The French Revolution of 1789, as Viewed in the Light of Republican Institutions

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MARIE ANTOINETTE.

THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION

OF 1789

AS VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS.

BY

JOHN S. C. ABBOTT.

With One Hundred Engravings.

NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1859.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred
and fifty-nine, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

PREFACE.

For some years the author of this work has been collecting materials for writing the history of the French Revolution. With this object in view he has visited Paris, wishing also to become familiar with the localities rendered immortal by the varied acts of this drama—the most memorable tragedy, perhaps, which has as yet been enacted upon the theatre of time. In addition to the aids which he has thus derived from a brief sojourn in Paris, he has also found the library of Bowdoin College peculiarly rich in all those works of religious and political philosophizings which preceded and ushered in these events, and in the narratives of those contemporary historians who recorded the scenes as they occurred, or which they themselves witnessed. Governor Bowdoin, whose library was the nucleus of the present college library, seems to have taken a special interest in collecting all the writings of the French philosophers and all the works of contemporary authors bearing upon the French Revolution, including—the most important of all—full files of the Moniteur.

The writer would not take up his pen merely to repeat the story which has so often and so graphically been told before. But it is expecting too much of human nature to imagine that the struggles of an oppressed people to emancipate themselves from feudal despotism can be impartially narrated in the castles of nobles or in the courts of kings. It is inevitable that the judgment which is pronounced upon the events which such a struggle involves will be biased by the political principles of the observer. Precisely the same transaction will by one be condemned and by another applauded. He who believes in the divine right of kings to reign and in the divine obligation of the people unquestioning to obey, must condemn a people who endeavor to break the shackles of despotic power, and must applaud kings and nobles who, with all the energies of bomb-shells, sabres, and iron hoofs, endeavor to crush the spirit of democratic freedom. On the contrary, he who accepts the doctrine that sovereignty resides in the people must commend the efforts of an inthralled nation to sever the chains of servitude, and must condemn the efforts of kings and nobles to rivet those chains anew. Thus precisely the same facts will be regarded with a very different judgment according as the historian is influenced by political principles in favor of equality of rights or of aristocratic privilege. The author of this work views the scenes of the French Revolution from a republican stand-point. His sympathies are strongly with an oppressed people struggling for political and religious liberty. All writers, all men profess to love liberty.

"Despots," says De Tocqueville, "acknowledge that liberty is an excellent thing. But they want it all for themselves, and maintain that the rest of the world is unworthy of it. Thus there is no difference of opinion in reference to liberty. We differ only in our appreciation of men."[1]

To commence the history of the French Revolution with the opening of the States-General in 1789 is as unphilosophical as to commence the history of the American Revolution with the battle of Lexington. No man can comprehend this fearful drama who does not contemplate it in the light of those ages of oppression which ushered it in. It is in the horrible despotism of the old monarchy of France that one is to see the efficient cause of the subsequent frantic struggles of the people.

"The Revolution," says De Tocqueville, "will ever remain in darkness to those who do not look beyond it. Without a clear view of society in the olden time, of its laws, its faults, its prejudices, its sufferings, its greatness, it is impossible to understand the conduct of the French during the sixty years which have followed its fall."[2]

There is often an impression that the Revolution was a sudden outbreak of blind unthinking passion—a tempest bursting from a serene sky; or like a battle in the night—masses rushing blindly in all directions, and friends and foes in confusion and phrensy smiting each other. But, on the contrary, the Revolution was of slow growth, a storm which had been for centuries accumulating. The gathering of the clouds, the gleam of its embosomed fires, and the roar of its approaching thunders arrested the attention of the observing long before the storm in all its fury burst upon France. A careful historic narrative evolves order from the apparent chaos, and exhibits, running through the tumultuous scene of terror and of blood, the operation of causes almost as resistless as the operation of physical laws.

The writer has freely expressed his judgment of the transactions which he has narrated. "The impartiality of history," says Lamartine, "is not that of a mirror which merely reflects objects; it should be that of a judge who sees, listens, and decides."[3] The reader will not be surprised to find that some occurrences which historians caressed in regal courts and baronial halls have denounced as insolent and vulgar are here represented as heroic and noble.

