2nd of September 1715 the emancipated parlement set aside the will in favour of the duke of Orleans, who thus together with the title of regent had all the real power. He therefore reinstituted the parlement in its ancient right of remonstrance (suspended since the declarations of 1667 and 1673), and handed over ministerial power to the nobility, replacing the secretaries of state by six councils composed in part of great nobles, on the advice of the famous duc de Saint-Simon. The duc de Noailles, president of the council of finance, had the direction of this “Polysynodie.”
The duke of Orleans, son of the princess palatine and Louis XIV.’s brother, possessed many gifts—courage, intelligence and agility of mind—but he lacked the one gift of using these to good advantage. The political crisisPhilip of Orleans.that had placed him in power had not put an end to the financial crisis, and this, it was hoped, might be effected by substituting partial and petty bankruptcies for the general bankruptcy cynically advocated by Saint-Simon. The reduction of the royal revenues did not suffice to fill the treasury; while the establishment of a chamber of justice (March 1716) had no other result than that of demoralizing the great lords and ladies already mad for pleasure, by bringing them into contact with the farmers of the revenue who purchased impunity from them. A very clever Scotch adventurer named John Law (q.v.) now offered his assistance in dealing with the enormous debt of more than three milliards, and in providing the treasury. Being well acquainted with the mechanism of banking, he had adopted views as to cash, credit and the circulation of values which contained an admixture of truth and falsehood. Authorized after many difficulties to organize a private bank of deposit and account, which being well conceived prospered and revived commerce, Law proposed to lighten the treasury by the profits accruing to a great maritime and colonial company. Payment for the shares in this new Company of the West, with a capital of a hundred millions, was to be made in credit notes upon the government, converted into 4% stock. These aggregated funds, needed to supply the immense and fertile valley of the Mississippi, and the annuities of the treasury destined to pay for the shares, were non-transferable. Law’s idea was to ask the bank for the floating capital necessary, so that the bank and the Company of the West were to be supplementary to each other; this is what was called Law’s system. After the chancellor D’Aguesseau and the duc de Noailles had been replaced by D’Argenson alone, and after thelit de justiceof the 26th of August 1718 had deprived the parlement, hostile to Law, of the authority left to it, the bank became royal and the Company of the West universal. But the royal bank, as a state establishment, asked for compulsory privilege to increase the emission of its credit notes, and that they should receive a premium upon all metallic specie. The Company of the Indies became the grantee for the farming of tobacco, the coinage of metals, and farming in general; and in order to procure funds it multiplied the output of shares, which were adroitly launched and became more and more sought for on the exchange in the rue Quincampoix. This soon caused a frenzy of stock-jobbing, which disturbed the stability of private fortunes and social positions, and depraved customs and manners with the seductive notion of easily obtained riches. The nomination of Law to the controller-generalship, re-established for his benefit on the resignation of D’Argenson (January 5, 1720), let loose still wilder speculation; till the day came when he could no longer face the terrible difficulty of meeting both private irredeemable shares with a variable return, and the credit notes redeemable at sight and guaranteed by the state. Gold and silver were proscribed; the bank and the company were joined in one; the credit notes and the shares were assimilated. But credit cannot be commanded either by violence or by expedients; between July and September 1720 came the suspension of payments, the flight of Law, and the disastrous liquidation which proved once again that respect for the state’s obligations had not yet entered into the law of public finance.
Reaction on a no less extensive scale characterized foreign policy during the Regency. A close alliance between France and her ancient enemies, England and Holland, was concluded and maintained from 1717 to 1739: France,The Anglo-Dutch Alliance.after thirty years of fighting, between two periods of bankruptcy; Holland reinstalled in her commercial position; and England, seeing before her the beginning of her empire over the seas—all three had an interest in peace. On the other hand, peace was imperilled by Philip V. of Spain and by the emperor (who had accepted the portion assigned to them by the treaty of Utrecht, while claiming the whole), by Savoy and Brandenburg (who had profited too much by European conflicts not to desire their perpetuation), by the crisis from which the maritime powers of the Baltic were suffering, and by the Turks on the Danube. The dream of Cardinal Alberoni, Philip V.’s minister, was to set fire to all this inflammable material in order to snatch therefrom a crown of some sort to satisfy the maternal greed of Elizabeth Farnese; and this he might have attained by the occupation of Sardinia and the expedition to Sicily (1717-1718), if Dubois, a priest without a religion, a greedy parvenu and a diplomatist of second rank, though tenacious and full of resources as a minister, had not placed his common sense at the disposal of the regent’s interests and those of European peace. He signed the triple alliance at the Hague, succeeding with the assistance of Stanhope, the English minister, in engaging the emperor therein, after attempting this for a year and a half. Whilst the Spanish fleet was destroyed before Syracuse by Admiral Byng, the intrigue of the Spanish ambassador Cellamare with the duke of Maine to exclude the family of Orleans from the succession on Louis XV.’s death was discovered and repressed; and Marshal Berwick burned the dockyards at Pasajes in Spain. Alberoni’s dream was shattered by the treaty of London in 1720.
