XIX. “L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI”…

XIX. “L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI”

The two foundations of the absolute throne of Louis XIV were terror and admiration: the terror of a power which had subjugated the army, the church, the magistracy, the noblesse, and the municipalities; the admiration of a power to which literature and art, arms and fortune, rendered their richest and their uninterrupted tribute. King-worship had never before taken so entire a possession of any Christian state. Never had the luxurious pomp of an Oriental court been so intimately and so long associated with the energies, the refined tastes, and the intellectual culture of an European sovereignty. During fifty successive years, Louis continued to be the greatest actor on the noblest stage, and in the presence of the most enthusiastic audience, of the world.--STEPHEN.[p]

[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]

Never had there been at any court more intrigues and hopes than during the last hours of Cardinal Mazarin. Women who had any pretence to beauty were flattering themselves that they would now govern a twenty-two-year-old prince whom love had already so far seduced as to make him offer his crown to his mistress. The young courtiers had hopes that the reign of the favourites would return; each minister was expecting the first place; none of them thought that a king who had been so excluded from affairs would dare take upon himself the burden of government. Mazarin had prolonged the king’s childhood as far as he could; and only for a short time had been giving him instructions, and that because the king had demanded it. So far were they from expecting to be governed by their sovereign, that of all those who had hitherto worked with the prime minister there was none who asked the king when he wished an audience. One and all asked, “To whom shall we now address ourselves?”--and Louis XIV replied, “To me.”[b]

The secretary of state for war, Michel le Tellier, hastened with the astounding piece of news to the queen-mother, who laughed in his face: “In good faith, M. le Tellier, what do you think of it?” This resolution, however, was nothing but the accomplishment of the advice twenty times given by Mazarin, and if there was any cause for astonishment it was not that the king took the advice but that he held to it; he was, as La Bruyère says, “his own prime minister and exacted of the chief state functionaries that they deal directly with him.” For thirty years he worked regularly eight hours a day. He relates in his Mémoires,[f] with legitimate pride, the effect produced by the announcement of his assumption of authority, and he recommends his son in a few truly eloquent words “not to forget that it is by work one reigns; to rule without working is to be ungrateful and defiant towards God, unjust and tyrannical towards man.”

But what is still more remarkable is that the young prince who so boldly assumed the power had already mapped out his policy. Not only did Louis XIV rule with the boundless power of some of his predecessors, but he was the first to establish in France the theory of an absolute monarchy. In his eyes royalty was a divine institution. Sovereigns were the representatives of God upon earth--his inspired lieutenants; and on this account participators, in a fashion, in his power and infallibility. And as royalty, in making itself absolute, had kept to the old principle of feudal law, that sovereignty and property are the same thing, Louis not only believed himself master of his subjects, but the owner of their possessions--a monstrous doctrine which carries us back to oriental monarchies. At all events it did not seem to him that authority to which he recognised no limits but those imposed by conscience and by religion, ought to remain sterile. He wished it active and hard working; he believed that kings had imperious duties to fulfil. It was thus that Louis XIV understood his royal profession.[c] Nor can it be denied that he carried out to a large extent in practice the theory of royalty that he professed. He was destined to reign for fifty-four years after the death of Mazarin; his reign in its entirety being one of the longest in history. After Mazarin he had no minister whom he did not dominate: he was king in fact as well as in name. He came to be by far the most famous monarch of his time. His court at Versailles set a standard of magnificence which other monarchs of that and succeeding ages strove to imitate without hoping to rival.

In his political relations with his subjects, as has been said, Louis came to represent the culmination of that autocratic system which for generations had been almost steadily advancing in France,--a system which had known such exponents as Louis XI, Francis I, and Henry IV; and which Sully, Richelieu, and Mazarin had done so much to fortify. Nor did he confine his theory to his own subjects. He came finally to feel almost the same proprietary right in the affairs of Europe and he attempted with the aid of his armies to dictate to foreign nations somewhat as he dictated within the bounds of his own territory. And, having the good fortune to be served by two great soldiers, Condé and Turenne, he was enabled, notwithstanding his own rather meagre military talents, to carry out the idea here also with some measure of success. It was a qualified success, to be sure, for he did not secure the control of Holland at which he aimed; he did not very greatly extend the boundaries of France; and if his grandson was left finally in possession of the Spanish throne, this was a victory tempered with the concession that the thrones of Spain and France should never be consolidated. Nevertheless, to have embroiled all Europe in war after war; to have been the central figure of a long epoch; to have given his name to an important period of history; to have placed that name in the small list of those rulers to whom posterity concedes the title “Great,”--this surely is to have played the part of king right royally.

This reign, then, is a curiously full and vital one. We shall best understand it perhaps if we study it first from within, witnessing the activities of the great monarch in his relations with his own people before turning (in subsequent chapters) to the foreign relations of the kingdom. As preliminary to this study of the economic and social development of France during the long reign of Louis XIV, we must take a glance at the interesting figure of the monarch himself. In the first place it must be remembered that this remarkable man had a remarkable heritage. He numbered among his direct ancestors not far removed such remarkable characters as Henry IV of France, the German emperor Charles V, and the Spanish sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella. This in itself suggests a strange mixture of races in his ancestry. But further examination of his ancestral tree reveals even more striking facts. It appears that this greatest of French kings is, so far as his ancestral blood is concerned, almost as much Spaniard or Italian as he is French; and quite as much German. His father was born in France, his mother in Spain; of his four grandparents one was born in France, one in Spain, one in Italy, one in Germany. Of his thirty ancestors within four generations only eight were born in France while ten were born in Germany or in the yet farther outlying regions of Hungary and Bohemia; the remainder of the company being distributed between Spain (and Portugal) and Italy. The subtended table[111] showing details of the ancestry of Louis XIV for four generations will make these facts clear at a glance. It is worthy of careful study as illustrating in detail the heterogeneity of ethnic elements that went to build up the personality of this cosmopolite. Persons fond of generalising as to national characteristics will perhaps feel that the more conspicuous traits of Louis’ personality are not difficult to account for in the light of his conglomerate ancestry.

[Sidenote: [1661-1683 A.D.]]

Leaving such speculations, however, to whoever may choose to make them, let us turn from the ancestry of the king to the king himself. “He had,” says Kitchin,[q] “all the qualities which strike the eye: and was, as Bolingbroke acutely remarked, ‘if not the greatest king, the best actor of majesty at least that ever filled a throne’; as a king should be, he was courteous, dignified, calm, and ‘debonair,’ firm in act and speech, and constant: he had a great sense of duty and propriety; and said himself that a king should act according to the dictates of good sense; he cultivated that habitual discretion and seriousness of manner which often cloak ignorance or want of capacity. He spoke but little, that little, however, was to the point; he was reserved, was thought rather stingy, did not often laugh. These characteristics were backed by one marked quality, strength of will, which could be obstinacy: and were all made subservient to one persistent passion, the inordinate desire of reputation and glory.” Yet Kitchin sees in Louis, on the whole, a “second-rate man,” distinctly inferior in many ways to his grandfather, Henry IV. Thus he declares that “In no branch of his life’s work does Louis show one spark of originality; even Voltaire confesses that there was ‘more uprightness and dignity than spring’ in him: he had no boldness and no enthusiasm: ‘he made war without being a warrior,’ decreed many laws, but had not the slightest idea of legislation; he busied himself with administration, but had no real organising gifts. He had that sure mark which distinguishes the second-rate man from the great man: he loved details for their own sake; he shrank instinctively from all that was noble and strong; and chose the inferior agent in preference to the better.”

It seems almost paradoxical to pronounce such a judgment as this upon a monarch of such celebrity. Yet perhaps the judgment is not far from just. Louis XIV had the good fortune to follow Henry IV and Richelieu and Mazarin; the later years of his reign, in which he was in effect gathering the harvest of his own sowing, are far less notable than are the earlier ones during which he profited by the labours of his forerunners. Yet after all allowances are made for Louis’ shortcomings and for his mistakes, it seems futile to deny that the famous monarch who for the space of almost three average generations dominated the European situation had at least some of the elements of greatness.

With this introduction to the personality of Louis XIV, we are now prepared to take up in detail the affairs of his government. First of all, as has been said, we shall consider those measures through which the internal prosperity of France was furthered during the early years of the reign. In so doing we shall have occasion to see something of the ministers who aided Louis in this work. There are no more Richelieus and Mazarins; yet in Colbert we have a man not altogether unworthy to wear the mantle of these great predecessors; nor are Le Tellier, Lionne, and Fouquet by any means despicable.[a]

THE MINISTERS

The clercs au secret who, in 1547, became ministers of state were four in number; each of them administered not only certain affairs, but all the affairs of certain provinces. They formed an impracticable organisation. The religious wars, the troubles of Louis XIII’s minority, prevented any change.[112]

In 1619 a single member of the ministry was charged with the conduct of war and with the correspondence with the chefs de corps; another in 1626 had the foreign affairs. Finally under Louis XIV the ministry of the king’s household was established for ecclesiastical affairs and those of the navy. Important posts, raised to offices, that is to say, making their holders irremovable--such as the chancellor-keeper of the seals, chief of the magistracy, and controller-general of the finances--were like two other ministries. The special functions allotted to each of the four secretaries of state did not prevent them from keeping, for other affairs, the old-time division by provinces which existed until the Revolution.

The ministers whom Mazarin had left behind him were Pierre Séguier, chancellor and keeper of the seals, a sort of irremovable minister who was clever enough, by assuming no political importance, to make himself regarded as necessary for fifty years; Michel le Tellier, secretary of state for war, Hugues de Lionne who had charge of the marine (the portfolio of which he kept till 1669) and of foreign affairs; and Nicholas Fouquet, the superintendent of finance. The first two were distinguished men, the third a superior man; as for the fourth, Fouquet, by his encouragement of letters, he had acquired the reputation of a generous Mæcenas, and he counted illustrious persons among his friends--Pellisson, La Fontaine, Gourville, Madame de Sévigné and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who have pleaded his cause before posterity without gaining it. He had put, or rather left, the finances in extreme disorder and he himself drew without scruple on the treasury. He was increasing the king’s expenses and diminishing the receipts; finally, what was still more serious, he seemed to seek supporters everywhere, even amongst the great nobles, and he fortified the places of which he held command as though to prepare for himself, in case of disgrace, an impregnable retreat. He was almost a frondeur; he was certainly a knave. Less was needed for Louis to strike him.

The king had a secret minister who every evening called his attention to the errors and falsehoods of the superintendent. This was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, born at Rheims in 1619 of an ancient family of tradesmen and magistrates. He had been intendant to Mazarin, who before he died had said to the king: “Sire, I owe you everything; but I think I am to some extent discharging my debt when I give you Colbert.”[c]

This working together in secret was the cause of the catastrophe of Fouquet, in which were involved many others. The fall of this minister, who is much less to be reproached than is Cardinal Mazarin, teaches us that it is not the privilege of everybody to commit the same faults.[b]

The precaution of disarming Fouquet was made in advance. His post of general prosecutor assured him the privilege of being judged by parliament; and the king put no trust, and for reason, in the justice of parliament. Fouquet therefore was skilfully inveigled into selling his post. It is said that he discarded his robe of office in the hope of obtaining the cordon bleu, which the king did not wish any longer to give to persons connected with justice. Moreover, he was counting on becoming chancellor on the death of the aged Séguier. Of the 1,400,000 francs, the price of his office, he offered one million as a pure gift to the king, who had expressed to him a desire for ready money. He thus prepared the instruments of his own ruin. It was feared that at the moment of his arrest his friends would attempt to get him to Belle-Île and to agitate Brittany and Normandy where many malcontents were under cover. A journey to Brittany was planned for the coming month of September, under pretence of holding the provincial estate at Nantes and of obtaining a greater gratuitous gift through the presence of the king.[d]

Fouquet’s undoing was thus already resolved upon when the king accepted the magnificent fête which the minister arranged for him at his house at Vaux for August 17th, 1661. The palace and its gardens had cost him about eighteen millions.[113] He had built the mansion twice over and bought three hamlets whose area was included in the enormous gardens, then considered the most beautiful in all Europe. The fountains of Vaux, since relegated to mediocrity by those of Versailles, Marly, and St. Cloud, were marvels in their day. But however magnificent the place, its enormous cost proves that he had been served with as little economy as he himself served the king. It was also true that St. Germain and Fontainebleau, the only pleasure places used by the king, could not compare in beauty with Vaux. Louis XIV felt this and it irritated him. All over the mansion were to be seen the arms and motto of Fouquet--a squirrel with these words, Quo non ascendam? (To what point shall I not mount?)

The king interpreted the device for himself; the ambition of the motto did not serve to appease the monarch. The courtiers remarked that the squirrel was everywhere painted pursued by a snake which was the arms of Colbert. The fête was far beyond those which Mazarin had given, not only in magnificence but in taste. The Facheux of Molière was presented for the first time: Pellisson had written the prologue, which was much admired.[b]

The king said to the queen-mother in anger, “Ah, madame, shall we not make this fellow disgorge his prey?” And he was tempted to have the minister arrested on the spot; however, he restrained himself.[c]

On the 5th of September, during the prearranged sojourn of the court of Nantes, D’Artagnan, captain of the musketeers, laid hands on Fouquet as he was leaving the cabinet of the king, put him into a coach and conducted him under a strong escort to the château of Angers. He had the greatest difficulty in protecting the superintendent during the journey from the fury of the people. All his houses were sealed and his property was seized. Among the latter were found directions as to what his friends should do in case he was arrested. The plan, like those that Cardinal de Retz had made several times, consisted in procuring for him places, money, and presses by means of which France could be inundated with pamphlets. Fouquet was transferred without delay to Vincennes and brought before a chamber of justice.[e]

He was accused of wasting the revenues, which was only too true, and of plotting against the safety of the state, which was never proved. At the end of three years nine judges gave their voices for death, thirteen others for banishment. The king, aggravating the penalty, changed it into perpetual imprisonment and Fouquet was incarcerated in the citadel of Pinerolo, where he died after nineteen years of captivity (March 23, 1680).[c]

The Man with the Iron Mask

For a long time Fouquet’s end remained a mystery; and even Voltaire, writing little more than a half century afterwards, says, “We do not know where died the unfortunate man, whose least actions in the days of his power made a stir.” For this reason attempts were afterwards made to connect Fouquet with one of the most extraordinary episodes of the secret history of Louis XIV’s reign.[a]

We know that a masked and unknown prisoner, object of an extraordinary surveillance, died in 1703 in the Bastille, whither he had been brought from the Îsle Ste. Marguerite in 1698 (and was buried under the name of Marchiali). He had been detained about ten years in these islands, and traces of his existence are found in the fortress of Exilles and at Pinerolo as far back as 1681. Now no great personage disappeared in Europe about this time. What powerful motive had the government of Louis XIV for concealing this mysterious visage from human sight? Many explanations more or less chimeric, more or less plausible, have been attempted of the “man with the iron mask” (an erroneous term; the mask was not of iron but of black velvet; it was probably one of those loups so long in use). In 1837 Le Bibliophile Jacob (Paul la Croix) published an ingenious volume to prove that Fouquet was passed off as dead, sequestered anew, and, masked, dragged from fortress to fortress until his death in 1703.[d]

Many other theories have been advanced to account for this person’s identity. It has been said that he was a twin brother of Louis XIV, who had been made to disappear; the count de Vermandois, natural son of Louis XIV and Mademoiselle de la Vallière, who was imprisoned for having struck the dauphin; the duke de Beaufort, who disappeared at the siege of Candia (1669); the duke of Monmouth, nephew of James II; Count Girolamo Mattioli, minister of Mantua, who was abducted from Turin for having prevented his master from selling Casale to the king of France (this hypothesis is sustained by Topin[g]); or Giovanni di Gonzaga, Mattioli’s secretary; a son of Anne of Austria by Buckingham or Mazarin; the Armenian patriarch Avedick; and, according to a recent theory of M. Bazeries, a certain general De Bulonde, imprisoned for raising the siege of Candia in spite of Catinat’s orders.[h] But the very multiplicity of theories sufficiently shows the doubtful character of each and all of them; and the identification of the man with the iron mask still holds a place among the most curious of the unsolved enigmas of history.[a]

THE MINISTRY OF COLBERT

The great trial of Fouquet involved another victim: Pellisson was condemned to restore 200,000 livres. But he was one of those skilful persons who, having fallen, always rise. From having been a Calvinist he became a Catholic and perhaps died a Protestant; from being Fouquet’s friend he became the favourite of the king [Louis XIV] and drew up his Mémoires[f] in which he speaks of the superintendent’s thefts, and he founded a prize at the Academy for an annual eulogy of Louis XIV. Thanks to his verses and his prose, which were supple like his conduct, he was very successful in money matters. In 1677 he was in receipt of 75,000 livres, just the same sum as Vauban received, without counting abbeys and priories. Finally he was a kind of prime minister and had charge of the funds devoted to the conversion of heretics, and yet he brought so much dignity into his office that posterity has forgotten in him the man of business and only remembers the man of letters. Colbert succeeded Fouquet with the title of controller-general. In 1666 Michel le Tellier left his charge to his son, the celebrated Louvois; the first ministry of Louis XIV was thus complete.

Colbert directed five of the French departments of administration: the king’s household, with the fine arts, the finances, agriculture, with commerce, public works, and, after 1669, the navy--a crushing weight under which he did not succumb.

“Jean Baptiste Colbert,” says a contemporary, “had naturally a frowning countenance. His hollow eyes and thick eyebrows gave him an air of austerity and rendered him at first sight savage and forbidding; but afterwards when one came to know him, he was sufficiently facile, expeditious, and immutably steadfast. He was persuaded that good faith is the solid foundation of all business. Infinite application and an insatiable desire to learn took with him the place of knowledge. He was a restorer of the finances, which on his accession to the ministry he found in a very bad condition. A solid but ponderous intelligence, born principally for calculation, he disentangled all the embarrassments which the superintendents and royal treasurers had purposely introduced into the accounts in order that they might fish in troubled waters.” Let us add that this austere and hard financier, “this man of marble,” as Gui Patin calls him, had a heart. “We must be careful of every five sous in matters which are not of necessity,” he wrote to Louis XIV, “and lavish millions when it is a question of your glory. A useless banquet costing 3,000 livres gives me incredible pain; and when it is a question of millions of gold for the affair of Poland, I would sell all my goods, I would pledge my wife and children, and I would go on foot all my life to provide them.”

Reorganisation of the Finances

The finances, indeed, had fallen back into the chaos from which Sully had rescued them. The public debt was four hundred and thirty millions, the revenues were swallowed up three years in advance, and out of eighty-four millions in annual imposts the treasury received scarcely thirty-five. Colbert began by annulling or reimbursing at the rate of purchase eight millions of bonds on the Hôtel-de-Ville, which had been acquired at an insignificant price, and caused the chambre de police to make an investigation of the malversations committed by officers of finance during the last twenty-five years; the very curés had to press their parishioners to denounce abuses. The money lenders who had taken advantage of the necessities of the state to lend to it at usurious interest were made to disgorge their profits; the fines rose to one hundred and ten millions; several money lenders were hanged. These were measures in harmony with the spirit of the times but not in accordance with good policy; the surest way for the state to avoid having to submit to burdensome contracts in evil days is to hold, in good ones, to a promise once given, because there are no usurers save for those who are suspected of not paying their debts.

Colbert was the true creator of the budget. Hitherto money had been dispensed haphazard, without consulting the receipts of the treasury. He was the first to draw up annually a provisional statement divided into two chapters in which the probable revenues and expenses were set down beforehand. When a secretary of state had a disbursement to make he signed an order for the intended payment; the persons receiving it presented it at the office of the controller-general’s department, when the payment of the sum was charged on a particular fund and this assignment was presented for the king’s signature.

Colbert modified the form and assessment of the imposts. The taille, or tax on landed property, was personal, that is it was paid by the roturiers and in certain circumstances two or three times in the same year. He wished to make it real as it was in the south, as it now is everywhere--that is to say, payable on the landed property, whoever the holders might be. In 1661 it had reached fifty-three millions; he brought it back to thirty-two. Amid the troubles of the Fronde many persons had been ennobled on their own authority or had bought titles of nobility for a few crowns; these were so many privileged individuals added to the real ones. As early as 1662 Molière in the École des femmes had laughed at this vanity which cost the people dear. A royal ordinance revoked all the letters of nobility granted within the last thirty years: Gros-Pierre was obliged to show his titles and had none, and nearly forty thousand families amongst the richest in the parishes were once more subjected to the impost which proportionately lightened the burdens of their neighbours.

The controller-general rightfully preferred to the taille the aides or indirect taxes to which all contributed. He diminished the price of salt, a commodity of the first necessity to the poor; but he increased or created taxes on coffee, tobacco, wines, cards, etc., and from one million five hundred thousand francs brought them up to twenty-one millions. Thus the indirect taxes, some of which have been so vigorously attacked in our own day, had their origin in an idea of justice and equality.

He disliked loans, not because he did not understand the advantage of borrowing at a low price to repay burdensome debts, but he dreaded giving Louis XIV facilities for burdening the future to the advantage of the present. On leaving the council in which the first loan was decided on, in 1672, he bitterly reproached Lamoignon for having approved this measure. “Do you know as I do the man with whom we have to deal, his passion for display, for great enterprises, for all kinds of expenses? Here is a free course opened for loans and by consequence for unlimited expenditure and taxes. You shall answer for it to the nation and to posterity.”

In truth a time was to come when Colbert would be no longer there and Louis XIV would borrow at 400 per cent. At least the great minister tried to protect the treasury against the exigencies of the financiers by inviting the small capitalists to pour their funds directly, without costly intermediaries, into a loan account which he established for the purpose and into which the money flowed.[c]

Colbert’s efforts extended into so many fields that it is impossible to follow them in detail. His service to agriculture was most beneficial. He exempted very large families from paying tithes, and forbade the seizure of implements and beasts of labour for non-payment of taxes. He improved the breeds of horses and cattle by crossing them with imported animals. His code for water highways and forests is still largely in force.

