A Short History of France Part 9

It was Marlborough at Blenheim (1702) who drove the iron of defeat into the soul of Louis XIV. When the war was ended he had made every concession demanded; had given up a vast extent of territory; banished the English pretender from his kingdom; and acknowledged Anne as queen of Great Britain.

By the provisions of the treaty (the Peace of Utrecht) Gibraltar pa.s.sed to England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed away as a spider's web.

An imbittered, broken old man, shorn of his omnipotence, who had outlived his fame and his worshippers, was dying in his great palace at Versailles; his only solace the austere woman who had inspired the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who upon the death of his unhappy queen he had privately made his wife. Marie Therese had borne his mad infatuation for Louise la Valliere; la Valliere had carried her broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her household Madame de Maintenon, the pious widow of the poet Scarron, in order that the austere virtues of that lady might be engrafted upon the children of the royal household. Grave, ambitious, talented, the governess of de Montespan's children was not too much absorbed in her duties to find ways of establishing an influence over the king.

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

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

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

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stake in the great game played in Europe was the headship, the pre-eminent position held by the house of Hapsburg. The entire reign of Louis XIV. had had this for its ultimate object. He seemed many times near it; but was never to reach the goal. The absorption of Spain was a last and desperate attempt. It had failed. France had not won the leadership of European civilization.

In the coming reign, new forces, new conditions, were to widen the field of national ambitions. And it was the nation across the channel which would grasp these forces and distance her rivals in an advance along the untried paths of commerce and a world-wide expansion.

With a strange apathy France had seen herself mistress of a large part of the American Continent, won for her by adventurous Frenchmen and Catholic missionaries. She did practically nothing to develop this magnificent colonial empire. Failing to comprehend changing conditions, the same old problem, with a towering house of Hapsburg, obscured her view, and remained the great unchanging fact about which her policy revolved.

Louis XV. was five years old when, in 1715, he became heir to a throne absolutely rigid. The best work of Richelieu and Mazarin and Louis XIV. had been expended upon it. Absolutism could go no farther. The king was all; next below him a fawning, obsequious n.o.bility, and then that vague ent.i.ty known as "the people," a remote invisible force, sustaining the weight of the splendid pyramid, the apex of which was this boy of five.

The young Louis was being prepared to sit upon this giddy elevation.

The Duke of Orleans, his accomplished cousin, a competent instructor in vice, was chosen as regent, and the royal education began. The best and rarest of the world's culture was at his service. Fenelon, the polished ecclesiastic, fed him the cla.s.sics in tempting form from his own Telemaque, written for the purpose. Although this work was later suppressed by the boy's royal father under the suspicion of being a covert satire upon his own reign, in which Madame de Montespan was represented by Calypso; and other famous or infamous members of his court also appeared in thin disguise.

The handsome boy was breathing the atmosphere of genius created by an age which compares well with those of Pericles and Augustus and the Medici, and nourished at the same time by the exhalations from a new crop of vices growing out of the decaying remains of those left by the old court.

CHAPTER XIV.

Such was the preparation for a supreme crisis in the life of the Kingdom.

The enormous debt left by the last reign taxed the ingenuity of the regent to its utmost. Then it was that John Law, the Scotchman, presented his great financial scheme of making unlimited wealth out of paper, which was just what the regent needed. The collapse came quickly, in 1720, bringing ruin to thousands, and leaving the country in more desperate need than before.

When declared of age, in 1723, a marriage was arranged for Louis with Marie Leczinska, daughter of the exiled Polish King Stanislas. Europe at this time was agitated over the succession to the throne of Austria, as the empire was now called. The Salic Law excluded female heirs, and the emperor, Charles VI., had died in 1718, leaving only a daughter, Maria Theresa, one year old. But a pragmatic sanction, once more invoked, seems to have covered the necessities of the situation by providing that the succession in the absence of a male heir might descend to a female, and so there was a young and beautiful empress on the throne at Vienna, who was going to make a great deal of history for Europe; and who would open her brilliant reign by a valiant fight for possession of Silesia, which the young king of Prussia intended to seize as an addition to his own new kingdom. This young King Frederick was also making history very fast, and after a stormy career was going to convert his Kingdom into a Power, and to be the one sovereign of his age whom the world would call _Great_! But at this particular period of his youth, Frederick and his n.o.bility, still blinded by the splendors of the reign of Louis XIV., were mere servile imitators of the court at Versailles, and the culture and the civilization for which they hungered were French--only French; and for Frederick, an intimate companionship with Voltaire was his supreme desire. But a closer view of the witty, cynical Frenchman wrought a wonderful change. The finely pointed shafts of ridicule when aimed at himself were not so entertaining. And his guest, no longer _persona grata_, was escorted over the frontier to France.

A nearer view of Versailles at this time might also have disenchanted these worshippers at the shrine of French civilization. A king absolutely indifferent to conditions in his kingdom, immersed in debasing pleasures, while Madame de Pompadour actually ruled the state--this is not the worst they would have seen! Dest.i.tute of shame, of pity, of patriotism, and of human affection, what did it mean to the king that his people were growing desperate under the enormous taxation made necessary by incessant wars and by the extravagant expenditures of the court? Louis simply turned his back upon the whole problem of administration, and left his ministers, Fleury, and later de Choiseul, to deal with the misery and the discontent and to make their way through the financial mora.s.s as best they might.

The power of Madame de Pompadour may be imagined when we learn that Maria Theresa, empress and proud daughter of the Caesars, when she needed the friendship of Louis XIV., in her struggle with Frederick of Prussia, in order to win him to her side, wrote a flattering letter to this woman.

