The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of France Part 4

CHAPTER IX.

After long wandering in strange seas, we come in view of familiar lights and headlands. With the advent of the house of Bourbon, we have grasped a thread which leads directly down to our own time.

The accession of a Protestant King was hailed with delirious joy by the Huguenots, and with corresponding rage by Catholic France. The one looked forward to redressing of wrongs and avenging of injuries; and the other flatly refused submission unless Henry should recant his heresy, and become a convert to the true faith.

The new King saw there was no bed of roses preparing for him. After four years of effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, he decided upon his course. He was not called to the throne to rule over Protestant France, nor to be an instrument of vengeance for the Huguenots. He saw that the highest good of the kingdom required, not that he should impose upon it either form of belief or wors.h.i.+p, but give equal opportunity and privilege to both.

To the consternation of the Huguenots he announced himself ready to listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Rome; and it took just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth. He announced himself ready to abjure his old faith. Bitter reproaches on the one side and rejoicings on the other greeted this decision. It was not heroic. But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be an act of supreme political wisdom.

Peace was restored, and the "Edict of Nantes," which quickly followed, proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten.

The Protestants, with every disability removed, shared equal privileges with the Catholics throughout the kingdom; and the first victory for religious liberty was splendidly won.

An era of unexampled prosperity dawned. Never had the kingdom been so wisely and beneficently governed. Sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty. Uplifting agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that forgotten element in the nation.

The reign of the Bourbon dynasty had opened auspiciously. Henry IV.

was the idol of the people. His loveless marriage with Margaret de Valois had been annulled, and he had espoused Marie de Medici. The blood from that poisoned stream was again to be intermingled with the blood of the future Kings of France.

After a reign of twenty-one years, the sagacious ruler who had done more than any other to make her great and happy was stricken down by the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin, and a cry of grief arose alike from Catholic and Protestant throughout the kingdom.

Poor France was again at the mercy of a woman with the corrupt instincts of the de Medici. The widow of Henry IV., who was Regent during the infancy of her son Louis, was intriguing, vulgar, and without the ability of the great Catharine. The kingdom was rent by cabals of aspiring favorites and ambitious n.o.bles, until the reign of Louis XIII., or rather of Cardinal Richelieu, began.

The foundations of this man's policy lay deep, out of sight of all save his own far-reaching intelligence. Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed every obstacle to his purpose. Impartial as fate, with no loves, no hatreds, Catholics, Protestants, n.o.bles, Parliaments, one after another were borne down before his determination to make the King, what he had not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.

The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe. The power of the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to monarchy, was swept away. One great n.o.ble after another was humiliated and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.

The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen, and even while the Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture, the minister was planning to send Henrietta, sister of the King, across the Channel to become Queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I. But the act of supreme audacity was to come. This high prelate of the church, this cardinal minister, formed alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great leader of the Protestants in the war upon the Emperor and the Pope!

He allowed no religion, no cla.s.s, to sway or to hold him. He was for France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless dominion. By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a commonplace King one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own colossal ambition he so strengthened the foundations of the monarchy that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it.

It was great--it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one thing which revolutions and time have not swept away. The "French Academy" alone survives as his monument. Out of a gathering of literary friends he created a national inst.i.tution, its object the establis.h.i.+ng a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in speaking or writing the French language. In a country where nothing endures, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years.

But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as much as he did the enemies of France.

CHAPTER X.

Again do we recognize the fine Italian hand in French politics.

Cardinal Mazarin was Minister during the regency of Anne of Austria, directing and controlling the affairs of the Kingdom, less intent upon the greatness of France than the greatness and magnificence of her Prime Minister. At last the wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV.

settled himself upon the throne which Richelieu had rendered so exalted and immovable.

Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in him to make four Kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage, dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties, his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments.

No King more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every manifestation of genius, but he signed the "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his subjects.

If the names of Marlborough and Maintenon could have been stricken out of his life, the story might have had a different ending. From the moment the great Duke checked his victorious army, his sun began to go down; but it was Maintenon who most obscured its setting.

His unloved Queen, the Spanish Marie Therese, had borne his mad infatuation for Louise la Valliere; la Valliere had carried her broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her household the pious widow of the poet Scarron, Madame de Maintenon, (grand-daughter of d'Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation).

Grave, austere, ambitious, talented, she was not too much engrossed in her duties as governess of de Montespan's children to find ways of establis.h.i.+ng an influence over the King.

This man who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the Government, who was Ministers, Magistrates, Parliaments, all in one, this central sun of whom Corneille, Moliere, Racine were but single rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing adventuress; her will his law. The hey-day of youth having pa.s.sed, he was beginning to be anxious about his soul. She artfully p.r.i.c.ked his conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.

She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith.

At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and brutally stamped out Protestantism.

A part of the scheme of penitence seems to have been that on the death of poor Marie Therese, he should make her (de Maintenon) his lawful wife, which he did privately; and his sun went down obscured by crus.h.i.+ng griefs and disappointments. His children swept away, the prestige of success tarnished, this demiG.o.d was taken to pieces by time's destroying fingers, quite as unceremoniously as are the rest of us, hiding finally behind the bed-curtains while a kneeling courtier pa.s.sed to him his wig on the end of a stick, and at last lying down like any other old dying sinner, overwhelmed with the vanity of earthly things and with the vastness of eternity.