He assisted industry by sparing no means of obtaining the manufacturing secrets of neighbouring countries. In 1669, says Duruy,[c] there were 42,220 looms and more than 60,000 workers in wool alone. The draperies of Sedan, Louviers, Abbeville, and Elbeuf were unrivalled in Europe; tin plate, steel, faience, and morocco leather, which had largely been imported, were now made in France; the cloth and serges of Holland, Genoese point, and velvets were imitated and equalled, the carpets of Persia and Turkey surpassed at the Savonnerie, at Aubusson, and at Beauvais. The rich silken stuffs shot with gold and silver were made at Tours and at Lyons; at Tour-la-Ville (near Cherbourg) and at Paris they made finer glassware than at Venice. The tapestries of Flanders yielded to those of the Gobelins.

For commerce the great minister did much by regulating customs and reducing tariffs. He made Dunkirk, Bayonne, and Marseilles free ports, and was the projector of the Burgundian canal opened in 1692, and built between 1664 and 1681, that connected the Mediterranean at Cette with the Garonne (and consequently the ocean) at Toulouse. Henry IV’s council of commerce was re-established in 1665 and the king presided over its fortnightly meetings.

At that period the Dutch and the English were far ahead of the French in foreign trade. The better to compete with these rivals Colbert substituted privileged associations for the isolated efforts of individuals. “He established,” says Duruy,[c] “five great companies modelled on the English and Dutch societies; those of the Indes Orientales and the Indes Occidentales in 1664; the Compagnie du Nord and the Compagnie du Levant in 1666, and the Compagnie du Sénégal in 1673, according them exclusive commercial monopolies and granting them considerable loans. He wished to restore life to the colonial system, much neglected since the days of Richelieu. The French now possessed only Canada, with Acadia, Cayenne, the Île de Bourbon [Île de Réunion], and several establishments in Madagascar and the Indies. Colbert purchased, for less than a million, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Grenada, and the Grenadines, Marie Galante, St. Martin, St. Christopher, St. Bartholomew, Santa Cruz, and Tortuga (Île de la Tortue) in the West Indies. He placed under the protection of France the French filibusters of Santo Domingo who had seized the western portion of the island (1664). He planted new colonies in Cayenne (1677) and in Canada (1665). He took Newfoundland in order to control the entrance to the St. Lawrence, and began the occupation of the magnificent valley of the Mississippi, which had just been explored by that adventurous captain, Robert de la Salle (1680). In Africa he wrested Gorée in Senegal from the Dutch in 1665 and took possession of the east coast of Madagascar. In Asia the Compagnie des Indes established itself at Surat and Chandarnagar and afterwards at Pondicherry,” but to offset these achievements he was short-sighted enough to close the colonial ports to foreign vessels and to forbid in 1669 the importation of sugar and tobacco from Brazil.

Colbert also revived the navy and established the naval inscription by which the people of these maritime provinces, in return for certain advantages, furnished the necessary recruits for the navy, dividing them according to age and family position into different classes (the régime des classes). He likewise instituted in 1672 the corps of marine guards, composed of one thousand gentlemen, in order to have good officers, a school of cannoneers for good marksmen, a school of hydrography, and a board of naval construction.

For the encouragement of the fine arts and the sciences, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belle-Lettres was founded in 1663, the Academy of Science in 1666, the Academy of Music (1669), the Academy of Architecture in 1671. A school of fine arts established at Rome (1667) received the prize pupils of the Academy of Painting in Paris who copied on canvas or in marble the masterpieces of antiquity. The cabinet of medals founded also a school for the study of oriental languages. The Royal Library received many additions and the Mazarine Library was opened to the public. The Jardin des Plantes was enlarged and the foundation of academies in the provinces encouraged. All the famous littérateurs and artists of the day were generally pensioned, including many from foreign countries who were induced to take up their residence in France.[a]

Michelet’s Estimate of Colbert

The king in 1683 was relieved of Colbert. He pressed heavily upon him, forced him to reckon, was always talking of making the receipts balance the expenditures. In his long ministry of twenty years he had passed through two phases. During the first he tried to live on the revenue; during the second, dragged on and compelled, he borrowed and lived on the future. One moment he lightened the taxes and nevertheless collected ninety millions; but the king spent one hundred millions.

Between him and the king there was a dispute about everything: concerning buildings--he condemned Versailles: concerning religion--he upheld the Protestant manufacturers. He died from his public disgrace--died because he could do nothing and had lost hope. Ridiculous quarrels were forced upon him. The king reproached him for the expense of Versailles, which had been built in spite of his advice to the contrary.[114]

He died, detested and cursed. It was found necessary to bury him at night to protect his body from the insults of the populace. Songs were composed, ponts neufs on the death of the tyrant. Was this word wrongly applied? Not at all. This great man had been the tyrant of France in two ways at once--tyrant through his position, the times, and the necessity of things; tyrant through his violence in well doing and his impatience, through his impulsiveness of will.

The war and Louvois, the king and the court, Versailles and the immense waste had been blamed very justly. But there was something else. The situation was tyrannical. Colbert built on a foundation already ruined, on that of the misery which grew in that century without anything being able to stop it--political and moral causes come from afar, above all, the indolence of the nobility and of the Catholics, which after having ruined Spain was about to ruin France. Mazarin had killed Colbert in advance. The tax placed by the league of notables on the small landholder, which was doubled about 1648, compelled him to sell his field to the lord of the parish. But these fields, gathered together under idle hands, produced little. Under Colbert there was a famine every three years. To sustain the army and the working classes with ease, he himself kept the wheat at a low price, almost always forbidding its exportation, thus discouraging agricultural labour. From 1600 to 1700 every manufactured article quintupled in value. Wheat alone was treated as a natural product, in connection with which labour would avail nothing; nothing was done for it; it remained at the same price. That evil of Spain, the hatred of work, the taste for a life of ease had for a long time been inoculated in France. Colbert revolved in the circle of a fatal contradiction. He wanted to discourage idleness, he said; he struck at the false nobles. With what? With the authority of the king--of the king of nobles, who, attracting everything to the court, “ennobling” the nation, drew it into idleness. The dead and unproductive life of the courtier, of the priest, more and more deadened everything.

This man of work was devoured by three great unproductive classes: the nobles, who more and more lived on the state; the officials, whom the progress of order brought into existence; the third class, the permanent army, enormously increased. Now, the king drawing little or nothing from the large rich body, that is the clergy, Colbert, triply crushed, was obliged to create a productive class, to over-stimulate work by driving industry abroad. War of customs duties, and soon a war of armies, resulted. He himself, who was so interested in maintaining peace, actively engaged in the war against Holland, and expected to gain something from it for the navy and for industry.

History can cite nothing greater or more terrible than his sudden improvisation of the marine. It astonishes, it frightens, both by material enormity and by moral violence. Colbert demanded from France the severest sacrifice which had ever been asked of her (before the conscription[115]).

He showed the same vehement impatience in commercial regulations, in the improvisation of a French industry. He was justly indignant at seeing an ingenious people, very artistic in many things, awaiting and receiving from elsewhere all the products of the useful arts. Manufactories are not only a product of wealth but of education also, a special development of certain faculties, of a certain aptitude. A people who did only one thing would be very low in the scale of nations. Colbert awakened and revealed in the French people an unknown aptitude; he caused a new art to burst forth, that above all, which puts good taste and elegance into all the requirements for the fitting out of a house, which relieves material life by a noble gleam of mind. It was splendid, it was grand of him. But the means were less happy. On the one hand, this budding industry he wanted perfect all at once; that young plant which could not grow without the liberties of life he confined and choked with tyrannical precautions. Almost at the outset, his regulations were laws of terror (even to putting a person in the pillory for defective merchandise, 1670). By requiring this perfection he hoped to gain credit for French goods abroad and to make people buy them with confidence. But, on the other hand, he prevented the manufacture of goods of inferior quality, to satisfy the less pretentious needs of the poorer classes.

The grandeur of this industrial creation has been told wonderfully well; but not its fall, its prompt decadence. It perished both from the general poverty (no more buyers) and from emigration (the producers left even before the death of Colbert). His last glances beheld the decay of the edifice which was soon to crumble to pieces.

The great historian of France for the end of this century is Pesant de Boisguillebert. He is not acquainted with ancient times and he is wrong in thinking that evils date from 1660. He is none the less truthful and admirable in the picture he gives of the misery of the country and of the crying abuses which continued even under Colbert. The three fiscal terrors (tailles, aides, douanes) are found there in characters of fire. One must see the unfortunate peasant collectors, who raise the land-tax and are responsible for it, march through the village. They go only together in companies for fear of being killed. But it is impossible to take away anything from him who has nothing. Everything falls back upon the collectors. The king’s bailiff seizes their cattle, the village flocks, then even their persons. They are imprisoned.

The case of the aides is much worse. The clerks, become merchants, make a fierce war on the merchants who wish to buy wine from the vine grower and not from them. All communication is broken off. “Everything which comes from Japan quadruples its price, merely on account of the distance. But everything here which passes from one province to another becomes twenty times dearer, twenty-four times. Wine for a sou at Orleans is worth twenty-four at Rouen. The salesman alone is six times more terrible than pirates and tempests, than a sea of four thousand leagues.” France pulls up its vines. The people no longer drink anything but water. The custom-house has killed foreign commerce. No merchant dares any longer to put himself in the hands of a receiver, who brings a suit against him if he wishes and who is judged only by his own judges.

Thus the people, thus Colbert, remained the miserable slaves of the financiers, of the general farmers of the taxes, of negotiators, of partisans more powerful than the king. Colbert, on his coming to power, had had the good fortune to hang several of them. In vain. They survived and flourished and in the end strangled him; much worse, they caused his name to be cursed. Under Mazarin there was absolute chaos. Under Colbert there was relative order. The old abuses subsisted, but with the odious force of order which an established government lent to them. Under Mazarin France, miserable and in rags, still drank wine; but under Colbert it drank water.

Progress was an evil. Under Colbert, the farming of the taxes was not given out to favourites, but was sold at auction, to the highest bidder, and thus it brought in more. Yes, but on the condition that the farmers were permitted to use the terrible severity which made tax collecting a war. In his mortal effort Colbert thus acted against himself. She escaped him, however, do what he would--this France whom he wished to cure, tormented by recors, eaten up by bailiffs’ men, expropriated, sold, and executed.

The great malediction under which he died troubled him on his death-bed. A letter from the king came to him and he did not wish to read it. “If I had done for God,” said he, “what I have done for this man, I would be sure of being saved, and I do not know where I am going.” We know it, hero! You are going into glory. You remain in the heart of France. Great nations, who judge with time like God, are as equitable as he, valuing the labour less according to the result than in proportion to the effort, the grandeur of the desire.[l]

After Colbert’s death his ministry was divided. The marquis of Seignelay, his son, had the navy; the finances were intrusted to Claude le Pelletier (1683-1689), later by the count de Pontchartrain (1689-1699); these last succeeded but did not replace him. After 1689 the general penury was such, that Louis was obliged to send to the mint the masterpieces in chiselled silver which adorned Versailles.

LOUVOIS

[Sidenote: [1666-1691 A.D.]]

Colbert had organised peace; Louvois, “the greatest and most brutal of clerks,” organised war. François Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois, was born in 1641. At the age of fifteen years he entered the office of his father, the secretary of state, and was initiated by a long apprenticeship into the science of military administration, to which he brought an activity equal to that of Colbert. When Louis XIV determined to assume the rule, Louvois became the real minister of war, although he did not succeed his father, Michel le Tellier, till 1666. He reformed the army, and his reforms lasted as long as the old monarchy. If he preserved the system of voluntary enlistment which had been in practice for three centuries, he diminished abuses and dangers by a more exact discipline and more severe regulations. He established uniforms by ordering that each regiment should be distinguished by the colour of its clothes and by various marks (1670). He introduced the use of copper pontoons for crossing rivers; he instituted magazines of food and supplies, barracks, military hospitals, the Hôtel des Invalides, all things almost unknown before his time. He created the corps of engineers whence came the great Vauban’s best pupils; schools of artillery at Douai, Metz, and Strasburg, the companies of grenadiers in the infantry, the regiments of hussars in the cavalry, and lastly cadet companies, a species of military school for the gentilshommes.

The army still showed the spirit of feudal times. The soldier belonged less to the king than to his colonel; the cavalry was given too much importance and the nobility would serve only in it. From this reign the French infantry became and long remained the first in the world. Louvois required it to march in step and substituted the gun and bayonet for the pike which was still prevalent; but it was not till after his time that Vauban succeeded in making the gun at once a weapon for projectiles and a weapon for fencing, and so rendered it the most formidable instrument of destruction which was ever put into the hands of men.

He made a revolution in the army by the ordre du tableau and by the creation of the service of inspection. He did not destroy the venality of offices which had been introduced into the army, and was exercised almost entirely to the profit of the nobles; but in order to merit promotion it was no longer sufficient for them to have ancestors--they must have services; and the grades, from the rank of colonel, became the prize of seniority--an excellent reform in those days, which would be so now no longer. The hatred of the nobility pursued the minister who was degrading “those born to command others, on the pretext that it is reasonable to learn to obey in order to command; who wished to accustom seigneurs to equality and to mingle with all the world indiscriminately.” Louvois, with inflexible firmness, required that each should perform his duty; to secure this he instituted inspectors-general who made the king’s authority and his own everywhere present; and severe rebukes awaited negligent officers.

He created recreation camps, a ruinous innovation when these assemblies of troops were only a spectacle to divert the ladies of the court and the king’s ennui, but an excellent school for officers and generals when preparing for the great manœuvres of war. It was only after his death that the order of St. Louis was instituted (1693) for the purpose of bestowing honours as a reward for military services--this time without distinction of birth, but not without distinction of religion; the reformed could not obtain it. By such measures France was able to have under arms, in the war of Flanders, 125,000 men; for that with Holland, 180,000; before Ryswick, 300,000; during the War of the Spanish Succession, 450,000.

VAUBAN

There was one point, the only one, perhaps, on which the minister of war and the minister of marine were in accord: namely, the fortification of the kingdom. To accomplish this immense work they found the man who is, with Colbert, the greatest of this reign. Le Prestre de Vauban was a gentilhomme of no great family, who was born at Saulieu in Burgundy in 1633. His father died in the service, leaving him only his name. A prior of the neighbourhood took him in and brought him up. When he had completed his seventeenth year the Fronde was in full swing. Eleven of his brothers, uncles, and relatives were under arms; one morning Vauban ran away and hastened to join the Great Condé, who received him as a cadet and soon made him an officer.

Vauban fought well; he studied more. The good prior had given him some notions of geometry; he developed them and these first acquirements decided his vocation. Having passed into the royal army he served under the chevalier de Clerville, the most renowned engineer of that time, and at twenty-five directed the works during the sieges of Gravelines, Ypres, and Oudenarde. In 1668 his reputation was so great that Louis XIV charged him with the fortification of Dunkirk. This first work of the young engineer was a masterpiece: two moles projecting over six thousand feet into the water and defended by formidable batteries created a harbour where nature had put only an unfavourable shore. The waters inside and those of the high tides skilfully manipulated, incessantly hollowed the channel and restored to the sea the mud it brought up. Henceforth Vauban was the indispensable man whom every general demanded when he had a siege to make. In time of war he took towns; in time of peace he fortified them. It has been calculated that he worked on 300 old towns, that he constructed 33 new ones, that he conducted 53 sieges, and was present at 140 important actions. He was several times wounded; for in order to reconnoitre the situation of a place and to spare the blood of his soldiers, he exposed himself in such a manner as to call forth the accusation of temerity, had not his cool and deliberate courage been like the fulfilment of a duty.

Vauban, who fortified towns, knew still better how to take them. He introduced the use of hollow cannon-balls for dispersing earth; ricochet firing to dismount the artillery of the besieged and destroy the angles of the bastions; above all he perfected the parallels at the siege of Maestricht in 1673. These parallels joined the trenches which converged towards the town, and gave the attack the advantage over the defence. Vauban went forward slowly but surely; he marched under cover by lines on which the troops were in a position to render each other mutual support, did not hurry on attacks when he could dispense with them, took pains to spare the soldiers, who had previously been flung away, and attained his object incomparably more quickly and with fewer losses, because he first silenced the enemy’s fire and left on the ramparts neither a tenable point nor a cannon in condition to be fired. There was no longer any impregnable fortress and it was easy to look forward to the day when every well-besieged town would be taken. It is to him that we also owe the invention of the socket which allows the infantry to fire whilst still keeping the bayonet at the end of the gun.

SÉGUIER, LEGISLATIVE WORKS

[Sidenote: [1665-1685 A.D.]]

In a memorial handed to the king, August 15th, 1665, Colbert had proposed to remodel the whole legislation so that there should be in France but one law, one system of weights and measures; in addition he asked for gratuitous justice, the abolition of the venality of offices, the price of which was reckoned at four hundred and twenty millions, and the diminution of the number of monks, and the encouragement of useful callings.

A commission was appointed. When the members had held a meeting and at last brought their task to a conclusion they discussed the matter with eminent members of the parliament in the presence of the ministers, under the presidency of the chancellor Séguier, sometimes under that of the king. Six codes were the result of these deliberations: in 1667 the civil ordinance or Code Louis which abolished some iniquitous procedure belonging to the justice of the Middle Ages, “true witness of human imbecility,” says Montaigne, shortened its delays and regulated the form of the registers of births, marriages, and deaths which, it was ordered, were to be deposited at the office of each law-court; in 1669 that of Rivers and Forests which continues in its principal dispositions; in 1670 the ordinance of Criminal Instruction which the parliaments accepted only after many lettres de cachet and decrees of exile; it restricted the application of the torture and various cases of provisional imprisonment, fixed rights of jurisdiction so that none might be deprived of his natural judges, laid down identical rules for all tribunals, thus preparing the way for unity of principle by means of unity of form, but did not yet allow either counsel or defender for the accused in capital cases, preserved the atrocity of earlier penalties, the wheel and quartering, and still made the penalty disproportionate to the crime; in 1673 the ordinance of Commerce, a true title to glory for Colbert; in 1681 that of the Navy and the Colonies, which has formed the common law of the nations of Europe and serves them to this day as maritime law; in 1685 the Black Code, which regulated the condition of negroes in the French colonies.

These ordinances form the greatest work of codification executed from Justinian to Napoleon. Some portions of them are still in operation.

LIONNE, FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND DIPLOMACY

[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]

If Colbert and Louvois, by the re-establishment of the finances, the creation of a navy, and the reform of the army, allowed Louis XIV to make war successfully, Lionne, secretary of state for foreign affairs, prepared that success by his negotiations. “He had,” says Choisy, “a superior genius: his understanding, naturally keen and penetrating, had been still further sharpened in the affairs in which the cardinal had early employed him.” Saint-Simon, who was no flatterer, also says that he did everything with a skill and superiority quite unequalled. The king indeed watched closely over this branch; he himself wrote the first despatches to his ambassadors; he often wrote minutes of the most important letters with his own hand, and he always had the instructions sent in his name read aloud to him.

When Lionne died in 1671 the king gave him as successor the marquis de Pomponne who had conducted several embassies with success and was then in Sweden, whose king he had succeeded in detaching from the Dutch alliance. Pomponne directed all the negotiations which terminated in the Peace of Nimeguen. “But,” said Louis XIV, “the office I gave him was found to be too great and extensive for him. I was obliged to order him to retire, because everything that passed through his hands lost something of the grandeur and force which are needed in executing the orders of a king of France who is not unfortunate.”

TRIUMPH OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY

Some of these ministers of Louis XIV, especially Colbert and Louvois, were certainly great administrators; they were not, they could not be, great statesmen. Colbert himself aimed at making France richer only in order to render the king more powerful; and all laboured to constitute the excessive centralisation which enveloped the whole country, its industry and commerce, the arms and the brain, with a thousand bonds of a minute regulation, so that the initiative of the ministers was everywhere substituted for the action of individuals and communities. The result of this system was to be that France would live less by her own vitality than by that of her government. When age and sickness should freeze that ever-present hand all would decline. A great people would be subjected to the vicissitudes of one man’s existence.

If the administration of the realm was as much the work of Louis XIV’s ministers as his own, one thing belonged to him alone: this was the general direction he gave to the government and to society--the skilful and energetic manner with which he knew how to control all other powers, to annul them, and make them to serve his greatness; it was in fact that art of ruling which no other prince, in Saint-Simon’s[i] judgment, possessed to a greater degree. We have already seen his ideas on the rights of sovereigns; he had summed them up in that phrase attributed to him, it is said, in his youth, at the end of the Fronde: “L’État, c’est moi--The State, it is I.”[116]

He believed this; everybody believed it with him, and the church taught it. Bossuet founded the divine right of the monarchy on maxims drawn from the Scriptures. “Oh kings, ye are gods,” exclaimed the great bishop at the very moment that Lebrun was filling Versailles with the apotheosis of Louis XIV. While he lived there was but one uncontrolled and limitless will--his own. The states-general might have recalled other wills, but he never convoked it; he punished those that spoke of it, and when, at the Treaty of Utrecht, the allies, still defying his ambition, tried to exact that the conditions of peace should be ratified by a national assembly, he haughtily refused and declared that he regarded the demand as an insult to the majesty of the throne. The minority of the provinces had their own estates, but he suppressed many of them. Those which remained, as in Languedoc, Burgundy, Provence, Brittany, etc., never assembled except to execute the orders of the ministers. Whatever remained of municipal liberty disappeared like that of the provinces. The king, coining money with the ancient rights dear to the towns, changed the mayoralties into hereditary offices and sold them to the highest bidders. An edict of 1683 placed the financial administration of the towns under the direction of the intendants. Their finances did not improve. The communities were made responsible for the payment of the taille as the curiates had been under the Roman emperors. Former fiscal arrangements had ruined the magistrates. The new one held them exempt, but ruined the communes.

A phrase sums up this entire policy--unfortunately it was spoken by Colbert: “It is not well,” he wrote to a governor, charging him to let an elective magistracy fall into desuetude, “that some one should speak in the name of all.”

Submission of Parliament

Royalty had taken five centuries to undermine the great body of the feudal aristocracy, and the better to perfect this work had formed with its own hands another body--that of the judiciary order. In the sixteenth century they spoke of the parliaments as “the strong columns on which the monarchy is supported,” but in the seventeenth the new royalty wished for no other support than its absolute power.