Seized in his turn with a longing for the cardinal’s hat, Dubois paid for it by the registering of the bullUnigenitusand by the persecution of the Jansenists which the regent had stopped. After the majority of Louis XV. had been proclaimed on the 16th of February 1723, Dubois was the first to depart; and four months after his disappearance the duke of Orleans, exhausted by his excesses, carried with him into the grave that spirit of reform which he had compromised by his frivolous voluptuousness (December 2, 1723).
The Regency had been the making of the house of Orleans; thenceforward the question was how to humble it, and the duc de Bourbon, now prime minister—a great-grandson of the great Condé, but a narrow-minded man ofMinistry of the duc de Bourbon.limited intelligence, led by a worthless woman—set himself to do so. The marquise de Prie was the first of a series of publicly recognized mistresses; from 1723 to 1726 she directed foreign policy and internal affairs despite the king’s majority, moved always more by a spirit of vengeance than by ambition. This sad pair were dominated by the self-interested and continual fear of becoming subject to the son of the Regent, whom they detested; but danger came upon them from elsewhere. They found standing in their way the very man who had been the author of their fortunes, Louis XV.’s tutor, uneasy in the exercise of a veiled authority; for the churchman Fleury knew how to wait, on condition of ultimately attaining his end. Neither the festivities given at Chantilly in honour of the king, nor the dismissal (despite the most solemn promises) of the Spanish infanta, who had been betrothedto Louis XV., nor yet the young king’s marriage to Maria Leszczynska (1725)—a marriage negotiated by the marquise de Prie in order to bar the throne from the Orleans family—could alienate the sovereign from his old master. The irritation kept up by the agents of Philip V., incensed by this affront, and the discontent aroused by the institutions of thecinquantièmeand the militia, by the re-establishment of the feudal tax on Louis XV.’s joyful accession, and by the resumption of a persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists which had apparently died out, were cleverly exploited by Fleury; and a last ill-timed attempt by the queen to separate the king from him brought about the fall of the duc de Bourbon, very opportunely for France, in June 1726.
From the hands of his unthinking pupil Fleury eventually received the supreme direction of affairs, which he retained for seventeen years. He was aged seventy-two when he thus obtained the power which had been his unmeasuredCardinal Fleury, 1726-1743.though not ill-calculated ambition. Soft-spoken and polite, crafty and suspicious, he was pacific by temperament and therefore allowed politics to slumber. His turn for economics made Orry,33the controller-general of finance, for long his essential partner. The latter laboured at re-establishing order in fiscal affairs; and various measures like the impost of thedixièmeupon all property save that of the clergy, together with the end of the corn famine, sufficed to restore a certain amount of well-being. Religious peace was more difficult to secure; in fact politico-religious quarrels dominated all the internal policy of the kingdom during forty years, and gradually compromised the royal authority. The Jesuits, returned to power in 1723 with the duc de Bourbon and in 1726 with Fleury, rekindled the old strife regarding the bullUnigenitusin opposition to the Gallicans and the Jansenists. The retractation imposed upon Cardinal de Noailles, and his replacement in the archbishopric of Paris by Vintimille, an unequivocal Molinist, excited among the populace a very violent agitation against the court of Rome and the Jesuits, the prelude to a united Fronde of the Sorbonne and the parlement. Fleury found no other remedy for this agitation—in which appeal was made even to miracles—thanlits de justiceandlettres de cachet; Jansenism remained a potent source of trouble within the heart of Catholicism.