Every generous heart will respond to the sentiment uttered, in this connection, by Thiers. "I have endeavored to stifle," he says, "within my own bosom every feeling of animosity. I alternately figured to myself that, born in a cottage, animated with a just ambition, I was resolved to acquire what the pride of the higher classes had unjustly refused me; or that, bred in palaces, the heir to ancient privileges, it was painful to me to renounce a possession which I regarded as a legitimate property. Thenceforth I could no longer harbor enmity against either party. I pitied the combatants, and I indemnified myself by admiring generous deeds wherever I found them."[4]

One simple moral this whole awful tragedy teaches. It is, that the laws must be so just as to command the assent of every enlightened Christian mind, and the masses of the people must be trained to such intelligence and virtue as to be able to appreciate good laws and to have the disposition to maintain them. Here lies the only hope of our republic.

The illustrations which embellish these pages are from the artistic pencil of Mr. C.E. Doepler, who went to Paris that he might with more historical accuracy delineate both costumes and localities. To the kindness of Messrs. Goupil & Co. we are indebted for the privilege of copying the exquisite engraving of Marie Antoinette at the Revolutionary tribunal, which forms the Frontispiece.

John S. C. Abbott.

Brunswick, Maine, Nov., 1858.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Old Régime and the Revolution, by Alexis de Tocqueville, Introduction, p. xi.

[2] Ib., p. 253.

[3] Lamartine, History of the Girondists, i., 10

[4] Thiers, French Revolution, Introduction.

CONTENTS.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

[CHAPTER I.]

ORIGIN OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY.

Extent of France.—Character of its early Inhabitants.—Conquest of Gaul.—Barbarian Invasion.—The Franks.—Pharamond.—Clovis.—Introduction of Christianity.—Clotilda.—Merovingian Dynasty.—Fields of March.—Anecdote of Clovis.—The Parisii.—Strife with the Nobles.—Moorish Invasion.—Charles Martel.—Pepin.—Fields of May.—Charlemagne.—His Policy.—Feudal System.—The Church.—Rolls.—Louis V.—Hugh Capet.—Parliament established by Philip the Fair.

Could one have occupied some stand-point in the clouds fifty years before the birth of our Savior, and have looked down upon that portion of ancient Gaul which has since been called France, he would have seen an immense undulating plain about six hundred and fifty miles square, bounded on the north by the Rhine, on the east by the craggy cliffs of the Alps, on the south by the almost impassable barriers of the Pyrenees, and on the west by the ocean. This beautiful realm, most admirably adapted in its physical features, its climate, and its soil to be inhabited by man, was then mostly covered with forest. Vast rivers, with their innumerable branches flowing in every direction, beautified the landscape and rendered the soil exuberantly fertile. About twenty millions of people, divided into more than a hundred independent tribes, inhabited this fair land. Life was with them all a scene of constant battle. They ever lived with weapons of war in their hands, seeking to encroach upon the rights of others or to repel those who were crowding upon them.

In this state of affairs imperial Rome cast a glance over the Alps upon Gaul, and resolved upon its conquest and annexation to the empire. Julius Cæsar, at the head of forty thousand men, descended through the defiles of the mountains and entered Gaul between the Lake of Geneva and Mount Jura. After a series of campaigns extending through ten years, and after sweeping with his invincible legions nearly two millions of men from his path, he succeeded in the entire subjugation of the country. Roman governors were appointed over the several provinces, and fortresses were reared and garrisoned by twelve hundred Roman soldiers, who enforced the laws of the empire. The arts, the civilization, and the refinements of Rome were gradually extended over the semi-barbaric Gauls, and for nearly four hundred years the country enjoyed general peace and prosperity. The southern portion of the province became distinguished for its schools, its commerce, and its elegance.