Nevertheless, thanks to the sale of offices, which left the same offices in the same hands, thanks to the dignity of the magistrate’s lives, to the political rôles they had played on several occasions, to the esprit de corps which had quickly been established in the bosom of the great judiciary companies, there had been raised alongside the nobility of the sword a nobility of the robe, which seemed quite as troublesome as the other because it already had its souvenirs and regrets. It was not always easily managed. It parried attacks with that force of inertia peculiar to assemblies of aged men, which is difficult to overcome at a time when tradition stands for law. The spirit of opposition, everywhere punished, took refuge here--political opposition, scarcely sensible in the parliament of Paris, provincial opposition in the others, all religious opposition, under the form of Jansenism. One of Louis XIV’s ideas which he sought to realise with the greatest perseverance was to transform the parliaments into simple courts of appeal, to put his state councils over them, even the parliament of Paris which had brought about the Fronde. In an edict of 1667 he proscribed it from enregistering ordinances within a week and he suffered no remonstrance. The following year he had torn from the parliament registers the records of all its deliberations during the civil war, in order to efface even the memory of its old-time pretensions. Besides this he changed its title of sovereign court into that of superior court, as if the first were a usurpation of royal sovereignty.

Submission of the Nobility

It appeared a more difficult task to reduce the nobles. Cardinal Richelieu had razed their fortresses and cut off the heads of some of the most unruly. Mazarin had bought them or vanquished them by ruse. Louis XIV made himself their master by drawing them around him by his fêtes, dragging them from their domains, where they thought too often of their ancestors and still felt themselves free, filling his antechamber and household posts with the descendants of those who had made his fathers tremble, and forming for royalty such brilliant cortèges as the representative of God on earth would wish to be surrounded by.

If they had titles and honours they had no political influence in the state. In his councils, the king, after the death of Mazarin, admitted but a single one of the old noblesse, the duke de Beauvilliers, governor of the royal children; and he chose all his ministers from those of middle conditions, in order, according to Saint-Simon’s[i] forceful expression, to be able “to plunge them into the depths of nothingness from which he had drawn them.” The French nobility never knew how, like that of England, to become a political class; it was never anything but a military caste.

The Third Estate

Louis XIV preferred, following in this the ancient monarchical traditions, to be served by the middle class, more educated and, moreover, more devoted, because it did not yet feel the inconveniences of absolute power, as it had been feeling for centuries those of the feudal régime. Louis turned over to it all the financial, political, and judicial functions; he established it peacefully in the administration of the realm; he pushed it energetically towards commerce and industry--two forces of the new era--and the regard he had for those petites gens named Boileau, Racine, Molière, announced the coming substitution of the rights of intellect for those of birth. Louis XIV thus unknowingly paved the way for democracy in France and the Revolution. However he must not be regarded as a sort of bourgeois king, a roi des maltôtiers, as Saint-Simon[i] disdainfully calls him. His policy, the high idea he had of his person, the rigorous ceremonial which made a sort of redoubtable and inaccessible divinity of him, the carrousels, the brilliant fêtes--none of these recalls to mind the modest pictures of constitutional monarchies.[117] More than that, those nobodies whom Louis made his councillors, his ambassadors, and his secretaries of state quitted their plebeian state before entering his court. They became the marquis de Louvois, the count de Pontchartrain, the marquis de Torcy. While working with the bourgeois, the grandson of Henry IV always had the desire to remain the king of the noblemen.

LOUIS XIV AND THE CHURCH

[Sidenote: [1661-1685 A.D.]]

Louis XIV conducted himself towards the clergy as he had done towards the nobility--in honouring them he watched to see that they robbed him of none of his power. The great lords, with but few exceptions, were removed from the church as they had been from the administration. Therefore the aristocratic Saint-Simon[i] reproaches Louis “with having ruined the episcopacy by filling it with seminarian pedants and their pupils without education and without birth”--a strange reproach from the mouth of a man who had lived with Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier, and Massillon, the eternal honour of the French church.

The clergy was therefore under Louis XIV one force the more at the disposal of royalty. In the affair of the régale, the bishops even upheld the king against Rome. The régale was the king’s right to enjoy the revenues of certain benefices, bishoprics, and archbishoprics, during vacancies in the sees. In 1673 an edict declared all the French sees subject to the régale. Two bishops refused to obey and their action was approved by the pope. Louis XIV, to end the dispute, convoked an assembly of French clergy which adopted, in 1682, under the inspiration of Bossuet, four propositions which were registered by the courts and the faculty of theology. They were in substance: God gave to St. Peter and his successors no power, direct or indirect, over temporal affairs. The Gallican church approves those decrees of the Council of Constance which declare the œcumenical councils superior to the pope in spiritual affairs. The rules and customs received in the kingdom and in the Gallican church must remain unalterable. The pope’s decisions, in matter of doctrine, shall not be irreformable until the church has accepted them.

Innocent XI neither approved nor quashed these resolutions, but he refused to grant bulls of investiture to those bishops, appointed by the government, who had been members of the assembly. The consequence was that at his death there were twenty dioceses without heads. The matter was, however, brought to a conclusion in 1693 by a compromise. Innocent XII granted the bulls of investiture and the king ceased to impose upon the theological faculties the obligation of teaching the four propositions of 1682.

The Protestants

The dissenters profited nothing by the quarrel with the court of Rome.[c]

Since the Peace of Alais the Protestants, being deprived of their political organisation, of their “towns of security,” and of everything which had helped to form them into a party, had been living in obscurity, doing their best to make their enemies forget them, and carefully abstaining from taking any part in the civil troubles of the time. During the Fronde not one of them had shown any sign of life. Their attitude towards the government was that of a child in disgrace, and towards the Catholics that of a disdainful enemy. They persisted in isolating themselves from the rest of the nation, and continued to correspond with their friends in England and Holland. They were law-abiding, peaceable, and industrious citizens, and contributed their full share to the greatness and prosperity of their country by their courage and their energy.

Nevertheless, the nation continued to look on them with mistrust, as if they were foreigners; France felt as if there were a little Holland in her midst, rejoicing at the success of the greater one (with which it was then waging ineffectual war). To reunite the Protestants with the national church was a fixed idea with Louis XIV. This desire inspired his policy, and was the chief goal of all his efforts; this was to be “the noble work and special feature of his reign”; and he looked upon the enterprise as a noble one, not only from a political but from a religious point of view. He was beginning to get into a narrow devotional groove, and allowed the Jesuits to exercise a powerful influence over him. He wished to free himself from the reproach of heresy, which his conduct towards the pope had drawn down upon him, and to atone for the irregularities of his youth. He resolved to revoke the Edict of Nantes. The assembly of the clergy, the parliament of Toulouse, the Catholics in the south all advocated this measure so strongly that it appeared to be the general desire of the nation; Louvois in his ambition, Le Tellier in his fanatical piety, also did their best to urge the king on, and last, but not least, Madame de Maintenon, whose influence during the rest of his life was to be paramount, threw all the weight of her persuasions into the scale in order to bring about the revocation of this edict.

Up to this time bribery had been the chief means employed in the attempts to convert the Protestants. Richelieu had used this method with great success. Louis XIV followed his example with favourable results; flattery, favours, rewards of every kind were lavishly bestowed in the attempt to gain over the Protestants. Pensions were given to the newly converted, they were exempted from taxation, all sorts of offices were given to them over the heads of staunch Catholics. A fund was formed for making conversions, with Pellisson, a converted Protestant, as director. France was flooded with missions, sermons, tracts, and books of dogma.

Calvinism suffered such severe losses that Madame de Maintenon said, “Very soon it will be ridiculous to belong to that religion.” But these methods of bribery and persuasion were not rapid enough, and harsher methods began to be used: royal edicts, parliamentary decisions, and orders issued by governors of provinces and cities rendered the preaching of the reformed doctrines difficult, made the Protestant pastors very uneasy, forbade their synods to assemble. Protestants were deprived of their pensions and of their titles of nobility; the chief burden of the taxes was laid on them; they were excluded from the king’s household, from the university, from holding municipal offices. They were also forbidden to practice as lawyers or doctors. They were expelled from financial offices, the rights of free citizenship were refused to them, they were not allowed to be members of corporations, their schools were closed, any of their places of worship which had been built since 1598 were destroyed, and their children were taken from them to be educated as Catholics. Then the Protestants began to fly from France (1682); but emigration was forbidden under pain of being sent to the galleys.

The Calvinists in the south made one last appeal to the king in March, 1684, begging him to allow them to serve God according to the dictates of their own conscience, or else to take refuge in some other country. For answer, the king sent them a number of missionaries accompanied by a detachment of dragoons, who were supposed to be the most cruel of all the French soldiers. Every day conversions by the hundred were announced to the king. On the 2nd of September all the Protestants of Montauban changed their religion by a resolution passed at a meeting in the town hall; on the 5th of October Montpellier, Castres, Lunel, etc., followed suit; then the dioceses of Gap and Embrun, then the whole of Poitou. The governor of Languedoc said that he had seen sixty thousand people converted in three days. It was thought that nothing more remained to be done, but to publicly announce the destruction of a sect which had only a few adherents left in distant provinces, among the rude inhabitants of the mountainous parts; it was necessary to strike only one more decisive blow and so complete the work for which a long series of unjust acts and the ingenious tyranny of the last fifty years had been the preparation. Père Lachaise, the king’s confessor, and Louvois promised that not a single drop of blood should be shed.

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685 A.D.)

Accordingly on the 22nd of October, 1685, an edict appeared ordaining: (1) The suppression of all the privileges which had been accorded to the Protestants by Henry IV and Louis XIII; (2) the proscription of Protestant worship throughout the kingdom (except Alsace and Strasburg); (3) the expulsion of Protestant ministers, the closing of Protestant schools, and the demolition of the churches, etc. Numerous rewards were given to those who agreed to change their religion; Calvinists were forbidden on pain of being sent to the galleys and the confiscation of their property, to go out of France; permission was given them to remain on their own property and engage in business without their worship being interfered with so long as they did not hold public services.

This edict was received in France with the greatest enthusiasm: sermons, poems, pictures, medals were produced with astounding rapidity to celebrate this great act of unity! At last the whole country was to be under one jurisdiction and under one king! Louis XIV was a second Constantine, a modern Theodosius. Never had any king performed such a wonderful achievement, nor was it likely that any parallel to it would be seen in the future. The whole of Europe was amazed at the promptitude and ease with which this great king had stamped out a heresy which had defied the efforts of six of his predecessors.

The only complaints that arose were directed against the leniency of that clause which allowed the Protestants to worship in their own fashion in private. This clause was only a lure, and Louvois wrote to the governors and those in authority: “His majesty desires that those who refuse to embrace his religion should be treated with the utmost rigour, and those who foolishly pride themselves on being the last to be converted are to be driven to the extremity of their endurance.” Then began a series of bloody atrocities which the king had never commanded, and which were not at all in accordance with his character for moderation. A defenceless population was delivered over to the cruel brutality of the soldiery, men were put to the torture, women were subjected to a dishonour worse than death, children were torn from their parents, houses and farms were wrecked, converts who refused to take the sacraments were sent to the galleys, as were those who harboured Protestant ministers or those who attempted to leave the kingdom. Sentence of death was pronounced against all who practised any other than the Catholic religion, against all Protestant ministers, and all who formed themselves into gatherings or held meetings. Those who were weak yielded; they were dragged to the altar and, with the executioner standing over them, forced to commit sacrilege. “Torture, abjuration, and forced communion,” says Saint-Simon,[i] “often all took place within twenty-four hours,” and the executioners were the guides and the sponsors of the convert. Almost all the bishops took part in these hasty irreverent practices. Most of them urged on the executioners and used every means to swell the number of conversions, for they sent an account of their triumphs to the court, and were anxious to gain as much glory and substantial recompense as possible. The king received from all quarters news and details of these persecutions; those who had abjured Protestantism and received the communion were counted by the thousand. The king gloried in his power and in his piety; the bishops sent him the most fulsome panegyrics on the great work he was doing; pulpits rang with his praises.

The Protestants fled from the country. The police were unable to prevent them. Certificates of confession were required from all travellers, sentence of death was pronounced against anyone who countenanced or assisted others in emigrating. The emigrants had been deprived of seventeen millions of francs in house and land property, the frontier was guarded by numerous troops; but all these measures were vain, and in spite of them fifty thousand families left the kingdom, and took refuge in Holland, England, Germany, and Switzerland. They consisted of nobles, tradesmen, and manufacturers. This active, energetic, and enlightened body of men, placed at the service of foreigners their talents, their swords, the secrets of French manufactures, their wealth, and a relentless hatred of the tyrant who had banished them. Their emigration did an irreparable injury to France. They were received everywhere with the greatest kindness; they were even invited to leave their country, and good positions were promised them. One part of London was peopled with silk-weavers and workers in crystal and steel; and England became the leading manufacturing nation. Brandenburg rose from its abasement; Berlin became a town; Prussia was opened up; the influence of the refugees on Frederick William’s states was so marked that it is from this time that their greatness and their subsequent weight among European powers may be dated. Amsterdam built a thousand houses for them, William gave them pensions, granted them privileges, and provided them with places of worship; he formed them into a royal guard of six hundred noblemen and two regiments. He made use of their ministers, embittered by hatred, to flood Europe with pamphlets against Louis XIV. Henceforth on every battle-field the French would meet these emigrants filled with a fierce hatred of their country, and, for more than a century afterward, French soldiers found that their bitterest enemies in Germany were the descendants of these refugees.[j]

The Jansenists

[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]

Nor did Louis protect the Jansenists who were, on certain points, in disagreement with the church of Rome. The Jansenists owed their doctrine to a bishop of Ypres, named Jansenius, who died in 1638, and to the abbé of St. Cyran who had sustained some ancient opinions, which seemed to be new, upon grace and predestination. Jansenism deserves at least a passing word especially on account of the character of the men who defended it. The most illustrious of them, the great Arnauld, Lemaistre de Sacy, Nicole, and Lancelot, retired to the ancient Cistercian abbey of Port-Royal des Champs, near Versailles, when Pascal also joined them in 1654, and there, leading a solitary life, these Catholic puritans set the world an example of assiduous works of the hands and the intellect, of lively piety, and of austerity which went as far as asceticism. They wrote, for the most part in common, some excellent works which are still in use; they had some illustrious pupils, among others Racine; they won over to a great part of their doctrine almost the entire magistracy.[c]

The Jesuits then monopolised the authority and influence of the church, whose spirit and moral code they attempted to modify, and adapt to the present courtly and despotic times. The studious, reasoning, and ascetic brethren of Port-Royal saw the tendency of the Jesuit preaching, the false and worldly basis of their creed. It was on the subject of Jansenism that the Jesuits had declared themselves, and had come forth in the arena of argument. The pious wits of Port-Royal seized the opportunity, took up a cause sufficiently absurd in its fundamental dogmas, but which they were enabled to support by battering the still more absurd outworks of the Jesuits. The latter won the pope to their side, and obtained from the head of the church a condemnation of the tenets of Jansenius. The polemic writers of Port-Royal bowed to his holiness, confessed that he was infallible as a high priest, in condemning such and such belief, but most fallible as a critic, since not one of these propositions, so lustily condemned, were to be found in Jansenius. This ingenious effrontery succeeded; for, under colour of disputing about such abstractions, Pascal and Arnauld attacked their enemies in more vulnerable points--in their moral laxity, their sophistic logic, their worldliness, courtliness, and servility. Louis XIV took the Jesuit side. Many of the courtiers, who dared no longer draw the sword in rebellion, ventured to move the tongue, and exercise thought at least in independence. Amongst the most distinguished sectaries of Port-Royal was the duchess de Longueville, sister of Condé, the famous partisan of the Fronde, and mistress of La Rochefoucauld. Her hôtel, once the resort of the coadjutor [de Retz] and his party, of the hot cavaliers that drove the court from Paris, was now the lurking-place and concealment of the Jansenists. She braved the royal authority at all times, whether in the cause of the noblesse or of religion; gallant and dissolute in the Fronde, in Jansenism rigid and devout. “She was Jansenist in truth and heart,” says Brienne, “just as she had indulged her gallantries with the same sincerity, and always drums beating” (the expression means openly and boldly): “a princess of the blood need fear nothing; and Madame de Longueville marched on her way with head erect.” Although the Jansenism of Pascal and of Arnauld was the protestation of reason, common sense, and deep religious feeling, against the corruptions of the Jesuits, that of Madame de Longueville and her class must be considered as a kind of covert opposition to the court, and to the despotic will of the sovereign. The froward love of independence, that could no longer exercise itself in political intrigue, found more harmless vent in criticism and polemics.[k]

The outcome of the Jansenist disputes was that in 1709 the king caused the buildings of Port-Royal des Champs to be levelled to the ground.[118] The bodies of the inoffensive solitaires were disinterred, and dogs were seen quarrelling over them.

THE POLICE

The police was the creation of Louis XIV. In 1687 he appointed a magistrate to oversee the Paris police, Nicholas de la Reynie, who was succeeded in 1697 by the marquis d’Argenson--these were the first two lieutenants de police. They established order, decency, and security in the city. Now commenced the system of public lighting; from the 1st of November to the 1st of March, lanterns, burning candles, were placed at the ends and in the middle of every street. There were five thousand of these lights in Paris. The watch was augmented and reorganised. Firemen replaced the Capuchins in the fire Service. The narrow streets, often cut up and always filthy, were cleaned, widened, and paved; coaches and cabs for the public were introduced; Pascal even devised the omnibuses, which did not succeed at that time. The custom of going about Paris on horseback was no longer kept up except by a few obstinate representatives of the olden times.

The police attended to other things; it censured all writings,[119] it held up the post, and read in what was afterwards called the cabinet noir, all suspected correspondence, and to relieve the government of too slow methods of justice it multiplied the lettres de cachet[120] which removed all guarantee of personal liberty to citizens. The new power charged with the overseeing of persons and opinions, thus became like an ever-open eye, always defiant of royalty. Thus were all the orders of state, all the existing authorities, all the conditions--parliament, nobility, bourgeois, clergy, and dissenters--reduced and dominated. Vauban, Catinat, and Fénelon resisted the contagion. Condé himself, in spite of his rank, his services, and his spirit, became a courtier. Turenne alone managed to keep a position from which he could tell the king many truths which others dared not repeat.[c]

THE COURT OF THE GRAND MONARCH

Louis XIV put so much brilliancy and magnificence into his court that the smallest details of its life seem interesting to posterity, to such an extent were they an object of curiosity to all the courts of Europe and to all his contemporaries. The splendour of his government shone on his pettiest actions.

That is why no historian has failed to write of the early affections of Louis XIV for the baroness de Beauvais, for Mademoiselle d’Argencourt, for the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who was married to the count de Soissons, the father of Prince Eugene, and above all for Marie Mancini, her sister, who afterwards married the constable Colonna.

The court, after the triumphant return of Mazarin after the Peace of the Pyrenees, busied itself with games, and the ballet, with comedy, which, being only new born, had not yet become an art, and with tragedy, which had become a sublime art in the hands of Pierre Corneille. A curé of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, who inclined to the rigorous ideas of the Jansenists, had often written to the queen against these spectacles, ever since the first years of the regency. He claimed that a person would be damned for being present at them. He even had this anathema signed by seven doctors of the Sorbonne, but the abbé de Beaumont, the king’s preceptor, provided himself with more approbations of doctors, than the strict curé had with condemnations. He thus quieted the scruples of the queen, and, when he became archbishop of Paris, he gave his authority to the opinion he had supported as abbé.

There had been one continual succession of fêtes, entertainments, and gallantries since the marriage of the king. Interrupted by the death of Mazarin, they were redoubled on the marriage of Monsieur, brother of the king, with Henrietta of England, sister of Charles II [which took place twenty days after Mazarin’s death]. After the cardinal’s death the court became the centre of amusements and the model for other courts. The king prided himself on giving fêtes which should cast those of Vaux into oblivion.

The good taste of society had not yet received its full perfection at court. The queen-mother, Anne of Austria, began to be fond of retirement.[121] The reigning queen could scarcely speak French and her goodness was her only merit. The princess of England, the queen’s sister-in-law, brought to court the attraction of a kindly and animated style of conversation, which was soon seconded by her reading of good works and her sure and fine taste. She perfected herself in the language, which she still wrote poorly at the time of her marriage. She inspired a fresh mental stimulus, and introduced graces and a politeness into court, of which the rest of Europe had scarcely an idea. Madame had all the wit of her brother Charles II, embellished by the charms of her sex, by the talent and the desire to please. The court of Louis XIV breathed forth a gallantry which a sense of propriety made more piquant. That which reigned at the court of Charles II was bolder, and too much grossness disfigured its amusements.

There was at first between Madame and the king a great deal of sprightly coquetry and a secret understanding, which was shown in little attentions often repeated.[122] The king sent her verses; she answered them. It chanced that the same man was at once the confidant of the king and of Madame in this ingenious intercourse. This was the marquis of Dangeau. He conducted the correspondence for both king and princess; thus serving both of them without letting one suspect what he was doing for the other.

Mademoiselle de la Vallière

These pastimes gave way to the more serious and more protracted passion which the king had for Mademoiselle de la Vallière, maid of honour to Madame. He experienced with her the rare pleasure of being loved solely for himself. She was for two years the hidden object of all the gallant amusements, all the entertainments which the king gave. A young valet de chambre of the king, named Belloc, composed several recitals which were interspersed between dances, sometimes in the queen’s, sometimes in Madame’s apartments, and these recitals expressed with an air of mystery the secrets of their hearts, which soon ceased to be a secret.

All these public entertainments which the king gave were so many homages to his mistress. In 1662, a tournament (carrousel) was held opposite the Tuileries in a large enclosure which has retained its name from this event, Place du Carrousel. There were five quadrilles. The king was at the head of the Romans; his brother of the Persians, the prince of Condé of the Turks, the duke d’Enghien, his son, of the Indians, the duke of Guise of the Americans.

The queen-mother, the reigning queen, the queen of England, widow of Charles I, forgetting for the moment her misfortunes, were under a dais to see this spectacle. The count de Saulx, son of the duke de Lesdiguières, took the prize and received it from the hand of the queen-mother. These fêtes reanimated more than ever the taste for devices and emblems, which tourneys had formerly made the fashion, and which had lasted after them.

In 1662, an antiquarian called D’Ouvrier designed for Louis XIV the emblem of a sun darting its rays on a globe, with the words: Nec pluribus impar. The idea imitated somewhat a Spanish device made for Philip II, and which was more appropriate for the Spanish king, who owned the best part of the New World and so many states in the old, than for a young king of France who as yet gave only hopes. This device had a prodigious success. The armoires of the king, the crown furniture, the tapestries, the carvings, were decorated with it. The king never wore it in his tournaments.