Still more would the dying moments of the Grand Monarque have been embittered could he have foreseen into what hands his great inheritance was pa.s.sing.

Upon Louis XV. more than any other rests the responsibility of the crisis which was approaching.

A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national poverty, indulging in wildest extravagance,--such was the man in whom was vested the authority rendered so absolute by Richelieu,--such the man who opened up a pathway for the storm.

As for the n.o.bility, their degradation may be imagined when it is said there was as bitter rivalry between t.i.tled and ill.u.s.trious fathers to secure for their daughters the coveted position held by Madame de Pompadour, as for the highest offices of State.

Could the upper ranks fall lower than this? Had not the kingdom reached its lowest depths, where its foreign policy was determined by the amount of consideration shown to Madame de Pompadour? But this woman, whose friends.h.i.+p was artfully sought by the great Empress Maria Theresa, was superseded, and the fresher charms of Madame du Barri enslaved the King. The deposed favorite could not survive her fall, and died of a broken heart. It is said that as Louis, looking from an upper window of his palace, saw the coffin borne out in a drenching rain, he smiled and said: "Ah, the Marquise has a bad day for her journey." It may be imagined that the man who could be so pitiless to the woman he had loved would feel little pity for the people whom he had not loved, but whom he knew only as a remote, obscure something, which held up the weight of his glory.

But this "obscure something" was undergoing strange transformation.

The greater light at the surface had sent some glimmering rays down into the ma.s.s below, which began to awaken and to think. Misery, hopeless and abject, was changing into rage and thirst for vengeance.

A new cla.s.s had come into existence which was not n.o.ble, but with highly trained intelligence it looked with contempt and loathing upon the frivolous, half-educated n.o.bles. Scorn was added to the ferment of human pa.s.sions beneath the surface, and when Voltaire had spoken, and the restraints of religion were loosened, no living hand, not that of a Richelieu nor a Louis XIV., could have averted the coming doom.

But--no one seems to have suspected what was approaching.

A wonderful literature had come into existence--not stately and cla.s.sic as in the age preceding,--but instinct with a new sort of life. The highest speculations which can occupy the soul of man were handled with marvellous lightness of touch and prismatic brilliancy of expression; but all was negation. None tried to build; all to demolish. The black-winged angel of Destruction was hovering over the land.

Then Rousseau tossed his dreamy abstractions into the quivering air, and the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," was caught up by the t.i.tled aristocracy as a charming idyllic toy, while Princes, Dukes, and Marquises amused themselves with a dream of Arcadian simplicity, to be attained in some indefinite way in some remote and equally indefinite future. It was all a masquerade. No reality, no sincerity, no convictions, good or evil. The only thing that was real was that an over-taxed, impoverished people was exasperated and--hungry.

Did the King need new supplies for his unimaginable luxuries, they were taxed. Was it necessary to have new accessions to French "glory," in order to allay popular clamor or discontent, they must supply the men to fight the glorious battles, and the means with which to pay them.

Every burden fell at last upon this lowest stratum of the State, the n.o.bility and clergy, while owning two-thirds of the land, being nearly exempt from taxation.

And yet the King and n.o.bility of France, in love with Rousseau's theories, were airily discussing the "rights of man." Wolves and foxes coming together to talk over the sacredness of the rights of property--or the occupants of murderers' row growing eloquent over the sanct.i.ty of human life! How incomprehensible that among those quick-witted Frenchmen there seems not one to have realized that the logical sequence of the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,"

must be, "Down with the Aristocrats!"

And so the surface which Richelieu had converted into adamant grew thinner and thinner each day, until King and Court danced upon a mere gilded crust, unconscious of the abysmal fires beneath. Some of those powdered heads fell into the executioner's basket twenty-five years later. Did they recall this time? Did Madame du Barri think of it, did she exult at her triumph over de Pompadour, when she was dragged shrieking and struggling to the guillotine?

And while France was thus weaving her future, what were the other nations doing? England, sane, practical, with little time for abstractions, and little said about "glory," was importing turnips, converting agriculture into a science, and under the instruction of exiled Huguenots, establis.h.i.+ng marvellous industries. In the new kingdom of Prussia, a half-savage, half-inspired King had been importing artisans and skill of all sorts, reclaiming waste lands.

Living like a miser, he had indulged in but one luxury: an army, which should be the best in the world. There was no powder, no patches at his Court; where he thrashed with his own royal hands male and female courtiers, starved, imprisoned, and cudgelled his son and heir to his throne for playing on the violin; and, it is said, so terrified and scarified his grenadiers with canes and cats that not one of them would not have preferred facing the enemy to meeting his enraged sovereign, had he done wrong.

Frederick was not a pleasant barbarian. But there is at least a ring of sincerity about all this, which it is refres.h.i.+ng to recall after the tinsel and depraved refinements of France under Louis XV., and something too which gives promise, in spite of its brutality, of a stalwart future.

Five years before the close of this miserable reign, an event occurred seemingly of small importance to Europe. A child was born in an obscure Italian household. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.