Toward the close of the third century the Roman Empire, enervated by luxury and vice, was visibly on the decline. Then commenced that mighty flood of invasion from the north which finally overran the whole of southern Europe, sweeping before it almost every vestige of the power and grandeur of the Cæsars. Army after army of skin-clad warriors, in aspect savage as wolves and equally merciless, crossed the Rhine, and in fierce and interminable battle fought their way over the plains of Gaul. For nearly four hundred years barbarian hordes from the shores of the North Sea, from the steppes of Tartary, even from far-off China, were pouring down upon southern Europe. Those in the rear crowded forward those in the advance. These clannish tribes, every where victorious, were slow to amalgamate. Each retained its distinctive laws, language, customs, and manners. For more than two centuries this cruel war continued, and all Gaul presented but a scene of tumult, terror, and carnage.

Among the marshes of the Lower Rhine there dwelt a fierce tribe called Franks, or Freemen. Early in the fifth century, Pharamond, the sovereign chief of this tribe, a man of extraordinary energy and sagacity, formed a confederacy with several other adjacent tribes, crossed the Rhine at various points, and after a series of terrific conflicts, which were protracted through many years, overpowered the Gauls under their Roman leaders, and took possession of the country nearly as far as the River Somme. Being the leading chief of the confederated tribes, he exerted a kind of supremacy over the rest, which may perhaps be considered as the first dawning of the French monarchy. The successors of Pharamond retained his conquests, and gradually extended their dominions until they were in possession of all the country between the Rhine and the Loire.

In the year 480 Clovis succeeded to the chieftainship of the confederation. Ambitious, unscrupulous, and energetic, he pushed his invading armies toward the Pyrenees, and for thirty years nearly all the south of France was a volcano of smoke and flame. His march, though attended with many reverses, was triumphant, and at the close of his career in the year 511 nearly all Gaul was partially subjected to his sway.

Christianity had previously entered Gaul from Rome. Clovis married Clotilda, the daughter of a Christian bishop. In the heat of one of his battles, as the tide of victory was setting against him, Clovis, raising his hands and eyes to heaven, exclaimed,

"O God of Clotilda! if thou wilt interpose and grant me this victory, I will renounce idols forever and become a Christian."

He gained the victory, and on the next Christmas-day Clovis was baptized. But a man more thoroughly wicked never played the hypocrite. By treachery the most loathsome, he caused all the chiefs to be assassinated who could be regarded in the least degree as his rivals, and, placing chiefs subject to his will at the head of all the different tribes, he attained such a supremacy as has led historians to speak of Clovis as the first monarch of the conquered realm. The dynasty thus established has been called the Merovingian, from Merovius, the grandfather of Clovis. From this successful invasion of the Franks all Gaul received the name of France. The leaders of these victorious bands occasionally had general assemblies, held in the open air, to deliberate respecting important movements. These meetings were very large, as all the chiefs and sub-chiefs came in battle array, surrounded by an ostentatious and well-armed retinue. As these assemblies were usually held in the month of March they received the name of Fields of March, Champs de Mars. The interests of the confederation rendered it not unfrequently necessary that these assemblies should be convened. This was the origin of the States General of France, which, twelve centuries later, opened the drama of that terrible revolution, which is universally regarded as the most awful tragedy of time.

An incident which occurred during one of these assemblies held by Clovis interestingly illustrates the character of that barbaric chief and the state of the times. A silver vase was included in the plunder taken from the church of Rheims after the conquest of that city. The plunder was divided at Soissons. The bishop of the church earnestly solicited that the vase might be restored to him. Clovis advocated the wishes of the bishop. One of the Frank warriors, jealous of his chief's interference, with one blow of his battle-axe crushed the vase, sternly declaring that Clovis was entitled to his share of the plunder and to no more. The chieftain, though glowing with rage, ventured not to utter a word.