The fête of Versailles, in 1664, surpassed that of the carrousel by its originality, by its magnificence, and by the pleasures of mind which, being joined to the splendours of these diversions, added an attraction and graces which no fête before had ever had. Versailles began to be a charming place of abode.

The 5th of May the king came there with the court, composed of six hundred persons, who, together with their suites, were entertained at his expense, as well as all those who assisted in preparing the entertainments. Nothing was ever lacking at these fêtes except buildings especially constructed for giving them, such as were raised by the Greeks and Romans. The quickness, however, with which theatres, amphitheatres, and porticoes were erected, and ornamented with as much magnificence as good taste, was a marvel which added to the illusion and which, diversified since in a thousand different ways, increased the charm of these exhibitions.

There was first a sort of tournament. Those who were to take part appeared on the first day as in a review; they were preceded by heralds at arms, by pages and equerries who carried their devices and their shields. On the shields were written verses composed by Périgny and Benserade. This latter especially had a singular talent for those gallant verses in which he always made delicate and piquant allusions to the character of the persons, to the personages of antiquity or of fable which were represented, and to the passions which animated the court. The king represented Roger; all the crown diamonds glittered on his coat and on the horse he rode. The queens and three hundred ladies, under triumphal arches, watched this entrance.

The king with all eyes fastened upon him distinguished only those of La Vallière. The fête was for her alone; she enjoyed it hidden in the crowd. The cavalcade was followed by a gilded car, 18 feet high, 15 feet wide, and 24 feet long, representing the chariot of the sun. The four ages, of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, the signs of the zodiac, the seasons, the hours, followed this car on foot. Everything was in character. Shepherds carried pieces of the barrier which were adjusted to the sound of trumpets, followed at intervals by bagpipes and violins. Certain persons who followed Apollo’s car came first to the queens to recite verses appropriate to the place and time, to the king and the ladies. When the races were finished and night was come, four thousand great torches lit up the space wherein fêtes were given. Tables were served by two hundred persons, representing the seasons, fauns, sylvan creatures, dryads, together with shepherds, vintagers, harvesters. Pan and Diana advanced on a moving mountain from which they descended to place on tables the most delicious products of field and forest. Behind these tables in the half circle, a theatre filled with performers arose. The arcades which surrounded the tables and theatre were ornamented with five hundred green and silver chandeliers, holding candles; a gilded balustrade shut in this vast enclosure. These fêtes, so far superior to those invented in romances, lasted for seven days. The king carried off the prize of the games four times, and then let other cavaliers contest for the prizes he had gained, which he abandoned to them. The comedy of the Princesse d’Élide, although not one of Molière’s best, was one of the most agreeable attractions of these entertainments, on account of an infinity of fine allegories on the customs of the times and by the apposite observations which form an agreeable feature of such entertainments, but which lose their point for posterity.

The chief glory of these entertainments, which in France perfected good taste, good form, and talent, came from the fact that they detracted nothing from the continual labours of the monarch. Without these labours he would have been able only to hold a court, he would not have known how to reign; and if the magnificent amusements of this court had increased the misery of the people, they would have been only odious; but the same man who had given these fêtes had also given the people bread in the famine of 1662. He caused grain to be brought, which the rich bought at a low price, and which he gave to poor families at the gate of the Louvre. He had returned three millions of taxes to the people; no part of the interior administration had been neglected.[b] Yet it cannot be overlooked that bad economics underlay most of these financial measures,--as, indeed, of all Colbert’s work.[a]

The legate Chigi, sent by Pope Alexander VII, arrived at Versailles in the midst of all these enjoyments to render satisfaction to the king for the assault of the papal guards.[b] This attack had taken place on August 20th, 1662, at Rome. It precipitated a quarrel very similar to that which had taken place in London the preceding year. The liveried servants of the duke de Créqui, the ambassador, had a fight with the Corsican guard; one of them was killed, the duke was insulted and his coach fired upon. Louis XIV demanded reparation. The court of Rome attempted, according to the custom of the times, to gain time; the king insisted, sent the papal nuncio to the frontier under escort, occupied the county of Venaissin, sent troops into the duchies of Parma and Modena in Italy, and finally threatened war. Alexander VII, seeing that these menaces were serious, gave in (1664). His own brother, the legate Fabio Chigi, brought in person the desired satisfaction. Louis XIV then gave back Avignon and Venaissin.[e] This visit of the papal delegate revealed to the court a new spectacle. The grand ceremonies were fêtes for the public. The honours paid him made the satisfaction more brilliant. Seated under a dais, he received the greetings of the superior courts, of the municipal courts, and of the clergy. He entered Paris to the sound of cannon, having the great Condé at his right and the son of that prince at his left; and in this manner he came to humiliate himself, Rome, and the pope, before a king who had not yet drawn a sword. After the audience he dined with Louis XIV, and the chief thought of all was to treat him magnificently and give him pleasure.

[Sidenote: [1669-1679 A.D.]]

All this gave to the court of Louis XIV an air of grandeur which affected all the other courts of Europe. The king wanted this éclat, which was attached to his person, to reflect on all that surrounded him. To distinguish his principal courtiers he invented blue cassocks embroidered with gold and silver. The permission to wear them was a great favour to men influenced chiefly by vanity. They were sought after almost like the collars of the order. We may mention here, since we are speaking of details, that it was the fashion then to wear cassocks over a doublet ornamented with ribbons, and over this cassock passed a shoulder band to which the sword was attached. A kind of lace band was worn around the neck and on the head a hat decorated with two rows of feathers. This fashion, which lasted until 1684, became that of all Europe with the exception of Spain and Poland. Almost everywhere people prided themselves on imitating the court of Louis XIV.

Louis established order in his household, regulated ranks and factions, and created new offices in connection with his person, such as that of the grand-master of his wardrobe. He re-established the tables instituted by Francis I, and augmented them. There were twelve for the officers of the king’s household, which were served with as much niceness and profusion as those of many sovereigns. He wanted all strangers to be invited to them, and this attention lasted during all his reign. There was another attention which was even more select and polite. When he had the pavilions of Marly built in 1679, all the ladies found a complete toilet-set in their apartments; nothing which belonged to commodious luxury was forgotten. Whoever was on a journey could give repasts in his apartments, and was served there with the same delicacy as the master. These little things acquire value only when they are sustained by greater ones. In everything which the king did might be seen splendour and generosity. He made a present of 200,000 francs to the daughters of his ministers on their marriage.

One can easily imagine the effect which this magnificence had in Europe. The French were not the only ones who praised him: twelve panegyrics were pronounced on Louis XIV in different towns of Italy--an homage rendered neither from fear nor hope of favour, which the marquis Zampieri sent to the king.

He continued to extend his patronage to letters and to the arts. Proofs of this are the particular gratuities of about 4,000 livres to Racine, the fortune of Despréaux, that of Quinault, and above all that of Lully and of all the artists who consecrated their work to him. The king danced in ballets until the year 1670. He was then thirty-two years old. The tragedy of Britannicus was played before him at St. Germain; he was struck by these verses:

Pour mérite premier, pour vertu singulière, Il excelle à traîner un char dans la carrière, A disputer des prix indignes de ses mains, A se donner lui-même en spectacle aux Romains.

After that he never again danced in public: the poet had reformed the monarch. His union with La Vallière still continued in spite of his frequent infidelities to her. These infidelities cost him little trouble. He never found women who resisted him, and he always came back to the one who, by the sweetness and goodness of her character, by her sincere affection, and even by the chains of habit, had subjugated him without the aid of art. But beginning with the year 1669, La Vallière perceived that Madame de Montespan was gaining the ascendency; she fought against it with her usual sweetness; she supported for a long time, and almost without complaining, the pain of being the witness of her rival’s triumph; she still thought herself happy in being even thought of by the king, whom she continued to love, and in seeing him without being loved by him.

Finally in 1675 she embraced the resource of tender souls, which need deep and intense sentiments to subjugate them. She thought that God alone could succeed her lover in her heart. Her conversion became just as celebrated as her affection. She became a Carmelite at Paris and persevered in her resolve. To wear haircloth, to walk with bare feet, to fast rigorously, to sing at night in chorus in an unknown tongue--all this did not repulse the delicacy of a woman accustomed to so much glory, luxury, and pleasure. She lived this austere life from 1675 to 1710, under the simple name of Louise de la Miséricorde.

It is known that when Sister Louise de la Miséricorde was told of the death of the duke de Vermandois, whom she had borne to the king, she said: “I ought to weep for his birth more than for his death.” One daughter was left to her, who resembled the king the most of all his children. She married the prince Armand de Conti, nephew of the Great Condé.

Madame de Montespan

[Sidenote: [1670-1675 A.D.]]

In the meantime the marquise de Montespan was enjoying the king’s favour with much éclat and authority. Athénaïs de Mortemar, wife of the marquis de Montespan, her elder sister the marquise de Thiange, and her younger sister, for whom she obtained the abbey of Fontevrault, were the most beautiful women of their day, and all three joined to this distinction singular attractions of mind. The duke de Vivonne, their brother, and marshal of France, was also one of the men at court who had the most good taste and was best read. It was to him that the king said one day: “But what is the good of reading?” The duke de Vivonne, who was stout and red faced, answered: “Reading does for the mind what your partridges do to my cheeks.”

These four persons were universally popular by a singular style of conversation mingled with pleasantry, naïveté, and wit, which was known as l’esprit de Mortemar. They all wrote with an ease and grace peculiar to them.

Madame de Montespan’s triumph burst forth during a journey which the king made to Flanders in 1670. The ruin of the Dutch was prepared on this journey in the midst of entertainments. It was a continual fête, accompanied with great pomp. The king, who made all his war expeditions on horseback, made this one for the first time in a closed carriage. Postchaises had not yet been invented. The queen, Madame, her sister-in-law, and the marquise de Montespan were in this superb equipage, followed by many others, and when Madame de Montespan was alone she had four bodyguards at the doors of her carriage. The dauphin came next with his court. Mademoiselle with hers; it was before the fatal event of her marriage; she took part in all these triumphs in peace and saw with complaisance her lover, the king’s favourite, at the head of his company of guards. The most beautiful crown furniture was carried to the towns where they slept. In every city they found a masked or dress ball, or fireworks. All his military retinue accompanied the king and all his household retinue followed or preceded him. The tables were kept as at St. Germain. In this pomp the court visited all the conquered cities. The principal ladies of Brussels, of Ghent came to see this magnificence. The king invited them to his table. He made them very handsome presents. All the officers of the garrison troops received gratuities. His liberality cost the king several times fifteen hundred gold louis a day.

All the honour, all the homage was for Madame de Montespan, except what duty gave to the queen. Nevertheless this lady did not share the secrets of state. The king knew how to distinguish affairs of state from pleasure. The unfortunate experience of a maid of honour to the queen in 1673 gave rise to a new court order. The danger attached to the position of a young girl in a gallant and voluptuous court caused twelve ladies of the palace to be substituted for the twelve maids of honour, who had graced the court and the queen’s presence. After that the queens’ households were composed in that manner. This arrangement made the court larger and more magnificent, by establishing in it the husbands and families of these ladies, which increased the society and spread greater opulence.

Poisoning: The Brinvilliers Case

[Sidenote: [1670-1685 A.D.]]

About 1670 the crime of poisoning began to be prevalent in France. This revenge of cowards had not been employed during the horrors of the civil war, but, by a singular fatality, had infected France in the time of glory and of the pleasures which softened manners, even as it found its way into ancient Rome in the fairest days of the republic.

Two Italians, one of whom bore the name of Exili, worked for a long time with a German apothecary called Glaser, in quest of the philosopher’s stone. In this enterprise the two Italians lost the little they had and endeavoured, by crime, to repair the harm done by their folly; they secretly sold poisons. Confession, the greatest curb to human wickedness but which is abused in the idea that one may perform the crimes one is sure of expiating, was the means of informing the grand penitentiary of Paris that certain persons had died of poison; he apprised the government. The two Italians were suspected, and put in the Bastille; one of the two died there; Exili remained there without being convicted; and from the depths of his prison he spread through Paris those dark secrets which cost the lives of the civil lieutenant D’Aubrai and his family, and which finally led to the establishment of the Chamber of Poisons, called the Chambre Ardente.

Love was the prime source of these horrible tragedies. The marquis of Brinvilliers, son-in-law of the civil lieutenant D’Aubrai, had in his house Sainte-Croix, the captain of his regiment, a man with too handsome a face: his wife warned him of the consequences; the husband persisted in letting the young man remain in the house with his wife, a young, beautiful, and susceptible woman. What might have been expected happened: they fell in love with each other. The civil lieutenant, father of the marquise, was harsh and imprudent enough to solicit a lettre de cachet and get the captain, who needed only to be returned to his regiment, sent to the Bastille. Sainte-Croix was unfortunately put in a room with Exili: this Italian taught him how to revenge himself; the results make one shudder. The marquise did not attempt the life of her husband, who had had some indulgence for a love of which he was himself the cause, but the fury of her vengeance induced her to poison her father, her two brothers, and her sister. Amidst so many crimes she was religious; she often went to confession, and when she was arrested at Liège a general confession was even found written in her handwriting, which served not as a proof against her but as presumptive evidence. It is not true that she tried her poisons in the hospitals as the people said, and as written in the Causes célèbres, the work of a briefless barrister (François Gabot de Pitaval) and made for the people; but it is true that she as well as Sainte-Croix had secret connections with persons afterwards accused of the same crimes. She was burned in 1676 after having had her head cut off. But from 1670, when Exili had begun to make poisons, down to 1680 this crime infected Paris. It cannot be concealed that Penautier, the receiver-general of the clergy and a friend of this woman, was accused some time afterwards of having put his secrets in practice and that it cost him half his wealth to suppress the indictment.

The Bavarian princess, wife of Monseigneur,[123] at first added brilliancy and vivacity to this court. The marquise de Montespan still attracted the principal attention but finally she ceased to please, and the violent transports of her grief did not bring back a heart that was forsaking her. However, she still kept her place at court, through her high position, being superintendent of the queen’s household, and with the king through habit and through her authority. The youth and beauty of Mademoiselle de Fontanges, a son she had borne to the king in 1680, the title of duchess she had received, kept Madame de Maintenon away from the first place, to which she did not then dare to aspire but which she afterwards obtained. The duchess de Fontanges, however, and her son died in 1681.

The marquise de Montespan, although she no longer had an open rival, none the less did not possess the heart tired of her and of her complaints. When men are no longer in their youth they almost all have need of the society of an agreeable woman. Above all the weight of affairs makes this consolation necessary. The new favourite, Madame de Maintenon, who felt the secret power she was gaining every day, bore herself with that art so natural to women and which is never displeasing to men. She wrote one day to Madame de Frontenac, her cousin, in whom she placed an entire confidence: “I always send him away dissatisfied but never discouraged.” During this time, when her favour was increasing and Madame de Montespan was nearing her fall, these two rivals saw each other every day, now with a secret bitterness, now with a passing confidence which the necessity of speaking to each other and the weariness of constraint sometimes put into their interviews. They agreed to write, each from her point of view, memoirs of all that happened at court. The work never went very far. Madame de Montespan took pleasure in reading selections from these memoirs to her friends, in the last years of her life. The pious devotion which was joined to all these secret intrigues further strengthened the favour of Madame de Maintenon and weakened that of Madame de Montespan. The king reproached himself for his attachment to a married woman and felt this scruple still more since he had begun to feel no more love for her. This embarrassing situation continued until 1685, a year made memorable by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Very different scenes were to be seen at that time--on one side the despair and flight of a part of the nation, on the other new fêtes at Versailles; Trianon and Marly built; nature in all these places forced with delights, and gardens in which every art was exhausted. The marriage of the grandson of the Great Condé with Mademoiselle de Nantes, daughter of the king and Madame de Montespan, was the last triumph of this mistress who began to retire from court.

The Retirement of Montespan

[Sidenote: [1685-1707 A.D.]]

The king afterwards gave in marriage two other children he had had by her: Mademoiselle de Blois to the duke de Chartres, and the duke du Maine to Louise Benédicte de Bourbon, granddaughter of the Great Condé and sister of Monsieur le Duc,[124] a princess celebrated for her wit and liking for the arts.

Before the celebration of the marriage of Monsieur le Duc with Mademoiselle de Nantes, the marquis de Seignelay in honour of that event gave the king a fête worthy of that monarch in the gardens of Sceaux, which had been planted by Le Nôtre with as much taste as those of Versailles. The idyll of Peace composed by Racine was performed on that occasion. At Versailles there was a new tournament and after the marriage the king displayed a singular magnificence, for which Cardinal Mazarin had given the first idea in 1656.

Four booths were put up in the salon at Marly, filled with the richest and most select products of the industry of Parisian workmen. These four booths were at the same time so many splendid decorations representing the four seasons of the year. Madame de Montespan presided over one with Monseigneur. Her rival, Madame de Maintenon, was in another with the duke du Maine. The newly married couple each had charge of one: Monsieur le Duc with Madame de Thiange; and Madame la Duchesse, whom propriety did not permit to have one with a man on account of her extreme youth, was with the duchess de Chevreuse. The so-called gentlemen and ladies du voyage drew lots for the jewels with which the booths were decorated. The king then made presents to the whole court in a manner worthy of a king. Cardinal Mazarin’s lottery was less ingenious and less brilliant. These lotteries had been formerly put into fashion by the Roman emperors, but not one of them ever relieved its magnificence with so much gallantry.

After the marriage of her daughter Madame de Montespan did not again appear at court. She lived a very dignified life at Paris. She had a large income, but it was a life annuity, and the king always paid her a pension of 1,000 gold louis a month. She went every year to take the waters at Bourbon, and there married off the girls of the neighbourhood, whom she endowed. She was no longer at the age when the imagination, affected by lively impressions, sends one to the Carmelites. She died at Bourbon in 1707.

One year after the marriage of Mademoiselle de Nantes with Monsieur le Duc, the prince of Condé died at Fontainebleau, at the age of sixty-six, of an illness which was hastened by his desire to go to see Madame la Duchesse, who had smallpox.

Madame de Maintenon

Meanwhile, after the marriage of Madame la Duchesse, after the total eclipse of the mother, the victorious Madame de Maintenon achieved such an influence and inspired Louis XIV with so much tenderness and such scruples, that the king, by the advice of Père Lachaise, married her secretly in the month of January, 1686,[125] in the small chapel in the apartments occupied afterwards by the duke of Burgundy. There was no contract, no stipulation. The archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Chanvalon, pronounced the benediction, the confessor assisting. Montchevreuil and Bontemps, first valet de chambre, were the witnesses. Louis XIV was at the time in his forty-eighth year and the woman he espoused in her fifty-second. This sovereign, crowned with glory, desired to combine with the fatigues of governing the innocent joys of private life; this marriage bound him to nothing incompatible with his rank; it was always a problem to the court. Since Madame de Maintenon was really married, it respected her as the king’s choice, without treating her as queen.

She was of an old family, granddaughter of Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, gentleman of the chamber to Henry IV. His father, Constant d’Aubigné, wishing to establish himself in business in the Carolinas, applied to the English government, and was thrown into the prison of the château Trompette, from which he escaped with the assistance of the daughter of the governor of the prison, a gentleman from Bordeaux named Cadillac. Constant d’Aubigné married his benefactress in 1627 and took her with him to the Carolinas. Returning with her to France after several years, both were imprisoned at Niort in Poitou, by order of the court. In this prison was born, in 1635, Françoise d’Aubigné, destined to know all the greatest hardships of life as well as the highest favours of fortune. Taken at the age of three to America (Martinique), brought back an orphan of twelve years, brought up with the greatest severity by Madame de Neuillant, mother of the duchess de Navailles her relative, she was only too glad to marry in 1651 Paul Scarron, who lived near her in the rue d’Enfer. Scarron came of an old family of parliament, distinguished by its important matrimonial alliances; but his profession of burlesque poet lowered him while making him popular. It was nevertheless a stroke of fortune for Mademoiselle d’Aubigné to marry this man, deformed in mind and body, and with very modest means. She abjured Calvinism, her own religion as well as that of her ancestors, before this marriage. Her beauty and wit soon made her distinguished. She was eagerly sought after by the best society of Paris, and this time of her youth was no doubt the happiest period of her life. After the death of her husband, in 1660, she was for a long time unable to obtain from the king a modest pension of 1,500 livres which Scarron had enjoyed. Finally, after several years, the king granted her one of two thousand, saying, “Madame, I have made you wait a long time, but you have so many friends that my only distinction could be in not being one of them.” Meanwhile it is proved, by the letters of Madame de Maintenon, that she owed to Madame de Montespan the slight assistance she received to relieve her poverty. It was remembered several years later, when it became necessary to bring up secretly the duke du Maine, son of the king by the marquise de Montespan, born in 1672. The duke du Maine was born with a deformed foot. The chief physician, D’Aquin, who was in the secret, decided that the child should be taken to the baths at Barèges. It was necessary to find a confidential person to be intrusted with this charge. The king suggested Madame Scarron. Louvois went secretly to Paris to propose this journey to her. From that time on she was in charge of the education of the duke du Maine--chosen for this duty by the king and not by Madame de Montespan, as has erroneously been said.

She wrote directly to the king; her letters pleased him greatly. This was the origin of her good fortune--her shrewdness did the rest. The king, who at first did not like her, passed from aversion to confidence and from confidence to love. The letters which we have of hers are of much greater importance than they would seem: they show that mixture of religion and gallantry, of dignity and weakness, which are often found in the human heart, and which certainly were in that of Louis XIV. Madame de Maintenon seemed to be filled at the same time with an ambition and a devoutness which never appeared to conflict. Her confessor, Gobelin, approved equally of both: he was spiritual guide as well as courtier; his penitent, having become ungrateful towards Madame de Montespan, always dissembled this feeling. Her confessor encouraged her in her aspirations. She called religion to the assistance of her waning charms to supplant her benefactress, now become her rival.