This worn-out septuagenarian, who prized rest above everything, imported into foreign policy the same mania for economy and the same sloth in action. He naturally adopted the idea of reconciling Louis XIV.’s descendants,Fleury’s foreign policy.who had all been embroiled ever since the Polish marriage. He succeeded in this by playing very adroitly on the ambition of Elizabeth Farnese and her husband Philip V., who was to reign in France notwithstanding any renunciation that might have taken place. Despite the birth of a dauphin (September 1729), which cut short the Spanish intrigues, the reconciliation was a lasting one (treaty of Seville); it led to common action in Italy, and to the installation of Spanish royalties at Parma, Piacenza, and soon after at Naples. Fleury, supported by the English Hanoverian alliance, to which he sacrificed the French navy, obliged the emperor Charles VI. to sacrifice the trade of the Austrian Netherlands to the maritime powers and Central Italy to the Bourbons, in order to gain recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction. The question of the succession in France lay dormant until the end of the century, and Fleury thought he had definitely obtained peace in the treaty of Vienna (1731).
The war of the Polish succession proved him to have been deceived. On the death of Augustus II. of Saxony, king of Poland, Louis XV.’s father-in-law had been proclaimed king by the Polish diet. This was an ephemeral success, ill-preparedWar of the Polish Succession (1733-1738).and obtained by taking a sudden advantage of national sentiment; it was soon followed by a check, owing to a Russian and German coalition and the baseness of Cardinal Fleury, who, in order to avoid intervening, pretended to tremble before an imaginary threat of reprisals on the part of England. But Chauvelin, the keeper of the seals, supported by public opinion, avenged on the Rhine and the Po the unlucky heroism of the comte de Plélo at Dànzig,34the vanished dream of the queen, the broken word of Louis XV., and the treacherous abandonment of Poland. Fleury never forgave him for this: Chauvelin had checkmated him with war; he checkmated Chauvelin with peace, and hastened to replace Marshals Berwick and Villars by diplomatists. The third treaty of Vienna (1738), the reward of so much effort, would only have claimed for France the little duchy of Bar, had not Chauvelin forced Louis XV. to obtain Lorraine for his father-in-law—still hoping for the reversion of the crown; but Fleury thus rendered impossible any influence of the queen, and held Stanislaus at his mercy. In order to avenge himself upon Chauvelin he sacrificed him to the cabinets of Vienna and London, alarmed at seeing him revive the national tradition in Italy.
Fleury hardly had time to breathe before a new conflagration broke out in the east. The Russian empress Anne and the emperor Charles VI. had planned to begin dismembering the Turkish empire. More fortunate than Plélo,The Eastern question.Villeneuve, the French ambassador at Constantinople, endeavoured to postpone this event, and was well supported; he revived the courage of the Turks and provided them with arms, thanks to the comte de Bonneval (q.v.), one of those adventurers of high renown whose influence in Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century is one of the most piquant features of that period. The peace of Belgrade (September 1739) was, by its renewal of the capitulations, a great material success for France, and a great moral victory by the rebuff to Austria and Russia.
France had become once more the arbiter of Europe, when the death of the emperor Charles VI. in 1740 opened up a new period of wars and misfortunes for Europe and for the pacific Fleury. Everyone had signed Charles VI.’sWar of the Austrian Succession.Pragmatic Sanction, proclaiming the succession-rights of his daughter, the archduchess Maria Theresa; but on his death there was a general renunciation of signatures and an attempt to divide the heritage. The safety of the house of Austria depended on the attitude of France; for Austria could no longer harm her. Fleury’s inclination was not to misuse France’s traditional policy by exaggerating it, but to respect his sworn word; he dared not press his opinion, however, and yielded to the fiery impatience of young hot-heads like the two Belle-Isles, and of all those who, infatuated by Frederick II., felt sick of doing nothing at Versailles and were backed up by Louis XV.’s bellicose mistresses. He had to experience the repeated defections of Frederick II. in his own interests, and the precipitate retreat from Bohemia. He had to humble himself before Austria and the whole of Europe; and it was high time for Fleury, now fallen into second childhood, to vanish from the scene (January 1743).