This friendship, so artfully sought by the empress, led to another very different and very momentous alliance. A marriage was arranged between her little daughter, Marie Antoinette, and the boy Louis, who was to be the future king of France. The dauphin, the dauphiness, and their eldest child were all dead. So Louis, the second son of the dauphin, was the heir to his grandfather, Louis XV.

How should the empress of Austria, born, nurtured, and fed in the very centre of despotism, utterly misunderstanding as she must the past, the present, and the future, how should she suspect that the throne of France would be a scaffold for her child? Hapsburg and Bourbon were to her realities as enduring as the Alps.

In the meantime England and France had come into collision over their boundaries in America, and the war opened by Braddock and his young aide, Washington, had been a still further drain upon impoverished France. With the loss of Montreal and Quebec, those two strongholds in the north, the French were virtually defeated. And when the end came, France had lost every inch of territory on the North American Continent, and had ceded her vast possessions, extending from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, to England and Spain.

So while England was steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a people crying for bread--taxing a starving people for money to procure unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour. Did she desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created and made possible. And one may see to-day at Versailles the sleigh in which this mad caprice was realized.

The various instructors of Louis XV. had not taught him anything about mind and soul processes. They were quite unaware that there had commenced a movement in the _brain_ of France, which was going to liberate terrific forces--forces which would sweep before them the work of the Richelieus and the Mazarins and the Colberts as if it were chaff.

The human mind was probing, questioning doubting, everything it had once believed. And as one after another cherished beliefs disappeared, it grew still more daring. The whole religious, social, and political system was wrong. The only remedy was to overthrow it all, and crown reason as the sovereign of a new era. Such was the ferment at work beneath the surface as Louis was devising incredible extravagances for du Barry. And there was rage in men's hearts as they wrote insulting lines upon his equestrian statue in the Place Louis Quinze.

The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the n.o.bility of France.

It is said that the three great events of modern times are the Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista of causes behind them! A French Revolution is not the work of a day, nor of a single man. There had been a steady movement toward this event for a thousand years--in fact, ever since the dogma that _labor is degrading_ was placed at the foundation of the social structure of France.

The direct causes which were precipitating the crisis in the closing eighteenth century were financial and economic, while the contributing causes were a remarkable intellectual movement and the War of Independence in America. It is possible that a king with a heart and a brain, and the moral sense which belongs to ordinary humanity, might have averted this tragic outburst, and at least have delayed the event by awakening hope. The Revolution was born of hopeless misery. With the reign of Louis XV. hope died, and his successor fell heir to the inevitable.

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

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

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

But this "obscure something" was undergoing strange transformation.

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

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

A wonderful literature had come into existence, not stately and cla.s.sic as in the age preceding, but instinct with a new sort of life. The profoundest themes which can occupy the mind of man were handled with marvellous lightness of touch and clothed with prismatic brilliancy of speech; but all was negation. None tried to build; all to demolish.

The black-winged angel of Destruction was hovering over the land.

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

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

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

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

And so the surface which Richelieu had converted into adamant grew thinner and thinner each day, until king and court danced upon a mere gilded crust, unconscious of the abysmal fires beneath. Some of those powdered heads fell into the executioner's basket twenty-five years later. Did they recall this time? Did Madame du Barry think of it?

Did she exult at her triumph over de Pompadour, when she was dragged shrieking and struggling to the guillotine?

Five years before the close of this miserable reign an event occurred seemingly of small importance to Europe. A child was born in an obscure Italian household. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte. His birthplace, the island of Corsica, had only two months before been incorporated with France. The fates even then were watching over this child of destiny, who might, by a slight turn of events then imminent, have been born a subject of Spain, or Germany, or of George III. of England.

The impoverished Republic of Genoa was in desperate need of money. The island could be had by the highest bidder, and in 1768 it was purchased by France, just in time to make the great Corsican a French citizen.

Indeed, all the performers in the approaching drama were a.s.sembled.

Three young princes, grandsons of Louis XV., who were to be successively upon the throne of France, were at Versailles: Louis the Dauphin, now twenty, and his Austrian bride, Marie Antoinette, and his two brothers, afterward successively Louis XVIII. and Charles X. Still another princeling, Louis Philippe, was at the Palais Royal, son of the Duke of Orleans, late regent, also destined to wear the French crown; and last of all that infant at Ajaccio, in whom the play was to reach its splendid climax.

In 1744 Louis XV. was stricken with small-pox, and exchanged the brilliant scenes at Versailles for the royal vault in the Church of St.

Denis, where he took his place among his ancestors.

CHAPTER XV.

Louis XV. was dead, and two children, with the light-heartedness of youth and inexperience, stepped upon the throne which was to be a scaffold--Louis XVI., only twenty, and Marie Antoinette, his wife, nineteen. He, amiable, kind, full of generous intentions; she, beautiful, simple, child-like, and lovely. Instead of a debauched old king with depraved surroundings, here were a prince and princess out of a fairy tale. The air was filled with indefinite promise of a new era for mankind to be inaugurated by this amiable young king, whose kindness of heart shone forth in his first speech, "We will have no more loans, no credit, no fresh burdens on the people;" then, leaving his ministers to devise ways of paying the enormous salaries of officials out of an empty treasury, and to arrange the financial details of his benevolent scheme of government, he proceeded with his gay and brilliant young wife to Rheims, there to be crowned with a magnificence undreamed of by Louis XIV.

In the midst of these rejoicings over the new reign, and of speculative dreams of universal freedom, there was wafted across the Atlantic news of a handful of patriots arrayed against the tyranny of the British Crown. Here were the theories of the new philosophy translated into the reality of actual experience. "No taxation without representation," "No privileged cla.s.s," "No government without the consent of the governed." Was this not an embodiment of their dreams?