This strange mixture of love and scruple on the part of the king, of ambition and devoutness on the part of the new mistress, seemed to have lasted from 1681 to 1686, the date of their marriage. Her elevation was for her only a seclusion. Shut up in her apartments, which were on the same floor as those of the king, she limited herself to the society of two or three ladies, retiring like herself--she saw even them very rarely. The king came to her apartments every day after supper, and remained until midnight. There he worked with his ministers, while Madame de Maintenon read, or occupied herself with needlework; she never attempted to speak on affairs of state, seemed often to ignore them, putting far from her any appearance of intrigue or plotting; much more occupied in humouring him who governed than seeking to govern, in managing her income, and expending it with the greatest cautiousness.

Louis XIV in marrying Madame de Maintenon gained only an agreeable and submissive companion. The sole public distinction which testified to her secret elevation was, that during mass she occupied one of those small gilded stalls which were supposed to be only for the king and queen. Beyond that, no display, no grandeur. The devoutness with which she had inspired the king and which had led to her marriage, became gradually a true and profound sentiment, which age and ennui served to strengthen. She already posed at the court and before the king as a foundress by gathering together at Noisy several young girls of the nobility; and the king had already set apart the revenues of the abbey of St. Denis for that budding community. St. Cyr was built at the foot of the park of Versailles in 1686.

On the death of the king she retired for life to St. Cyr. What is surprising, is that the king left her almost nothing. He simply recommended her to the duke of Orleans. She asked for a pension of only 24,000 livres, which was scrupulously paid her, until her death on April 15th, 1719.[b]

Turning now from this survey of the court, let us examine the effect of Louis XIV’s policy on the nation at large.

EFFECT OF LOUIS XIV’S POLICY ON THE NATION

[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]

Louis XIV’s reign falls into two parts, easy to distinguish, the one from the other; the first covers from 1661 to 1683, the second, and much the longer, from 1683 to 1715. In the first period, Louis XIV found four men of genius, who were also scrupulously honest men, to uphold and even direct him in everything concerning the internal government, diplomacy, warfare, and defence of the kingdom. In an equal degree Colbert, Lionne, Turenne, and Vauban exercised a salutary and fruitful influence over the king’s mind, never divorcing the welfare of the kingdom from that of the king, and seeking before all else the greatness or the security of the empire by adopting the best of the measures which had proved so successful under Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin. The profound reverence which Colbert, more especially, had for the memory of Richelieu, whom he wished the king to take as his model, provoked Louis’ jests. “When any important matter was under discussion,” says a contemporary chronicle, “the late king would often exclaim, ‘Colbert there will tell us: Sire, the great Cardinal Richelieu.’ Which, however, did not prevent Colbert from pursuing his object, and moulding the king in Richelieu’s likeness.”

In the second period, Louis, prematurely aged, disillusioned, and ill, reduced to a stern performance of his duties as a man and a Christian by the froward influence of an obstinate and ambitious woman, drew inspiration from none but narrow ideals, applying the most fatal maxims to home government and foreign policy. He yielded to the advice of persons whom he had for long encouraged to flatter his prejudices, and who urged him along a path of bloody repressions. Louvois, Madame de Maintenon, Chamillard, and Villeroi were the real wielders of authority. They sacrificed the well-being of the kingdom to their own interest, which they sought to confound with the interests of the crown. They prepared the way for the ruin of the state by the most disastrous home measures, while they ruined the prestige of France abroad by changing the character of her policy.[m]

The trouble was not only in the royal household; it also threatened to be in the state; for Louis, violating all laws civil and religious, placed the legitimated princes side by side with the princes of the blood. He forced the court to pay equal respect to both; and public morality received a blow from which it was slow to recover. The lessons in scandal which came from the throne were not lost, and the corruption, which was fermenting in spite of the apparent austerity of the last years, was to break out under the new reign without restraint and without shame. Those dukes of Orleans and Vendôme, given up to filthy debauches, that duke d’Antin surprised in a flagrant act of theft, and so many others who contrived at play to correct the chances of fortune; those princesses of the blood who at Marly within two steps of the king and Madame de Maintenon, send for such strange pastimes[126]--that court in fine which, according to Saint-Simon,[i] “sweated hypocrisy,” all shows, under a king who plays the devotee, when he is no longer able to do otherwise, that human morality, conscience, and dignity can never be violated with impunity. Already, even in the very heart of Versailles, a premonitory cry is heard. In face of these gilded lives La Bruyère writes: “The great have no soul; I would be of the people.” It was at Versailles that the French nobility ruined themselves. There official ennui led to secret debauches; the habit of receiving everything from the monarch led to the belief that all was due not to services but to servility.

One irrefutable witness of the wretchedness of this period has been left to us--the memorials which the king demanded of the intendants on the condition of their provinces in order that his grandson the duke of Burgundy might by studying them become acquainted with the affairs of the administration. At every page these distressing words recur, “War, mortality, the continual quartering and passage of the soldiers, the militia, the great prerogatives, the withdrawal of the Huguenots have ruined this country.” Bridges, roads were in a deplorable state and commerce was annihilated. The frontier provinces were further crushed by requisitions and the pillage of the soldiers who, receiving neither pay nor food, helped themselves. In the generality of Rouen, out of 700,000 inhabitants 650,000 had a bundle of straw for their beds. In certain provinces the peasant was returning to a state of savagery: living for the most part on herbs and roots like the beasts; and, wild as they were, he fled if one approached. “There is no nation more savage than these people,” the intendant of Bourges says of those under his administration; “sometimes troops of them are to be seen in the country, seated in a circle in the middle of a field and always far from the roads; if one approach the band immediately disperses.”[c]

We have seen Louis XIV at home; let us now turn to his relations with other countries.[a]

FOOTNOTES

[111] Table of the direct ancestors of Louis XIV for four generations, showing birthplace of each ancestor. It will be noted that Ferdinand I and Anna of Hungary appear twice in the fourth generation column. The actual number of persons, therefore, is twenty-eight instead of thirty.[a]

THIRD GENERATION FOURTH GENERATION

Anthony +-Charles, d. of Vendôme France SECOND de Bourbon| GENERATION +----------+ | France | Henry IV| +-Françoise d’Alençon France +--------+ FIRST | France | Jeanne +-Henry II, K. of Navarre France GENERATION| | d’Albret | | +----------+ Louis | France | XIII | +-Marguerite d’Angoulême France +-------+ |France | +-Cosmo I, G. D. of Tuscany Italy | | Francesco | | | I, Grand D.| | | of Tuscany | | | +----------+ | | Marie | Italy | | |d’Medici| +-Leonora of Toledo Spain | +--------+ | Italy | Joanna +-Emp. Ferdinand I Spain | | Arch., D.| | +----------+ | Austria | Louis XIV| +-Anna of Hungary Hungary France | 1688-1715| +-Charles V Spanish Netherlands | Philip II | | +----------+ | Philip | Spain | | III | +-Isabella Portugal | +--------+ | | Spain | Anne of +-Maximilian II Austria | | | Austria | | | +----------+ |Anne of| Austria | |Austria| +-Maria (d. Emp. Ch. VI) Spain +-------+ Spain | Charles, +-Emp. Ferdinand I Spain | D. Styria | | +----------+ | | Austria | |Margaret| +-Anna of Hungary Hungary +--------+ Austria | Maria of +-Albrecht V Bavaria | Bavaria | +----------+ Bavaria | +-Anne (d. Emp. Ferdinand I) Austria

[112] There were in Louis XIV’s day three councils: (1) The supreme council, to which the king summoned the secretaries of state and sometimes the princes of the blood. It had the general direction of the governmental policy and important affairs. It judged appeals from the state council. (2) The state council, placed beneath the ministry but above the higher courts. It was the great administrative body of the realm, meeting four times a week, the chancellor presiding. On one day it read and discussed the reports of the provincial governors; on another it discussed financial questions; on another it listened to complaints on taxation; on another it adjudged differences between the courts. The state councillors were eighteen in number. (3) The grand council, which occupied itself with cases covering the bishoprics and the benefices at the king’s disposal. It judged the edicts of the sovereign courts and the conflicts between the parliament and the lower courts. Its decisions were executive throughout the whole kingdom, while the sentences of each parliament applied only to its own territory.

[113] [Voltaire is wrong here, says Martin:[d] “Fouquet had spent about nine millions” (almost eighteen nowadays and perhaps forty-five in relative value).]

[114] [Louis XIV had little love for Paris and created Versailles, or rather greatly enlarged the old château of Louis XIII, by making immense additions, and by constructing the fine façade on the park side which, with its extended wings, made it the most superb and vast abode in the world.[e]]

[115] [The above mentioned régime des classes.]

[116] [If the words were not uttered the thought was certainly present. Louis XIV is known to have written on one occasion, “The nation does not constitute a body in France; it resides entirely in the person of the king.”]

[117] [In 1680 the Paris corps de ville solemnly conferred on the king the title of Louis the Great, which, hitherto used sometimes on medals, now became de rigueur in official language.[d]]

[118] In 1669 the sister house of Port-Royal de Paris was placed under Jesuit management. It was to this house that Clement XI ordered the transference of the property of Port-Royal des Champs, the year before the buildings were destroyed. The aged sisters were dispersed.

[119] In 1694 a printer and a publisher were hanged for libel, by sentence of De la Reynie. Several persons were interrogated or died in the Bastille for the same reason. The author of the pamphlet against the archbishop of Rheims was imprisoned in an iron cage at Mont St. Michel.

[120] These were letters written by order of the king, countersigned by a secretary of state, and sealed with the king’s seal, by virtue of which the police arrested a citizen, and imprisoned him without trial, as long as it pleased the government, without his being seen or allowed to receive letters from anyone.

[121] [Anne of Austria died of cancer January 20th, 1666.]

[122] [Madame’s husband, Philip duke of Orleans, who had assumed that title on the death of Gaston in 1660, was a man of licentious habits, and although he distinguished himself in war, as we shall see, his effeminacy was of a most marked type. There is no doubt that Monsieur was most indifferent to his wife, and many historians, including Michelet,[l] believe that Louis XIV was the father of her children. Of these, two daughters arrived at maturity--Marie Louise, who married Charles II of Spain, and Anne Marie, who married Victor Amadeus of Savoy, afterwards king of Sardinia. Madame died 1670, under circumstances which will be related in the next chapter, and which were open to the suspicion of poison. The following year Monsieur married the princess palatine--Charlotte Elizabeth. She was the mother of the duke of Orleans, regent of the realm, and died in 1722.]

[123] [By this title was known the “grand dauphin” Louis, only child of Louis XIV and his queen, born in 1661. The dauphin married in 1680 the princess Marie Anne Christine Victoire of Bavaria.]

[124] [Louis de Bourbon-Condé, who was the father of Louis XV’s prime minister.]

[125] [The queen Maria Theresa had died July 30th, 1683, quite suddenly. She held so little place at court that the event was scarcely noticed.[e]]

[126] Monseigneur played late in the salon. On withdrawing to his own apartments he went up to the princesses (the duchesses de Chartres and de Bourbon) and found them smoking with pipes which they had sent for from the Swiss guardhouse. Monseigneur made them stop this diversion, but the smoke betrayed them. Next morning the king administered a rough rebuke.[i]

The duchess de la Ferté assembled her purveyors at her house and played a kind of lansquenet with them. She whispered in my ear, “I cheat them but they rob me.” Mémoires of Madame de Staal.[o]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XX. LOUIS XIV, SPAIN, AND HOLLAND

I doubt whether any human being ever enjoyed, in greater perfection, the blessing of nerves toned to habitual energy, and exempt from all morbid sensitiveness. Heat, cold, pain, fatigue, and hunger seemed to have no power over him. Not only his delicate courtiers but his hardy veterans admired the stoicism of their invulnerable king; and his mental composure was on a level with his bodily hardihood. No provocation could excite him to unseemly anger, and no calamity could depress him to unmanly dejection. If he was often the victim, he was never the slave of appetite or passion. Though constantly exposed to the allurements of the most exquisite flattery, and the most fascinating caresses, he never yielded himself to the guidance of any favourite, male or female; but adhered, with immutable constancy and calmness, to the ministers whom he had either trained or chosen.--STEPHEN.[n]

[Sidenote: [1661-1679 A.D.]]

The foreign situation in 1661 was most favourable. If it was necessary to wind up the affairs of Mazarin, all that had to be done abroad was to gather the fruits and enjoy the glory acquired. Europe was basking in a peace so profound that not a cloud seemed to threaten it. The powers were all occupied in reorganising their forces, some like England in reconstructing their government. Louis XIV was one of the freest of sovereigns; he was the most powerful, thanks to Mazarin; and he became the wealthiest, thanks to Colbert.

He desired them to preserve peace and give no offence to Europe. Nevertheless he had inherited from Mazarin a fixed plan, and certain projects in harmony with the spirit of his government. His ambition was to invalidate the renunciation of Maria Theresa, in such a manner as to create a right for himself or his sons to the Spanish succession, or at least to the Netherlands.[127]

He charged the archbishop of Embrun, his ambassador at Madrid, to demand that the renunciation be revoked. He maintained that it was not ipso facto, the infanta not having renounced her rights and the court of Spain having itself thus decided; that in all respects it had failed to obtain the necessary ratification; finally that the condition on which it had been made, the payment of a dowry of 500,000 crowns, had not been complied with. He offered, in case his plea was accepted, to ally himself the more closely with Spain, and even abandon all claims to Portugal in her favour; but Philip and his ministers eluded the question and refused to give an opinion.

[Sidenote: [1661-1662 A.D.]]

During the negotiations a serious affair occurred in London, where the baron de Vatteville, the Spanish ambassador, claimed precedence over the count d’Estrades, the ambassador of France. On October 8th, 1661, the Swedish envoy, the count de Brahé, was to be presented to the king of England. As the procession was about to start, D’Estrades tried to make his coach pass first, and a troop of armed men under orders from Vatteville stopped it. The Londoners took the part of the Spaniards; there was a fight--some were killed and wounded. In the end the French were obliged to retire.[b]

At this news Louis XIV ordered the Spanish ambassador to leave France, and the French ambassador to Spain to demand the punishment of Vatteville and a reparation which should make such affairs henceforth impossible.[c]

Philip IV granted this without much difficulty. Vatteville was recalled; and March 22nd, 1662, the marquis de Fuentes declared at the Louvre before the assembled court that the Spanish envoys would claim no precedence over those of France, except at the court of Vienna where they had long been accustomed to occupy the first place on account of the close ties which united the two branches of the house of Austria.

Meanwhile Spain still refused to recognise the rights of the infanta, and Louis XIV continued to uphold the Portuguese;[128] he even assisted in bringing about the marriage of Charles of England to a princess of the house of Braganza, who received Tangier, Bombay, and a considerable sum as dowry. Charles II sought, as did Cromwell, to develop English commerce and the navy, but he was needy, extravagant, and he feared the parsimony of parliament. Louis XIV advanced him money in secret and offered to buy back Dunkirk and Mardyck.[129] The bargain was concluded November 27th, 1662, and France recovered the two towns which Mazarin had turned over to Cromwell with regret.

By this acquisition Louis XIV took a first step towards the Netherlands, the object of his whole ambition. He awaited the moment when the question of Philip IV’s successor should be opened to uphold the rights of the infanta in the Belgian provinces, even though the determination of these rights was still a matter of debate. He wavered between the desire to reunite the major part of the Spanish Netherlands to France, giving the rest to Holland, or to occupy only a few places and erect the ten Belgian provinces into a republic or a neutral state. The latter plan was the less brilliant, but the easiest to carry out; and a state thus constituted would oppose a barrier to foreign invasion. Louis XIV negotiated in secret to obtain the eventual concurrence of Holland in his plans, but in spite of the efforts of the grand pensionary, the celebrated Jan de Witt, he could not obtain this. The Dutch understood too well that a Belgian republic would be dependent on Louis and would not oppose his ambitions.[b] Besides this the Dutch had a cause for complaint in the tax of 50 sous a ton, placed by Fouquet in 1659, upon foreign ships trading in French ports. After long debates this tax was reduced by half for Dutch ships and a defensive and commercial treaty was signed in 1662 in which France and Holland agreed to protect each other’s rights on land and sea.[a]

The duchies of Lorraine and Bar had been returned to Duke Charles IV in 1661 only on condition that he would not rebuild the ramparts of the towns, that he would only maintain one fortress, Marsal, and that French troops should have the right of passing through his territory. These conditions were not fulfilled. Louis lost patience and sent an army corps to Marsal. The duke bent before the necessity, and gave up Marsal on condition that he might hold the rest of his estates according to the terms of the treaty of 1661.[c]

Louis, admirably counselled by Lionne, took care in preparing the execution of his designs against the Netherlands not to arouse the defiance of Europe. He managed only ostensibly to sustain the Portuguese; simply authorising them to take into their service Marshal de Schomberg and a body of French volunteers which helped them defend their liberties.[130]

[Sidenote: [1663-1665 A.D.]]

While Louis was feeling his strength he eagerly seized any opportunity for military enterprise which would give a high idea of himself and serve his policy.[b] In spite of his rough treatment of the head of the church in 1662-1664, he displayed zeal for the interests of Christianity against its great enemy the Turks, who continued to press the siege of Crete[131] and extend their conquests in Hungary and to desolate by piracy the entire coast of the Mediterranean. Divers plans were proposed in the king’s council for attacking the Ottoman power on the Barbary coasts and repressing the pirates. A squadron commanded by the duke de Beaufort, the former hero of the Fronde, landed 5,000 picked soldiers at Jijelli, a small Algerian port between Bougie and Bona. Jijelli was taken without difficulty (July 22nd, 1664), but discord arose between Beaufort and his officers. They were soon hard pressed by the Turks of Algiers, reinforced by numerous Arab and Kabyle bands, while Beaufort cruised in front of Tunis instead of making a diversion against Algiers, as the king had ordered. The military resources of the Algerians and especially their artillery were greater than the French had imagined; discord broke out, and after having repelled a few attacks the French were compelled to re-embark in such haste that they left their cannon behind.

But the successes of Beaufort’s squadron, which the famous Chevalier Paul commanded, soon wiped out the stigma of this reverse; two Algerian flotillas were annihilated during the course of the year 1665.[c]

A touching example of self-sacrifice was an incident of this war. The dey of Algiers had among his captives an officer from St. Malo, named Porcon de la Barbinais; he sent him to offer to the king proposals of peace, making him promise to return in case his mission failed. The lives of 600 Christians were dependent upon his keeping his word. The propositions were not accepted. Porcon knew it. He went to St. Malo, regulated his affairs, then returned to Algiers, certain of the fate which awaited him. The dey had him decapitated. This man was the equal of Regulus, yet he is little known to fame.[d]

Reasons and pretexts for war with the porte were not long wanting. In 1664 some acts of bad faith on the part of the viziers were taken as an excuse for sending 6,000 men under the orders of Coligny-Saligny into Hungary, which the Turks were invading. This was a means of dissipating the religious clouds which the threats against the pope had raised at Rome and elsewhere. Louis XIV had still another reason. He had undertaken in obtaining a [three years’] prorogation of the league of the Rhine (1663) to furnish a contingent to his imperial allies in case the empire should be threatened. He attached the highest importance to maintaining a league whose principal object would be to close the road to the Netherlands to Austrian troops if ever war should break out between France and Austria, and he believed it all the more easy to play the rôle of protector in Germany since the emperor’s power there had sensibly declined since the Treaty of Westphalia.

Coligny-Saligny joined the Austro-German army commanded by Montecuculi; the French took a considerable part in the combat at Körmend, and especially in the battle of St. Gotthard (August 1st, 1664), where they paid dear for the principal honour of the victory. But the emperor and Austria, grateful though they were, could not pardon the French for having claimed to have saved the empire. Leopold hastened to treat with the Turks, and was as eager to deliver himself from his auxiliaries as he was from his enemies.[b]

Indeed the emperor was alarmed, and not without reason, to encounter the hand of Louis everywhere. A defensive alliance was concluded in August, 1663, between France and Denmark, as the result of a commercial treaty, advantageous to the French marine. A secret negotiation of the very highest importance was, about the same time, entered upon with Poland. Since 1661 that republic had taken Louis XIV as arbiter in its quarrels with Moscovy. In 1663, King John Casimir Vasa, discouraged by Poland’s constant woes, determined to lay down the crown: his wife, a princess of that branch of the Gonzagas which had long been established in France, entered into communication with Louis XIV to bring about the election of the duke d’Enghien, son of the Great Condé, to the Polish throne. With regret Louis saw Poland plunging to her own ruin, and decided to arrest the disaster by doing again that in which Henry III had so disgracefully failed--infusing French spirit into the land of the Jagellons. Colbert pushed the king to the same policy.[c]

THE WAR OF THE QUEEN’S RIGHTS (1667-1668 A.D.)

Meanwhile Louis XIV had not succeeded in having Maria Theresa’s act of renunciation revoked, and he now thought of compelling Madrid to recognise the right of devolution.

Such was the name given in Brabant and some of the other Belgian provinces to the law, by virtue of which, when there were children of two different marriages, those of the first inherited in preference to those of the second. Louis XIV claimed Brabant and its annexes, in the name of Maria Theresa. Philip IV rejected this new claim, which was most contestable, since if the rule of devolution really existed in the above-mentioned provinces, it had to be proven that it applied to the succession of princes as well as to those of private individuals. Moreover all the acts emanating from Spanish sovereigns since Charles V were manifestly contradictory of this. Nevertheless both parties remained on pacific terms until the death of Philip IV and Anne of Austria. The king of Spain expired after a lingering illness September 17th, 1665. The queen-mother, his sister, died of a cancer January 20th, 1666, after constant efforts to maintain peace between the two crowns.

Philip IV directed in his will that the 500,000 crowns constituting Maria Theresa’s dowry should be paid, but he regulated the succession in such a manner as to confirm the renunciation of that princess and to exclude all pretensions of the house of France to any portion whatsoever of his estates. He left the throne of Spain to a sickly infant scarcely able to walk, and who nobody believed would live. Foreseeing the contingency by which the death of this child, the young Charles II, would extinguish the male line, he stipulated that the throne should pass in that event to his second daughter Margaret and her children. Margaret was then fourteen years of age; she was betrothed to the emperor Leopold, and did in fact marry him the following year.

The reign of an infant under the regency of a foreigner, his mother, Maria Anna of Austria, the exhausted condition of the Spanish realm on account of the Portuguese war, offered a magnificent opportunity for Louis XIV’s ambition, but he waited until 1667 before declaring his project. Impatient as he was, a maritime war between England and Holland retarded the execution of his plans.

Under Charles II, as under Cromwell, England had in Holland a rival in commerce and the marine. Charles II, who was desirous of flattering public sentiment and who had the same reason as the Protector to seek in foreign war a diversion to calm restless spirits, entertained, moreover, a profound antipathy for De Witt and other leaders of the republican government at the Hague. He wished to re-establish the stadholdership to the profit of the young William of Orange, his sister’s son.[132] In this state of feeling it only required a hostile meeting between some Dutch and English ships off the African coast to precipitate the two navies into a fearful war.

The Dutch convinced themselves that they were the attacked party and demanded assistance of Louis XIV in fulfilment of the guarantee he had given them in 1662. At first Louis refused, alleging that it was not proved that the English were the aggressors, and he offered his mediation. His desire was to act cautiously with regard to England and not drive her to an alliance which Spain was seeking. As to the Dutch, he was beginning to regard them with distrust. The grand pensionary De Witt joined to his fine qualities a shrewdness, a proud reserve, and a talent for making advances without committing himself, which were little to the taste of the French agents. D’Estrades, ambassador to the Hague in 1665, considered an English alliance more desirable for France than one with Holland.

[Sidenote: [1665-1667 A.D.]]

The offer of mediation was declined. Louis XIV tried at least to confine his struggle to a naval war, for he did not wish to see the English on the continent. Meanwhile the states-general were insisting on the complete execution of the guarantee treaty. Louis ended by deciding to declare war on England. He gave out that he wished to convert the world to the religion which kept him to his word. But he informs us himself that there were still other reasons; he wished to keep Holland from carrying out her projects against the Netherlands, and prevent a reconciliation with England that might some day be a serious danger to France. He therefore upheld her, but he kept as much as possible to the rôle of a looker-on, and let the English and Dutch fleets almost annihilate each other in the four great combats of two campaigns. The duke de Beaufort and the Brest squadron never left the Channel. The French never fought the English except in the West Indies, where they captured a portion of the island of St. Christopher.

In the beginning of 1667 Louis XIV supported Sweden’s offer of mediation, and Breda was chosen as the seat of a congress. Besides the war, England was suffering from another scourge--the plague of 1666. Charles II was satisfied with France’s promise of a personal subsidy and with the restitution of St. Christopher without indemnity. The treaty was signed July 31st. Louis XIV did not await this moment to enter Flanders. He based his aggression on the formal refusal of all his demands by the court of Madrid, declaring that, having exhausted all peaceful means of obtaining justice, he was now going to take possession of what belonged to Maria Theresa.[b]

The league of the Rhine assured Louis of at least the neutrality of Germany; the emperor was not prepared for war; Europe, favourable or intimidated, beheld with astonishment King Louis XIV take the field in the month of May, 1667. He had collected an army of fifty thousand men carefully armed and equipped under the direction of Turenne, whom Louvois still obeyed with docility. This fine army was not unequal to the task of vindicating the queen’s rights to the duchy of Brabant, the marquisate of Antwerp, Limburg, Hainault, the county of Namur, and other territories. “Heaven not having established a tribunal on earth from which the kings of France may demand justice, the most Christian king can expect it only of his arms,” said the manifesto sent to the court of Spain. Louis XIV set out with Turenne. Marshal de Créqui was commissioned to keep a watch on Germany.

The Spaniards were caught unprepared; Armentières, Charleroi, Douai, and Tournay had but inadequate garrisons and succumbed almost without a blow. While the army was occupied with the siege of Courtrai, Louis XIV returned to meet the queen at Compiègne; the whole court followed him to the camp. “I brought the queen to Flanders,” said Louis XIV, “to show her to the people of that country, who indeed received her with all the joy imaginable, showing that they were sorry there had not been more time to prepare themselves to receive her more worthily.” It was at Courtrai that the queen took up her residence. Marshal de Turenne had gone in the direction of Dendermonde, but the Flemings had opened their sluices and the country was inundated; he was obliged to fall back on Oudenarde; the town was taken in two days. The king, still followed by the court, laid siege to Lille. Vauban, already celebrated as an engineer, formed his lines of circumvallation. Créqui’s army rejoined that of Turenne; an effort on the part of the governor of the Netherlands to relieve the town was anticipated; the Spanish troops sent for that purpose arrived too late and were defeated as they retired; the citizens of Lille had forced the garrison to capitulate; Louis XIV entered the place on the 27th of August, ten days after the trenches were opened. On the 2nd of September the king set out on the way back to St. Germain; Turenne also took the town of Alost before going into winter quarters.

THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE

[Sidenote: [1667-1668 A.D.]]

The first campaign of Louis XIV had been merely a warlike game almost without danger or bloodshed; it had nevertheless sufficed to alarm Europe. Scarcely had peace been concluded at Breda before another negotiation was secretly entered into between England, Holland, and Sweden. It was in vain that King Charles II was personally inclined to an alliance with France; his people had their eyes open to the dangers which Europe incurred from the arms of Louis XIV. On the 23rd of January, 1668, the celebrated Treaty of the Triple Alliance was signed at the Hague. The three powers requested the king of France to grant the Netherlands a truce till the month of May, in order to give time to treat with Spain and obtain from her, as France demanded, the final cession of the places conquered or of Franche-Comté in exchange. In reality the triple alliance was resolved to protect helpless Spain against France; a secret article pledged the three allies to take arms to restrain Louis XIV and if possible to bring him back to the position fixed by the Treaty of the Pyrenees. At the same moment Portugal made peace with Spain, which recognised her independence.

The king refused to concede the prolonged armistice which had been demanded of him: “I grant it till the 31st of March,” he had said, “as I do not wish to miss the season for taking the field.” The marquis of Castel Rodrigo laughed at this: “I am content,” he said, “with the suspension of arms which winter imposes on the king of France.” The governor of the Netherlands was mistaken; Louis XIV was about to prove that his soldiers, like those of Gustavus Adolphus, did not know what winter was. He had confided the command of his new army to the prince of Condé, who had been amnestied nine years before but had hitherto been a stranger to the royal favours.[g]

Under pretext of being in Burgundy for the estates, Monsieur le Prince had made careful note that Franche-Comté was without troops and unsuspecting, because the inhabitants did not doubt that the king would grant them neutrality as in the last war, since they had sent to him to demand it. He kept up the delusion.[e]

The gaieties of St. Germain were at their height, when in the depth of winter in the month of January, 1668, all were astonished to see troops marching in all directions, coming and going on the roads of Champagne and in the Three Bishoprics--trains of artillery, wagons of munitions stopping under various pretexts in the roads which lead from Champagne to Burgundy. That part of France was filled with movement of which the cause was unknown. The uninitiated out of interest, and the courtiers out of curiosity, exhausted themselves in conjectures; Germany was alarmed; the object of these preparations and peculiar actions was a mystery to everybody. The secrets of conspiracies were never more closely guarded than in this enterprise of Louis XIV.

Finally, on February 2nd, the king left St. Germain with the young duke d’Enghien, son of the Great Condé, and several courtiers; the other officers being at the rendezvous with their troops. He travelled on horseback by long stages and arrived at Dijon. Twenty thousand men, assembled by twenty different routes, found themselves on the same day in Franche-Comté, several leagues from Besançon, the Great Condé at their head.[f] Besançon and Salins surrendered at sight of the troops. When the king arrived he went to Dôle and caused counterscarps and demilunes to be set up. Four or five hundred men were killed here. The amazed inhabitants, seeing themselves surrounded by troops and without hope of succour, surrendered on Shrove Tuesday, February 14th. The king at the same time marched to Gray. The governor made as though he would defend himself, but the marquis d’Yenne, governor-general under Castel Rodrigo, who was of the country and had all his property there, came to surrender to the king and, going to Gray, persuaded the governor to surrender. The king entered Gray on Sunday, the 19th of February, and there caused a Te Deum to be sung, having the governor-general at his right hand and the governor of the town itself on his left; and the same day he set out to return. Thus in twenty-two days of the month of February he had started from St. Germain, had been to Franche-Comté, taken complete possession of it, and returned to St. Germain.[e] The king was back at St. Germain preparing enormous armaments for the month of April; he had given the prince of Condé the government of Franche-Comté.

Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668 A.D.)

War seemed imminent. The last days of the armistice were at hand. “The opinion of peace which prevails in France is a malady which is becoming widespread,” Louvois wrote in the middle of March; “but we shall soon be cured, since the time to take the field is drawing near. You must give out everywhere that the Spaniards will not have peace.” Louvois was uttering a shameless falsehood; the Spaniards were without resources, but they had still less courage than resources; and consented to the abandonment of all the places in the Netherlands conquered in 1667.

A congress was opened at Aix-la-Chapelle and was presided over by the nuncio of the new pope Clement IX, who was as favourable to France as his predecessor Innocent X had been to Spain--“a phantom arbitrator between phantom plenipotentiaries,” says Voltaire. The real negotiations took place at St. Germain. “I did not only take care,” writes Louis XIV, “to profit by the present conjuncture, but also to put myself in a position to turn to good account those which seemed likely to ensue. Amid the great augmentations which my fortune might receive, nothing seemed to me more necessary than to acquire for myself, among my smaller neighbours, a reputation for moderation and probity which might quiet in them those emotions of terror which all naturally feel at the aspect of too great power. I must not lack the means of breaking with Spain when I wish to do so; Franche-Comté which I surrendered might be reduced to such a condition that I could be master of it at any time, and my new conquests, well secured, would open me a surer entry to the Netherlands.” Determined by these wise motives, the king gave the order to sign; and the 2nd of May, 1668, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was concluded. Before surrendering Franche-Comté the king gave orders to demolish the fortifications of Dôle and Gray; at the same time he commissioned Vauban to fortify Ath, Lille, and Tournay. The triple alliance was triumphant, the Dutch especially.[g]

PROJECTS AGAINST HOLLAND (1668-1672 A.D.)

The first period of the diplomatic and military history of Louis XIV closes with the treaty that ended the War of the Queen’s Rights. A new era is about to open in which Louis will cast aside the compass that was so safely directing the ship of France to follow no other guides than his passion and his fortune.

Recent events had succeeded in crushing the old French sympathies for Holland, much weakened since the Dutch defection of 1648. Resentment against the unfaithful ally, very keen in the active and military element of the nation, had reached a point of exasperation with the king, who was not unaware of the secret clauses of the Treaty of the Hague.[133] Louis, who had laid down his arms much less for the confederates of the Hague than for the sake of the future Spanish succession, bore a grudge against Holland, not so much for having really arrested his progress [by having formed the triple alliance] as for having boasted of doing so. Pride had turned the head of the little republic, which plumed itself on having laid colossal Spain low, saved Denmark from the blows of Sweden, beaten, or at least quit even with England, set a limit on French conquests, and drawn into its hands three-quarters of European commerce and sea trade.

But wounded pride was far from being the only motive that turned Louis XIV against Holland. He was convinced that he must crush her in order to get Belgium, and consequently he must appear, momentarily, to forget the end in order to remove the obstacle. He might then, strictly speaking, imagine to himself that he was still pursuing his old plans, and was only changing the means of French policy; but passion might easily make him take the means for the end. This passion, generated by diplomatic disappointments, was nourished and envenomed by the dissimilarity between the institutions, principles, and beliefs of the French and Dutch governments. Holland was not only an unfaithful ally--she was a republican and Protestant nation, the home of religious and political liberty, which Louis hated with a growing hatred as his monarchy became more clearly outlined in his head.

After the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the ruin of Holland became the king’s fixed idea. It was no longer a question of the commercial war so ably conducted by Colbert with his tariffs and his differential rights--it was a war of invasion and conquest that Louis was planning.[c]

The resolution taken, he adjourned its execution until such time as he had completed the organisation of his sea forces, which were not then on a level with those of the land, and until he could assure himself that Europe would not interfere with his plan. The able and indefatigable Lionne consecrated the last three years of his life (he died in 1671) to performing diplomatic wonders to acquire this certitude.

While he was waiting, Louis XIV neglected no opportunities that presented themselves to feed warlike passions and provide employment for his unengaged officers and troops. In 1669 he sent a volunteer corps to Crete to assist the Venetians, threatened in the capital of that island. Beaufort disappeared in a combat, and Vivonne ineffectually bombarded the grand vizier’s camp. But this was only a diversion from more important projects. Louis XIV wished to isolate Holland, and for that reason to break the triple alliance. He began by trying to detach England from it.

[Sidenote: [1669-1670 A.D.]]

The English were not less jealous than the Dutch of France’s maritime progress; they were not less frightened at Louis’ ambitions. But Charles II did not share these feelings. Although he had experienced all the hazards of fortune, the vicissitudes of his life had in nowise elevated his character. After the Treaty of Breda, he signed that of the Triple Alliance and united with the Dutch, as a concession to national sentiment. But he did not like parliament, and felt an especial aversion for the Presbyterian spirit, and the religious passions which had brought about the English Revolution. Finally, about 1670, he resolved to become a Catholic, perhaps through real conviction, perhaps through the influence of his brother, the duke of York, a secret convert to the church of Rome, who was animated by the true ardour of a neophyte; perhaps because he hoped to find in Catholicism a more solid support for his throne and his royal prerogative than in Anglicanism.

To realise his object a French alliance was indispensable. France alone could provide him with the money he needed; his court was wasteful and in debt, and parliament measured out subsidies with jealous parsimony. If France demanded the sacrifice of Holland, he was ready to make it.

Under these conditions he readily lent ear to the overtures of the French ambassadors, Ruvigny and Colbert de Croissy, the minister’s brother. He did not delay to let Louis XIV into the secret of his plans. Louis asked nothing better than to grant much on condition that England would join him in war on Holland. Nevertheless the negotiations dragged on account of the precautions necessary to secrecy, and it took more than a year to arrive finally at an understanding. When all was arranged Charles II demanded that his sister, the duchess of Orleans, should come to England and sign the treaty.[b]

The Treaty of Dover: Death of Madame (1670 A.D.)

On the 24th of May Madame Henrietta suddenly left the court which was at Lille and embarked at Dunkirk for Dover where Charles II was awaiting her. She persuaded Charles to sign the treaty without delay (June 1st). The English monarch led his sister to hope that he would consent that the attack on Holland should precede his declaration of Catholicism. This is what Louis XIV most wished for. The treaty, however, far from committing Charles to this course, stipulated that after Charles should have made “the said declaration,” Louis might choose the moment of attack on Holland.[134] Louis was to give Charles two millions, payable two and three months after the exchange of ratification and was to assist him with six thousand foot soldiers, if the return to Catholicism should excite trouble. Charles was to furnish Louis at least four thousand foot soldiers against Holland, Louis to reinforce the English fleet by thirty vessels, of at least forty guns, and to pay Charles an annual subsidy of three millions during the continuation of the war. The island of Walcheren (with Sluys and Causand at the mouth of the Schelde) were to go to England.

[Sidenote: [1670-1672 A.D.]]

An unforeseen catastrophe fell now like a thunder-clap upon the two royal families which had just sealed the pact of Dover. The household of Louis XIV’s brother had long been disturbed by domestic tempests. The amiable and brilliant Henrietta, adored by the court, esteemed by the king, who confided to her the most secret springs of his policy, inspired nothing but antipathy in her husband, an effeminate prince, as mediocre in mind as in heart, whose childish and strange habits have given rise to suspicion of shameful practices. The king had recently intervened in the family quarrels by imprisoning and afterwards exiling the chevalier de Lorraine, Monsieur’s favourite. After this the king had had great difficulty in compelling his brother to allow Madame Henrietta to go to Dover.

She returned in triumph; leaving Dover on the 12th of June, she appeared for a moment at St. Germain where the court was established; the 24th of June her husband took her to St. Cloud, where she had scarcely arrived when she complained of pains in her stomach and side. For several days she lingered, and on the 29th, after having drunk a glass of chicory-water, she was seized with a violent pain in the side; the next day before daybreak she was dead. In her last agony she repeated several times that she was dying of poison.

An outbreak of terrible suspicion against her husband and his people occurred at once. The king had an autopsy performed by the most celebrated physicians and surgeons of Paris, who agreed that death was due to natural causes, and that it was a wonder the princess had lived so long with her lungs and liver so gravely affected. The question, however, has remained a question of controversy among historians to this day.[135] The news of this tragic event made a great stir in England; but the real sorrow expressed by Louis XIV and the report of the physicians calmed Charles II and his court.[c]

Treaties with Other Powers (1670-1672 A.D.)

Already, as early as 1667, Louis XIV had privately provided for the neutrality of the empire by a secret treaty regulating the eventual partition of the Spanish monarchy. In case the little king of Spain should die without children, France was to receive the Netherlands, Franche-Comté, Navarre, Naples, and Sicily; Austria would keep Spain and the Milanese. Accordingly the emperor Leopold turned a deaf ear to the solicitations of the Dutch, who would have persuaded him to join the triple alliance; and a new agreement between France and the empire, signed secretly November 1st, 1670, reciprocally bound the two princes not to give help to their enemies. The German princes were more difficult to win over; they were beginning to be alarmed at the pretensions of France. The electors of Treves and Mainz had already assembled troops on the Rhine; and the duke of Lorraine seemed disposed to give them assistance. Louis XIV took as a pretext the erection of some fortifications contrary to the Treaty of Marsal; on the 23rd of August, 1670, he sent Marshal de Créqui into Lorraine; in the beginning of September the duchy was entirely subdued and the duke a refugee. To the emperor’s protest, the king responded that he did not want Lorraine for himself, but that he would never surrender it to anyone’s petitions. Brandenburg and Saxony alone refused neutrality point-blank; France had renounced the Protestant alliances in Germany, and the Protestant electors recognised the danger which threatened them.

Sweden also recognised it, but Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstierna were no longer there; the memory of former alliances with France alone remained; the Swedish senators, one after another, allowed themselves to be bought. The treaty was signed the 14th of April, 1672; for an annual subsidy of 600,000 livres Sweden pledged herself to offer armed opposition to the princes of the empire who should attempt to succour the United Provinces; a space was being cleared round Holland.[136]

In spite of the secrecy which surrounded the negotiations of Louis XIV, De Witt was filled with anxiety; always favourable to the French alliance, he had sought to calm the irritation of France which imputed the triple alliance to the Dutch. Jan de Witt negotiated everywhere; Charles’ treaty with France had remained a profound secret, and the Dutch thought they could count on the good will of the English nation. They effaced the arms of England on the Royal Charles, a vessel taken by Tromp in 1667, and hid from sight a picture in the town hall of Dordrecht which represented the victory of Chatham with the ruart[137] Cornelis de Witt leaning against a cannon. These concessions to the pride of England were not made without a contest.

THE WAR WITH HOLLAND BEGINS (1672 A.D.)

The apprehensions of the grand pensionary were not without foundation; in the spring of 1672 all the negotiations of Louis XIV had been successful; his armaments were complete; he was at last about to crush the little power which had so long presented an obstacle to his designs. The king wrote in an unpublished memoir: “Amidst all my prosperity in my campaign of 1667, neither England nor the empire, both convinced of the justice of my cause, opposed themselves to the rapidity of my conquests, whatever interest they may have had to stop them. I found in my path only my good, faithful, and old-time friends, the Dutch, who instead of identifying themselves with my fortune as with the foundation of their state, sought to dictate to me and to compel me to peace, and even dared to threaten violence in case I refused to accept their interference. I confess that their insolence stung me keenly and that I was ready, at the risk of what might happen to my conquests in the Spanish Netherlands, to turn all my forces against this haughty and ungrateful nation; but having summoned prudence to my aid and considering that I had neither the number of troops nor the allies requisite for such an enterprise, I dissimulated and concluded peace on honourable conditions, resolved to postpone the punishment of this perfidy to another time.” The time had come; to the last effort at conciliation attempted in the name of the states-general, by De Groot, son of the celebrated Grotius, the king answered with a haughty threat: “When I heard that the United Provinces were endeavouring to corrupt my allies, and were urging kings, my relatives, to enter into offensive leagues against me, I sought to put myself in a position to defend myself, and I raised some troops; but I intend to have still more towards the spring, and I will then use them in the manner which I may judge the best adapted for the welfare of my states and for my glory.”[g]

A public treaty had just been signed between France and England (February 12th), and the English, according to their custom, attacked without declaration of war. On March 23rd an English squadron assailed a Dutch merchant fleet returning from Smyrna off the isle of Wight. The Dutch defended themselves so well that the aggressors after two days of fighting were only able to capture two or three merchant ships and one man-of-war. Charles II’s declaration of war was published March 29th, six days after this fight. That of Louis XIV was launched on the 6th of April.[c]

“The king sets out to-morrow, my daughter,” writes Madame de Sévigné[i] to Madame de Grignan on the 27th of April; “there will be 100,000 men outside Paris, the two armies will join hands; the king will give orders to Monsieur, Monsieur to Monsieur le Prince, Monsieur le Prince to M. de Turenne, and M. de Turenne to the two marshals, and even to the army of Marshal de Créqui.”[g]

Ninety thousand men were gathered from Sedan to Charleroi; the bishop of Münster, the bishop of Cologne, and other German princes furnished about 20,000 more. The king led this magnificent army in person; Condé, Turenne, Luxemburg, Chamilly, were in command under him. Vauban was to take the towns, Pellisson to record the victories. What had Holland to bring in opposition to such an enemy? She had a formidable navy; two admirals, regarded to this day as the greatest of their century, Tromp and De Ruyter; rich colonies, and an immense commerce; but she had neglected her land-forces, so often dangerous in a republic; she could hardly count upon 25,000 militia, badly equipped and wholly without discipline, and 20,000 men promised by the elector of Brandenburg were at the same time very insufficient and very far away. The intestine struggles also enfeebled her; there were two parties, the one led by Jan de Witt, and entirely devoted to the cause of ancient liberty. The other aimed at the restoration of the young prince of Orange to the heritage of his ancestors, and profiting by the present danger nominated him captain-general at the age of twenty-two.

The Passage of the Rhine (June, 1672 A.D.)

Meanwhile Louis XIV advanced along the Maas, upon the lands of the bishop of Liège, his ally, in order not to invade Spanish territory, thence along the right bank of the Rhine from Wesel to Toll-Huys. There the inhabitants informed the prince of Condé that the dryness of the season had made the river fordable. Crossing was easy. On the other shore only 400 to 500 cavalry were to be seen and two feeble regiments of infantry without cannon. The artillery mowed down their flank. While the king’s household and the crack regiments of cavalry, in number about 15,000 men, were crossing in safety, the prince of Condé went beside them in a copper-bottomed boat. A small number of the Dutch cavalry rode into the river to give at least a semblance of resistance, but took flight immediately before the approaching multitude. Their infantry laid down their arms and begged for their lives. The French lost in that passage only the count de Nogent, and several cavalrymen who strayed from the ford and were drowned. No one would have been killed on that day had it not been for the imprudence of the young duke de Longueville. It was said that, being intoxicated, he fired his pistol at the enemy, who were begging on their knees for their lives, crying, “No quarter for that rabble!” One of their officers was killed by his shot. The Dutch infantry despairingly resumed their weapons for a moment and fired a charge which killed the duke de Longueville. A captain of cavalry, who had not taken flight with the others, ran to the prince of Condé who was mounting his horse, and pressed his pistol against the prince’s head, who by a movement turned aside and had his wrist shattered by the bullet. This was the only wound Condé ever received. The French, exasperated, charged upon that infantry, which took flight in all directions. Louis XIV crossed on a pontoon bridge with his infantry (June 12th, 1672).[d]

Such was the passage of the Rhine, celebrated ever after as one of the great events which should occupy the memories of men. That air of greatness with which the king surrounded all his actions, the fortunate rapidity of his conquests, the splendour of his reign, the idolatry of his courtiers, finally the tendency the French, above all the Parisians, have towards exaggeration joined to their ignorance concerning war which ruled in the idle life of the large cities--all this caused the passage of the Rhine to be regarded as a prodigious achievement whose fame continued to be exaggerated. The common belief was that the whole army had crossed the river swimming, in the face of a thoroughly entrenched army, and in spite of the artillery of an impregnable fortress called Tholus (Toll-Huys). It was very true that nothing could have been a more imposing sight to the foe than this passage, and if there had been a corps of serviceable troops on the other side the enterprise would have been very perilous.[f]

Fifteen years later Bossuet said in his funeral oration of the prince of Condé, “Let us leave the passage of the Rhine the prodigy of our century and of the life of Louis the Great.” But Bossuet was not writing history in his funeral orations. Neither does Napoleon in his Mémoires share the enthusiasm of the sacred orator: “The passage of the Rhine is a military operation of the fourth order, since in that place the river is fordable, impoverished by the Waal, and moreover was defended by only a handful of men.” “I have seen a woman,” says Voltaire, “who crossed the Rhine twenty times at that place to defraud the customs.” The Toll-Huys was exactly what its name indicates.

THE FRENCH IN HOLLAND AND GERMANY (1672-1673 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1672-1673 A.D.]]

With the Rhine crossed, Holland was open to invasion. The provinces of Overyssel, of Gelderland, and Utrecht submitted without trying to defend themselves; there were very few hours during the day in which the king did not receive news of some victory. An officer wrote to Turenne: “If you will send me fifty cavalrymen I will take two or three fortresses with them.”

Four soldiers became in a few moments masters of Muiden, the key to Amsterdam, because the sluices by which the country surrounding the capital could be flooded were in this village. The generals called to council were anxious to march at once upon Amsterdam, Louvois thought it better to garrison the forts; the army was in this manner enfeebled and its operations retarded. Upon this the Dutch took courage once more, and concentrating the state forces into the hands of one man, raised William of Orange to the stadholdership (July 6th, 1672). This prince was to save the independence of his country.[d] Soon afterward an infuriated populace slaughtered the illustrious chiefs of the republican party, Jan and Cornelis de Witt. French historians charge William with complicity in these murders. Burnett, however, says that William “always spoke of it to me with the greatest horror possible,” and there seems no good ground to doubt that this sentiment was genuine. To suppose otherwise would seem to belie the character of this far seeing, cautious, unconquerable man.[a]

The military dictatorship confided to the prince of Orange gave a new aspect to the situation; he had the dykes cut, flooding all the country surrounding Amsterdam, and forced the French to retreat before the inundation.[d]

The French king, in the meantime, in answer to the Dutch deputies who sought for peace (De Groot was of the number), demanded for himself the limit of the Rhine, and the re-establishment of the Catholic religion in Holland, besides satisfaction to the demands of the English. The Dutch magnanimously refused such terms. The capital was for this year secure behind its waters; the French army being weakened by garrisoning so many towns. Condé pressed the monarch to dismantle these towns, and unite the army to reduce Amsterdam; but Louvois, minister-at-war, biased by his peculiar pursuits, would not consent to the demolition of a single bulwark. The consequence was that nothing more could be effected, and Louis returned, to enjoy the congratulations of his capital and the flatteries of his court.[j]

THE NEW COALITION AGAINST FRANCE (1673 A.D.)

This is an epoch of great importance. The state system of the treaty of Westphalia was really upset by Louis’ aggressions, e.g. the German states making common cause with Emperor; and the fear of French predominance acted from now on through the Dutch war and the War of the Spanish Succession as a new and dominant force in European politics, much as the pre-eminence of the Hapsburgs had acted before Westphalia. From now to the treaty of Utrecht, European history is on another track, and the treaty of Utrecht, which closes the foreign policy of Louis XIV, is the real end of the chapter of history we are now beginning.[a]

Neither Spain nor Germany could remain indifferent spectators of Louis XIV’s progress and Holland’s peril. Although Spain had not pronounced herself, Monterey, the governor of Brussels, had furnished the prince of Orange some auxiliary troops. The elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William--“the Great Elector”--promised his assistance to the states-general by a secret treaty. He also agitated the north German courts and that of Vienna, representing to them the necessity of a coalition. Austria, more reserved, was none the less exasperated in spite of the arrangement to which she had consented, and concluded a ten years’ defensive alliance with the great elector. The emperor likewise concluded another treaty with the states-general, promising auxiliary troops for a subsidy.

Louis XIV, warned by these events, gave these princes the most solemn assurances of his intention to respect the Treaty of Westphalia as well as the imperial territory. But as these assurances had no effect, he finally declared that the continuation of their armed condition would be regarded as an act of hostility against his allies of Cologne and Münster, and he declined the responsibility of any war that might ensue.

Montecuculi [the imperial general] and the great elector united their forces, which with the German contingents amounted to 40,000 men. Louis XIV gave orders to Turenne to leave to Luxemburg the protection of the conquered towns in Holland, and to betake himself with 16,000 men to the lower Rhine, keeping the Germans from crossing, and to protect the territories of Cologne and Münster. Condé was charged with covering the upper Rhine and Alsace with an equal number of troops. The Germans’ plan was to march upon the Maas, to establish themselves there, and then to bring thither the prince of Orange and cut off in this manner communication between France and the French garrisons in Holland. But Turenne, stationed at Andernach, kept them a long time on the banks of the Rhine. They tried to cross higher up; Condé had destroyed the bridge at Strasburg, but after several weeks they succeeded (on November 23rd) in building a bridge of boats near Mainz. Turenne doubled on his track to cover the Maas. The Germans spread themselves over the electorate of Treves and the Palatinate; but this country being already ruined they could find no sustenance, and they recrossed the Rhine to live on the lands of Cologne and Münster. Turenne followed them.

Meanwhile Orange rallied a Spanish corps commanded by Marchin; he drove off Duras who was guarding the Maas with several French regiments, and conceived the bold idea of occupying Charleroi. He undertook the siege on the 15th of December, but he did not have sufficient material and had to retire before the arrival of Condé’s troops and the Flemish garrisons which Louis XIV ordered to Charleroi. [Notwithstanding the lack of troops, withheld through the jealousy of Louvois, these are said to have been Turenne’s most brilliant campaigns.]

By March, 1673, Turenne had driven the Germans across the Weser, and Frederick William, convinced of his powerlessness, and discontented with his allies, asked for peace. Louis XIV was eager to grant it, for he was in a hurry to dissolve the coalition, and simply imposed conditions that the elector should not assist Holland, or maintain troops beyond the Weser. Louis consented to withdraw his own troops from Frederick’s territory except from the towns in the duchy of Cleves, which he intended to hold until peace should be declared. This treaty was made definite the 6th of June, 1673, at Vossem, and Louis XIV almost at the same time signed two others with the duke of Hanover and the elector of Cologne, assuring defensive and offensive alliances on the part of France. Henceforth he regarded himself as delivered from all fear on the side of northern Germany.

Louis was not willing to submit to a mediation purposed by the emperor with arms in his hand. In the month of December, 1672, he accepted that which the Swedes offered. The mediation of Sweden was accepted by the other belligerents; it was agreed that a congress should be held at Cologne, but various delays postponed the first pourparlers until June, 1673.

Louis XIV in agreeing to this congress had attached little importance to it and counted in reality upon war alone. For the campaign of 1673 he disposed of 800,000 men without counting the garrisons of Roussillon, Pinerolo, and Lorraine. In the month of June he sent Turenne into Hesse to watch the imperials who were reorganising their army. He gave Condé the command of the Dutch garrisons and placed Luxemburg under him. He himself went to besiege Maestricht with 45,000 of his best troops. He had no desire to declare war upon the Spaniards although Monterey had upheld the Dutch; nevertheless he traversed their territory and made a false demonstration upon Brussels in order to deceive them.

The 10th of June he arrived before Maestricht. He had reserved for himself the chief command, which he wished to share with no one. But Vauban was with him and alone conducted and directed the work of approach. This was begun on the 17th and on the 29th the miner was under the town. The next day the garrison, although strong and well commanded, was obliged to capitulate.

If the taking of Maestricht was a brilliant success, the king really sacrificed to it the campaign in the Netherlands, which had an unfortunate ending. The Anglo-French fleet had, on its side, appeared in the arena. It numbered 90 ships of the line of which 30 were French. Parliament had voted a subsidy, but as it suspected King Charles’ project of becoming a Catholic, it had made a condition that a declaration of conformity to the Anglican church should be imposed upon all officers of the crown. The duke of York was unwilling to submit to the obligation of the “test” and had been dismissed from the admiralty. De Ruyter took command of the Dutch fleet with Tromp second in command, and advanced against the enemy, giving two battles on the 7th and 14th of June which remained undecided. The Anglo-French fleet having put back into the Thames for repairs embarked the troops under Schomberg’s command and set sail for the shores of the Netherlands. De Ruyter on the 21st of August gave a more decisive battle, in that it prevented the landing of the forces, and compelled the fleet to retire.

The Dutch, emboldened by this success, raised little by little their tone and their claims at the congress of Cologne. They cut down greatly the concessions they were offering France and reduced to almost nothing those they consented to grant the king of England, the elector of Cologne, and the bishop of Münster. They intended to make no sacrifice essential to keeping their rank as a great power. Louis XIV held out for a long time and obtained nothing; finally, on the 30th of September, he reduced his claims to Aire, St. Omer, Cambray, Ypres, and their dependencies and the two castellanies of Bailleul and Cassel. As these places belonged to Spain, he demanded that Spain should be indemnified by the United Provinces, which would have recovered all that they had lost. This proposition was rejected like the others.

Holland was now counting on more important alliances than those of 1672. She no longer feared England, where the reawakening of the Protestant spirit would reduce Charles II to powerlessness. She had signed on the 30th of August three treaties, with Spain, with Austria, and with the duke of Lorraine. Spain had not declared war on Louis XIV, as she did not wish to enter the arena except with a European coalition; but now, having procured resources by extraordinary taxation and having succeeded in overcoming the irresolution of the court of Vienna, she made a twenty-five-years’ treaty of offensive and defensive alliance with the republic, promising to furnish 8,000 men.

Austria, assured of Spain and the military co-operation of several German states, among others Saxony, resolved to recommence her preceding campaign. She made a point of war of Turenne’s presence on the right bank of the Rhine and demanded the restitution of the places of the empire, that of Lorraine for Duke Charles IV, and the abandonment of France’s claims to the fiefs of Alsace and the Three Bishoprics. On Louis XIV’s refusal, Leopold addressed a declaration to the diet of Ratisbon, making known his intentions, and signed with Holland a ten-years’ treaty of offensive and defensive alliance, enjoining himself for a subsidy to furnish 30,000 men. As for the duke of Lorraine, he put, on consideration of a subsidy, his sword and his troops at the service of the Dutch. Thus the latter were paying for the war, and the war under these conditions was changing its character, becoming European, and little by little withdrawing from their territory.

Louis XIV recalled Condé to Flanders, where he left him with but few troops. He gave Luxemburg the supreme command of the Dutch garrisons, and he planned himself to lead the army which had taken Maestricht to the Rhine, to occupy the bridges, and to support Turenne. Up to the last minute he refused to believe in the coalition, but when he saw it an accomplished fact he resolved to face it. Treves was occupied August 26th; Louis XIV then visited Alsace and Lorraine, strengthening fortifications without taking into consideration the privileges the towns enjoyed from the Treaty of Münster. Montecuculi, at the head of the imperials, left Bohemia in September and marched towards the Rhine. Turenne tried without success to stop him at the Tauber and at the crossing of the Main. He turned north, crossed the Rhine on a bridge of boats near Mainz, and finally marched upon Bonn, before which he joined the 25,000 Spanish and Dutch troops led by the prince of Orange, at the end of October.

Orange had taken the offensive, and captured Naerden in six days (September), crossed the Spanish Netherlands, where Condé had not sufficient force to stop him, and gained the electorate of Cologne, to join hands with the imperials. [This juncture of imperial and Dutch troops constituted an important success for the coalition.] United they attacked Bonn and took it on November 12th.

The taking of Bonn detached Germany from Louis XIV. Louvois had already a few days before given Luxemburg orders to evacuate Utrecht and the more distant places, keeping only those on the Maas, Waal, and Rhine, to destroy as far as possible abandoned fortifications, to reduce garrisons to 20,000, and to send home 30,000; but these orders took time to execute, and their execution, being compulsory, was a fresh subject of triumph for Holland and Europe.

The winter stopped hostilities, without ending the reverses; for Louis XIV now saw himself abandoned by England and the whole empire aroused against him.[b]

Defection of England and the Imperial Allies (1674 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1674-1675 A.D.]]

The Protestant inquietude of the English parliament had not yielded to the influence of the marquis de Ruvigny, French ambassador to London, and the nation wanted peace with the Dutch. Charles II yielded in appearance at least to the wishes of his people. On February 21st, 1674, he went to parliament to announce to the two houses that he had concluded with the United Provinces a prompt, honourable, and, he hoped, durable peace, as they had asked for. At the same time he wrote to Louis XIV asking him to pity rather than accuse him of a consent that had been dragged from him. The English and Irish regiments remained, without remark, in the service of France, and the king did not withdraw his subsidy from his royal pensioner.

Thus, link by link, the chain of alliance which Louis XIV had cast around Holland was coming apart. In her turn France was finding herself alone. The congress of Cologne had dissolved. None of the belligerents was looking for peace.[g]

The bishop of Münster, who could no longer count on the help of the French, had already secretly approached the emperor, and in April, 1674, agreed to defend by arms the decisions of the diet of Ratisbon, and restore all that he had taken from the Dutch. The electors of Treves and Mainz concluded an offensive pact with the emperor. So did the elector palatine, that eternal enemy of Austria. As early as January, Denmark, seeing Sweden inclined towards France, had thrown herself on the side of the emperor. The dukes of Brunswick and Lüneburg promised auxiliaries to Leopold for a subsidy. In May the elector of Cologne treated with the United Provinces, and then gave them back the places he had taken. Like the king of England, in abandoning France he at least left the soldiers he had furnished. On the 28th of May the Germanic diet finally pronounced against France and declared that the emperor’s war was a war of the empire. The great work of French politics was destroyed; Austria had regained, thanks to Louis XIV’s excesses, the supremacy and the direction of Germany against France.[c]

OPERATIONS IN FRANCHE-COMTÉ; TURENNE IN ALSACE (1674-1675 A.D.)

With the war thus become European, Louis XIV changed its object with a decision that did him honour. He abandoned Holland, which he was not strong enough to retain, and turned all his forces against Spain, the weakest of the states of the league. With 20,000 men and Vauban, he took the direction of Franche-Comté. The second conquest was almost as rapid as the first; Besançon was taken in nine days, and the entire province in six weeks (May, 1674).

The allies had planned for this year a double and formidable invasion of France by way of Lorraine and through the Netherlands. Turenne was to stop the one, Condé the other. But the enemy was so slow in beginning operations that the conquest of Franche-Comté was finished before they had decided on their movements. Turenne was thus enabled to take the offensive: he crossed the Rhine at Philippsburg with 20,000 men, destroyed with fire the whole Palatinate in order to prevent the enemy from subsisting there, and fought a number of unimportant engagements at Sinsheim and at Ladenburg in July, 1674, where he showed resources of tactics unheard of until then.[d] To this day numberless ruins of castles along the Rhine bear witness to the savage work of Turenne.[a]

The imperials numbered 40,000 men. Moreover it was known that the elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William, was coming with all haste at the head of 20,000 men to assist Bournonville [who replaced Montecuculi, who was ill, in the command of the imperial troops], and to crush the French by superiority of numbers. This juncture once effected, the French would be done for. Already in Germany they spoke of nothing less than marching on Paris itself. Many princesses accompanied the elector, saying they would “make the acquaintance of the French ladies, to learn manners from this polite nation.”

Fortunately Turenne was on the watch. To prevent the two armies joining, he began by attacking that which was nearer. He approached Bournonville by a forced march of forty hours, and, without even giving his soldiers time to rest, fell on the surprised imperialists at Enzheim and forced them to retire under the walls of Strasburg in the greatest disorder (October 4th, 1674). It was a great victory, but the numerical inferiority of his troops hindered his reaping its full fruits. Ten days after this victory the elector of Brandenburg in his turn passed the Kehl bridge and joined his 20,000 men to Bournonville’s army. Turenne received scarcely sufficient reinforcements to repair his losses at Enzheim. The situation became more and more serious. How could it be thought that the genius of a single man could compensate for such an overwhelming disparity of forces--how believe that 20,000 Frenchmen could hold their own against 60,000 Germans? No one doubted that the nation would soon be swallowed up in defeat. Fear gained ground in the northeast provinces; peasants abandoned their fields and flocked into the towns to seek shelter from the enemy. Even at Paris great anxiety prevailed. It seemed as if the capital of France would soon be at the mercy of the German army.

Alsace comprises the country between the Rhine and the Vosges, forming, from Hüningen or Belfort at the south, to Weissenburg on the Lauter at the north, a long band of territory of almost constant breadth. The river and mountain which serve for limits for this province in the east and west run nearly parallel one with the other. The Vosges separate Alsace from Lorraine. After the juncture of the two armies near Strasburg on the 14th of October, Turenne retired slowly in good order in the direction of the defiles which assured communication between Alsace and Lorraine. The Germans followed the same route in this retrograde march. By this time November had arrived with its cold and snow. The German generals, reassured by Turenne’s retreat, thought the campaign over. So they postponed military operations until the following spring, as well as the invasion of Lorraine or Franche-Comté, and thought of wintering quietly in Alsace. To get more supplies, they spread their troops all through the province and installed them in quarters separated one from the other. Seventy thousand imperials or Brandenburgers thus took up quarters from Strasburg to Belfort in upper and lower Alsace. Frederick William installed himself at Colmar, where his wife and court joined him. The only thought now was how to speed the cold and rainy season by the help of fêtes.

Meanwhile Turenne was quietly marching on Lorraine with his troops. On the 29th of November the last French soldier left Alsace by the defile of Lützelstein, in the north of Zabern. The news reached Paris. The court murmured; Louvois let loose his wrath against the marshal who had failed to save Alsace; the people, who had had a momentary hope after the success at Enzheim, gave themselves up again to despair.

Turenne, not condescending to reassure public opinion--an opinion clearly against him--began to put into execution the admirable plan he had conceived. He divided his army into many detachments, placed them under the direction of experienced officers, to whom his only instructions were that they should defile from north to south along the western slopes of the Vosges; and reunite on a given day in the neighbourhood of Belfort. Thus, while the enemy dispersed itself imprudently in its winter quarters, the French army, concealing its intention by means of the Vosges chain, concentrated itself in upper Alsace. Issuing from the province near Zabern in the north, it re-entered at forty leagues from there, near Belfort in the south. Success complete, unheard of, crowned this splendid stroke of genius. Such was the devotion of the French soldiers to their chief that they accepted without murmuring the necessity of marching in the depths of winter, in a country without roads, covered with snow and intersected with torrents. From the 5th to the 27th of December, the army, at the cost of incredible fatigue, marched from Lützelstein to the pass of Belfort. There the marshal reassumed in person the command of the troops, which he had divided up to facilitate the march. On the 29th of December he came upon the first body of the enemy, near Mülhausen, and destroyed it. Horrified at this sudden appearance, in upper Alsace, of an army they had thought to be encamped in Lorraine, near Nancy or Metz, the German generals realised the mistake they had made in dispersing their forces. They tried to repair the fault by sending orders for concentration in every direction.

It was too late. Turenne advanced with lightning speed. From Mülhausen, the place of his first victory, he went northwards. Near Colmar, by Türkheim, the imperials showed fight. He attacked them furiously on the 5th of January, 1675, and put them to flight. The remnant of the enemy retired on Schlettstadt. The marshal pursued them without giving them any rest. From Schlettstadt he pursued them at the sword’s point to Strasburg, making an immense number of prisoners and carrying off cannon and standards. On the 11th of January the small number of Germans who had not been put hors de combat, killed, or taken, during this terrible campaign, recrossed the bridge of Kehl in the greatest disorder (1675). Alsace was delivered. A formidable invasion was spared to France.[k]

This campaign prepared with such secrecy, executed with an adroitness so prudent, was ended in less than six weeks, and excited the enthusiasm of the whole of France; Louis XIV wrote to the marshal: “I hope you will soon return, as I am most impatient to see you to demonstrate to you by word of mouth how much I appreciate the great and important services you have rendered me, in the last victory you have gained over my enemies.” On the entire route the inhabitants whom Turenne had saved from the ravages of war turned out filled with admiration and gratitude, so that his return was a march of triumph until he reached St. Germain.

CONDÉ IN THE NETHERLANDS

While Turenne was victorious in foiling the invasion from the east, Condé arrested that of the north. He prevented 90,000 Spaniards and Dutch from invading Champagne. He entrenched himself at Charleroi, with the Sambre behind him, in a position where the prince of Orange dared not attack him. Condé, who did not voluntarily prolong the war of defence, pursued the enemy to his retreat and attacked the rearguard at Seneffe, near Mons (August, 1674), routing it completely, broke through the centre, and attacked and threw into disorder the remainder of the army, which was drawn up in a very strong position. When night came, he had had three horses shot under him, and the victory was still undecided. “He now,” says an eye-witness, La Fare,[l] “ordered new battalions to advance and cannon to be brought forward to attack the enemy at daybreak. All who heard this order trembled, and it was very evident that he was the only one who still desired to continue the battle.” The following day, the two armies separated with an equal loss of from seven to eight thousand men.

The prince of Orange, in order to prove that he had not been defeated, besieged Oudenarde. Condé proved himself the victor, and forced him to abandon this enterprise; but Grave, the last of the French conquests in Holland, opened its gates. Chamilly had defended it ninety-three days, and caused the loss of 16,000 men to the assailants.

LAST CAMPAIGNS OF TURENNE AND CONDÉ (1675 A.D.)

In the early summer (June, 1675) Turenne returned at the head of his army of the Rhine. He moved into the Palatinate. The emperor opposed him with Montecuculi, who passed for a consummate tactician. They took six weeks to follow and observe each other, and their reputations which had seemed to have reached their apogee were still more augmented by these actions. Finally they decided to come to battle near the village of Salzbach in a place chosen by Turenne; where he believed himself certain of victory, when the marshal on examining the position of a battery was struck by a stray shot, which also tore off the arm of Saint-Hilaire, lieutenant-general of the army (July 27th, 1675). The latter’s son burst into tears. “It is not for me that you should weep,” said Saint-Hilaire to him, “but for this great man.” Turenne’s death was truly a national calamity. Louis XIV, in order to show honour to the greatest military leader of his century, had him interred at St. Denis, in the royal sepulchre. But in time, the memory of the services of Turenne grew fainter, at least at court, and his reputation appeared overestimated. In 1710 in the midst of the distress of the War of the Succession, his family built a mausoleum for him in the chapel of St. Eustace. By order of the king, the ornamentations and armorial bearings were destroyed, under the pretext that they were not suitable to such a sacred spot.

[Sidenote: [1675-1676 A.D.]]

The death of Turenne undid the whole result of an able campaign. The French, discouraged and seemingly seized with a panic of terror, fled in the direction of the Rhine. Montecuculi penetrated into Alsace by the bridge of Strasburg. At the same time the duke of Lorraine, Charles IV, hastened to besiege the city of Treves with 20,000 men. Créqui tried to come to his assistance, but was beaten at Consarbrück. He rushed into the town, and after several weeks of heroic defence was obliged to capitulate through the cowardice of the garrison (September, 1675). “His misfortune,” says Condé, “made him a great general.” Condé was right.

After the death of Turenne, Condé was sent to Alsace to arrest the progress of Montecuculi and to reanimate the confidence of the troops. He forced the imperials to raise the sieges of Zabern and Hagenau, and to recross the Rhine. This was his last victory; he never again appeared at the head of the armies, but retired to Chantilly, where he lived thereafter in the society of men of letters and philosophers. During the campaign in Holland, he sought an interview with Spinoza, and when Malebranche published his Recherche de la vérité he sought to meet the author. He enjoyed holding erudite conversations as much as fighting battles, taking part in them with intelligence, with ardour, and sometimes, says La Fontaine, took reason, like victory, by the throat! If in conversations on literature he was sustaining a good cause he spoke with much grace and gentleness, but if he upheld a bad one it was not wise to contradict him. Boileau was once so astonished, relates Louis Racine, by the fire of his eyes in a dispute of that nature, that he prudently yielded, and said in a low voice to his neighbour, “From now on I shall always agree with the prince whenever he is in the wrong.” Bossuet says, “What a charming picture is presented to us in the avenues of Chantilly, where the fountains play unceasingly by day and by night, and our greatest poets debate with one of our greatest warriors.”

EVENTS OF 1676; AFFAIRS IN SICILY

In the following year (1676) the same campaign of sieges of which Louis was so fond was recommenced. Condé and Bouchain were taken; Maestricht, besieged by the prince of Orange, was delivered; but the Germans re-entered Philippsburg, which Fay defended three months and did not give up until he ran out of powder. An unexpected victory, however, consoled France for these slight successes and reverses. The inhabitants of Messina, in Sicily, revolting against Spain, had placed themselves under the protection of Louis XIV in 1675. He sent them a fleet commanded by the duke de Vivonne, brother of Madame de Montespan, who had Duquesne under him. This illustrious sailor, born at Dieppe in 1610, had begun life as a privateer and pirate; after which he had entered the service of Sweden, where he acquired some reputation. Returning to France in order to enter the royal navy, he passed through all grades, became lieutenant-general, but could not rise any higher as he was a Protestant. On the coasts of Sicily his adversaries were De Ruyter and the Spanish. The first battle fought near the island of Stromboli was undecided (1676); a second combat off Syracuse was a complete victory; De Ruyter was killed there.

Louis XIV ordered military honours to be paid by all French ports to the vessel which transported to Holland the remains of that great naval hero. Finally Duquesne, Vivonne, and Tourville, in a last encounter at Palermo, crushed the hostile fleets. France had for a time the control of the Mediterranean (1676).

[Sidenote: [1676-1678 A.D.]]

The Dutch had taken Cayenne in that same year, and ravaged the French Antilles. The vice-admiral D’Estrées armed, at his own expense, eight ships with which the king intrusted him, in consideration of reserving half the prizes. He retook Cayenne and destroyed ten ships of the enemy in the harbour of Tobago where they had thought themselves to be in security. In 1678 he took the island itself and all the Dutch factories in Senegal. The French flag now floated over the Atlantic as it did over the Mediterranean.[d]

In spite of the sufferings of his kingdom Louis XIV persisted in 1676 in the conditions he wished to impose on England and the empire, and which these two powers were unwilling to accept. He was still flattering himself over being able to keep England in the neutrality [she had committed herself to by the treaty of peace with Holland in 1674]. England’s neutrality was indeed what concerned him most. He gave money to Charles II and gave orders to the ambassadors, Ruvigny and Courtin, to distribute more money, among such ministers, courtiers, and members of parliament as they could win over. But the English desired that, at any price, Louis should return his conquests or that Charles II should join the Dutch to crush him. Parliament demanded the recall of those English troops which Churchill was commanding in the army of the Rhine.

Charles himself was only desirous of satisfying public opinion, and of conciliating that satisfaction with what he had promised Louis. He believed he would do this by assuming the rôle of a mediator. He started the idea of a congress that it was difficult for the powers to reject, and which was particularly pleasing to Holland, overcome by the burden of maritime war. During the preliminary negotiations of the congress, for which the town of Nimeguen was chosen, Charles signed a new secret treaty with Louis XIV (February, 1676), the two kings reciprocally engaging to make no separate peace with the Dutch. Louis XIV on his side overwhelmed the prince of Orange with offers that would detach him from Spain. All was useless.

The campaign of 1677 was preceded like that of 1676 by several attempts at negotiations in England and Holland. Courtin, who had replaced Ruvigny in England, wrote to Louis XIV that it was absolutely necessary to detach the prince of Orange from his allies, which might be accomplished by the intervention of Charles II. In consequence the king renewed to Orange and the states-general his former offers. He proposed to abandon the places necessary to cover Ghent and Brussels, to make a commercial treaty with Holland, and to conclude with her an eight years’ truce which would give Spain the time to reflect. If, on the expiration of the delay, Spain persisted in sustaining other claims, France and Holland would divide the Netherlands between them. William did not absolutely repel these conditions, but replied that he could not abandon his allies without dishonour.

In order to have some faith placed in his pretended moderation, Louis signed with Charles II, on February 24th, a commercial treaty which offered some advantage to the English. Charles II insisted that France should make peace. He represented that Holland would not separate from her allies, that in the end he would be obliged to uphold her, and that he could not continually go against the sentiments and interests of his subjects.

The enterprises in Sicily had brought England’s uneasiness to a climax. She already saw the ruin of her trade with the Levant, and Charles II proposed a project of peace, the basis of which was that France should keep Franche-Comté and a part of the places conquered in the Netherlands; that she should grant the Dutch a barrier and a commercial treaty; that she should indemnify the duke of Lorraine and abandon Sicily; but it remained to come to an understanding on a number of particular points and on the determination of the places that should remain to Louis XIV. The latter wished to give up only three--Charleroi, Ath, Oudenarde; and he demanded that Spain should cede him Ypres, Charlemont, and Luxemburg in exchange. He was all the more obstinate because he knew the states-general were tired of war and the damage inflicted upon commerce. He hoped to separate them from the prince of Orange, through the establishment of a barrier and some tariff concessions, but these concessions were so weak that the Dutch only laughed at them. As for the congress of Nimeguen, where the discussion of the propositions between the plenipotentiaries of the various countries began on the 6th of May, 1677, it would necessarily take too much time to put a stop to military events.[b]

CAMPAIGN OF 1677; NEGOTIATIONS FOR PEACE

Créqui had succeeded Turenne in Germany, Luxemburg replaced Condé in the Netherlands. The former made amends for his defeat at Consarbrück by a campaign worthy of Turenne. By a succession of quick marches, which kept him constantly between the enemy and the French frontier, he covered Alsace and Lorraine against an adversary superior in numbers, defeated him at Kochersberg, between Strasburg and Zabern (October 7th, 1677), and took Freiburg from him, thus taking the war to the right bank of the Rhine. Luxemburg, who resembled more the victor of Rocroi, captured Valenciennes in conjunction with the king, where the musketeers raised formidable works in broad daylight, then Cambray, and with Monsieur, against the prince of Orange, fought the battle of Cassel, near St. Omer, which capitulated (April, 1677).[d]

The coalition was now seriously shaken. Orange was everywhere accused of small ability for leadership. At Brussels and at Ghent the people broke loose against the Dutch. Even in Holland the peace party began to be demonstrative. Louis XIV reduced his tariff by half, in October, 1677, in order to stimulate the pacific desires of the Dutch. The latter, exhausted and tired of continually paying useless subsidies to their allies, complained that the Spaniards were always behindhand in fulfilling their engagements, that the Germans never left Germany, and that the prince of Orange never found provisions or stores in Belgium.

William and his partisans replied to these complaints that the honour of the country was at stake, that the United Provinces could not abandon the allies to whom they owed their salvation, and he had still one resource. This was to force England, which according to him was alone capable of doing it, to call a halt to the armies of Louis XIV. He went to London, where Charles II not only authorised but desired his presence, believing that it would be a convincing response to the defiances and murmurs of the nation. Scarcely had the prince arrived when he asked the hand of Mary, daughter of the duke of York. The king, who had long judged this alliance necessary, hastened to grant it. The marriage was celebrated on the 15th of November.

Charles II believed that Louis XIV would now raise no obstacle to accepting the proposals of peace: but he was mistaken--Louis rejected them, as going too far beyond those he had proposed himself, and which he already considered too moderate. The other powers, Spain and the empire, also declined them and preferred to continue the war. Charles II, having signed a treaty with the states-general on January 10th, 1678, found himself compelled to go further than he wished. He was obliged to recall the English troops serving in the French army and to prepare armaments.

Louis XIV took little notice of these demonstrations, strengthened the remainder of his armies, and decided to strike a great blow in the Netherlands, where Vauban had just retaken St. Ghislain in the depths of winter.

At the opening of the campaign of 1678, France could count on 219,000 men under arms, of whom half, it is true, were only fit for garrison service. Louvois was resolved to capture Ghent, and deceived the enemy by false demonstrations on other places, which led them to reduce the garrison at Ghent. When this had been done, he suddenly appeared under the walls of the town on the 1st of March. In less than two days 70,000 men were assembled and the siege was begun. Louis XIV, who had gone on a journey to Metz and the borders of the Maas to outwit the Spaniards, suddenly changed his direction and arrived on the 4th. The queen and the court followed closely, but stopped at Tournay. Four marshals, Humières, Luxemburg, Schomberg, and Lorges, assisted the king, Vauban pressed the works. The town, in spite of its siege and the number of watercourses and canals protecting it, was promptly surrounded. The 500 men forming the garrison declined to defend it. It surrendered the 9th, and on the 11th the castle capitulated. The army now marched upon Ypres, which it took on the 25th after eight days of entrenchment and in spite of a bloody resistance. The king, after this rapid campaign and its two important acquisitions, returned to St. Germain on the 7th of April.

Louis XIV now believed himself secure in imposing his conditions. He sent them the 9th of April to Nimeguen and to London: they were the same as before the taking of Ghent and Ypres. He allowed his plenipotentiary a month to have them accepted, but this term was further extended to the 10th of August. The latest successes of the French had had the effect that Louis XIV hoped for, that of strengthening the peace party in Holland. Amsterdam and the large towns refused to prolong these sacrifices. Charles II hastened to approve the French conditions. The Dutch, ready to agree to Louis’ commercial stipulations, did not find his proposed restitution of places sufficient to form such an efficient barrier that they could oblige Spain to accept. Suddenly Villa-Hermosa (successor of Monterey in the governorship of the Spanish Netherlands) received the order from his court to lay down his arms. The Madrid cabinet, divided and exhausted, had resigned itself to the abandonment of that which had been lost, from fear of losing that which was still retained. This decision relieved the states of Holland of their last scruples. Louis XIV then put forward a condition which was nearly the ruin of everything. He declared that, in engaging to restore Maestricht and the other places on the Maas of which he was master, he intended to maintain garrisons in them until his ally Sweden should have recovered that which Denmark and Brandenburg had taken from her. This exigence aroused the Spaniards, disconcerted the Dutch, exasperated the English, and drove Charles II to despair. They gave up all hope of ending the war. On July 26th, Charles II signed a treaty of defensive alliance with the states-general.

Louis XIV realised the necessity of getting out of this hole, and as he did not wish to recede, he engaged Sweden to ask the withdrawal of this condition, which Charles XI generously did. The Dutch plenipotentiaries at Nimeguen, Van Beverningk, Odyk, and Van Haren asked on August 7th for a conference with the French plenipotentiaries, D’Estrades, D’Avaux, and Colbert. They debated together for more than twenty-four hours, and finally, before midnight on the 10th, they signed a treaty of peace and a treaty of commerce with France.[138]

LOUIS XIV SETTLES WITH THE COALITION (1678-1679 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1678-1679 A.D.]]

The first treaty returned to the states-general Maestricht and the little towns which Louis XIV had kept in the vicinity and in Limburg, on sole condition that free exercise of the Catholic religion should be allowed. The second re-established freedom of commerce and navigation between the two peoples.

D’Estrades brought in person the news of the treaty to Marshal de Luxemburg, encamped on the plateau of Casteaux not far from Mons, which a detachment of his troops was blockading. The prince of Orange, who had come face to face with the French army with almost equal forces (45,000 men), knew of the Peace of Nimeguen, but had not yet received official notice. He began a sharp attack upon Luxemburg, and the battle raged for six hours around the abbey of St. Denis. It was a hard fight. A regiment of French refugees fighting under the Dutch flag was literally hacked to pieces. The day remained undecisive; and on the next the courier announcing the peace arrived in the Dutch camp, and the two armies separated.

The Dutch having signed the peace were assailed with violent recriminations on the part of their German allies, especially the elector of Brandenburg, the king of Denmark, and the bishop of Münster. But the great point for them was to obtain the definite adhesion of Spain. The latter country, exhausted and ill-governed, had long shown a great repugnance to making peace. But as soon as Charles II had attained the age of fourteen, his majority, the great personages of the kingdom forced the queen to drive Valenzuela out; then they compelled her to accept exile herself. Don John took the title of prime minister and seized the government (June 20th, 1677). As the emperor insisted on the re-establishment of his sister, Maria Anna, Don John, almost embroiled with the court of Vienna, was compelled to lend his ear to pacific propositions.

The treaty between France and the court of Madrid was finally signed September 17th, 1678. Louis XIV restituted Courtrai, Oudenarde, Ath, and Charleroi, which the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had given him; also Binche, St. Ghislain, Ghent Leuw, and Puigcerda in Catalonia, which Marshal de Navailles had taken that same year. On his side he retained with definite title St. Omer, Cassel, Aire, Bailleul, Poperinghe, Ypres, Wervicq, Warneton, Cambray, Bouchain, Valenciennes, Condé, Bavay, Mauberge, and the whole of Franche-Comté. The treaty of 1668 had in reality only been a truce, giving France advance posts in the heart of Belgium and leaving Spain with other places, isolated spots in the midst of French possessions, particularly on the borders of the Schelde. The treaty of 1678 established a much more regular border, by assuring France a series of strongholds bound one to the other, and closing all avenues to the kingdom from Dunkirk to the Maas, and leaving the Spanish Netherlands another series of places which offered the same advantages though in a less degree. The Treaty of Nimeguen was, in spite of a few restitutions demanded by Europe as a guarantee of peace, one of the most glorious and most advantageous that France had ever signed.

The emperor and the empire remained to be reckoned with. They were left out of the Dutch and Spanish treaties. They began by protesting and continuing the war. The imperial army, without stopping at the negotiations of Nimeguen, undertook, under the duke of Lorraine, to retake Freiburg in Breisgau, and to penetrate into Alsace. In May it appeared on the Rhine between Offenburg and Wilstett. Créqui was again charged with protecting Freiburg; and conducted a campaign which was as fortunate as it was able, and which placed a seal upon his fame. The Germans, reduced to powerlessness at every turn, quickly ended the campaign. The emperor, abandoned by the Dutch and embroiled with the Spaniards, ended by desiring peace. The possession of Philippsburg indemnified him for the loss of Strasburg. The princes of the empire, with the exception of a few in the north, refused to pursue the now objectless war. The subsidies of Spain and Holland had ceased. Leopold consented to a treaty which was signed January 15th, 1679, between the emperor, the empire, and France. The whole difficulty centred around the allies, whom Austria refused to abandon and for whom she demanded satisfaction. The king made a few concessions; but he would not give up Lorraine to Duke Charles except in retaining Nancy and four military routes. The duke rejected these conditions. Louis XIV also reserved to himself the right of passage through eight towns of the empire, to join the duchy of Cleves, and to continue the struggle with the elector of Brandenburg.

The imperial princes, interested in keeping their conquests over the Swedes, were the only ones who would not lay down their arms. They did not have to wait long to see themselves forced to do so, for Louis XIV was not willing at any price to abandon unfortunate allies whose actions had been of service to him. Pecuniary indemnity served to interest the dukes of Brunswick, Lüneburg, and the bishop of Münster. The elector of Brandenburg refused this sort of compensation. Créqui entered the duchy of Cleves, occupied the county of Mark, [the two possessions of the elector by the Rhine] and the town of Lippstadt beyond the Rhine, and advanced as far as the Weser, whose passage he forced June 30th, near Minden. The elector, incapable of continuing this unequal struggle, had on the eve of that day made his submission. His envoy signed at St. Germain a treaty by which he restored to the Swedes that which he had taken from them, stipulating a rectification of the Pomeranian frontier, and an indemnity of 300,000 crowns which France paid. The king of Denmark was the last to treat. He restored the towns he had taken, but received no pecuniary indemnity. These successive treaties, consequent upon those of Nimeguen, re-established things in Germany almost upon the footing of the Treaty of Westphalia.

[Sidenote: [1680 A.D.]]

All the powers had been weakened in the eight years’ war. Holland alone escaped almost intact from the storm which had threatened to destroy her. As for Louis XIV, he emerged from the struggle aggrandised and triumphant. He triumphed all the more in that he owed nothing to anyone--not even to the king of England, who, having shown himself equally incapable of making war or peace, now raised against himself as much scorn in France as hatred in his own state. If France had suffered considerably from a prolonged struggle which demanded enormous sacrifices, she had displayed resources superior to those of any other power, although Holland had shown herself the richer in proportion. France had struggled single-handed against the empire. The king’s proud device, “Nec pluribus impar,” was justified. The courtiers and the soldiers were unanimous in granting him the title of Louis the Great; an equestrian statue representing him in the costume of a Roman emperor was raised a short time after in Paris in a square which was called the Place des Victoirés.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[127] [See Volumes X and XIII.]

[128] [Richelieu’s interference in Portuguese affairs will be recalled.]

[129] [The price paid was five millions.]

[130] [These 4,000 veterans under Marshal de Schomberg assisted in 1665, by the battle of Villaviciosa, to settle the house of Braganza on its throne.]

[131] [Louis aided the Venetians to defend Crete. Between 1665 and 1669 more than fifty thousand men went there at different times.[d]]

[132] [In 1650 a violent attempt of the young William II of Nassau against the states-general had failed and the stadholder died a few months after, leaving an unborn son who was to become the famous William III. The stadholdership had been abolished and the grand pensionary of the province of Holland became the first personage of the United Provinces, like the president of the states-general. Jan de Witt had been filling these high functions since 1653. Elected at the age of twenty-five, he showed at once the ripeness of a great statesman and the devotion of a great citizen. With a mind at once practical and philosophic, loving letters and the arts as much as affairs, a wise administrator and skilful diplomat, he was not unlike the last great men of Greece; and a contemporary--a very competent judge, the count d’Estrades--has compared his mind to that of Richelieu.[c]]

[133] [By these secret articles England and Holland agreed to make war on Louis XIV if he went back on his word, and they proposed to compel him to make peace without including Portugal, if Spain was determined on this point.]

[134] It was afterwards decided to defer the execution of the attack on Holland until 1672. A new treaty was signed at Dover, December 31st, 1670, modifying the first in several points.

[135] [The chevalier de Lorraine and a maître d’hôtel of Monsieur, Morel by name, were among those suspected of poison. We have seen in the preceding chapter how epidemic that crime became about that time. However, the theory of natural death, the result of an abscess of the liver, hastened by domestic troubles, is now generally accepted as the cause of Madame’s death. Dareste[b] says it was due to cholera morbus. Madame was only twenty-six years old.]

[136] [This was an important departure from the old policy of Francis I and of Richelieu, who, for political reasons, made Protestant alliances abroad, though upholding Catholicism at home.]

[137] Ruart means inspector of the dykes.

[138] [The commercial party (the old one of De Witt) was attracted by Louis’ offering commercial advantage, and thus forced the peace against the will of William of Orange.]

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