At the next review of his troops, Clovis, approaching the soldier, took his weapon as if to inspect it. Pronouncing it to be unfit for use, he threw it disdainfully upon the ground. As the soldier stooped to pick it up, Clovis with one blow of his battle-axe crushed his skull, exclaiming, "Thus didst thou strike the vase at Soissons."[5]

The monarchy, thus established by usurpation, treachery, and blood, was very precarious and shadowy in its power. There was no acknowledged metropolis, no centralization of authority, no common laws. The whole country was occupied by the various tribes of invaders, each, under its own local chiefs, claiming independence, governed by its own customs, and holding the province upon which it chanced to have taken possession. Thus the supremacy of Clovis was neither precisely defined nor boldly claimed.

When Cæsar, five hundred years before the rise of Clovis, invaded Gaul, he found a tribe, called the Parisii, dwelling upon the banks of the Seine, with their principal village—which consisted of a few barbarian huts of mud, with straw roofs, and without chimneys—upon a small island embraced by the river. From the name of the tribe the village itself was subsequently called Paris. Such was the origin of that world-renowned metropolis which for ages has been the focal point of literature, science, art, and bloody revolutions. During the sway of the Romans the city had increased very considerably in population and importance, and Clovis selected it as his capital.

For about three hundred years the successors of Clovis maintained their supremacy. During all this period there was a constant conflict between the king and the heads of the other tribes, or the nobles as they gradually began to be called. An energetic monarch would occasionally arise and grasp extended power. But he would perhaps be succeeded by a feeble ruler, and the nobles would again rally and make vigorous encroachments upon the royal assumptions. The only contest, however, was between the king and the nobles. The mass of the people were in abject servitude, with no recognized rights.

In the year 732 the Moors, who had crossed the sea from Africa and had overrun Spain, began to crowd down in battle array through the defiles of the Pyrenees upon the plains of France. A successful general, Charles Martel (the hammer), so called from the tremendous blows he dealt the enemy, met them and drove them back with prodigious slaughter. By his achievements he acquired immense popularity and renown. As a very feeble prince then occupied the throne, Charles Martel collected the reins of power into his own hands, and, though nominally but an illustrious general, became in reality the ruler of France. Satisfied with the possession of power he was not ambitious of the kingly title, or thought it not prudent to grasp at too much at once.

At the death of Charles Martel, his son Pepin, a man of great energy and ambition, drove the imbecile king, Childeric III., into a cloister, and took his seat unresisted upon the throne. The dynasty thus established is called the Carlovingian, from Charlemagne, the most illustrious of this line of kings. The nation cordially approved of the act. As Pepin could not claim the throne by right of hereditary descent, he founded his title to reign upon the regal power which his father had in reality exercised, and upon the well-known assent of the nation. To confirm his authority still more, he appealed to the Pope. The Church was now in the plenitude of its power; and the Pope, grateful for the service which Charles Martel had rendered the Church by driving back the infidels, with alacrity consented to establish Pepin upon the throne by the august rites of religion.

Pepin, as his leading warriors had now become horsemen, changed the time of the general assemblies from the month of March to May, as the latter month was more convenient for forage, and the Assembly hence received the name of Fields of May, Champs de Mai. At these meetings the king presided, and the body was composed of the higher clergy and the nobility. Occasionally, a small delegation of the most distinguished of the people, who were called the Third Estate, Tiers Etat, had been admitted. Pepin called together only the clergy and the nobility, declining to admit the Third Estate to the Assembly. Subsequently some kings admitted the Third Estate, and others excluded them, according to their caprice. Questions relating to war, peace, and the enactment of general laws were submitted to this body, and decided by the majority. The chiefs only could speak. The assembled warriors clamorously and with clashing of arms expressed assent or dissent.

The world-renowned Charlemagne, succeeding his father Pepin, ascended the throne in the year 768. France at that time presented every where an aspect of decay and wild disorder. This monarch, illustrious both as a warrior and a statesman, fused the heterogeneous and warring tribes into a compact nation. Still, the mass, though consolidated, was conglomerate, its component parts distinctly defined. All France bowed submissive to his sway. Like a whirlwind he traversed Spain with his armies. Italy speedily acknowledged his supremacy. The vast empire of Charlemagne soon vied with that of ancient Rome, embracing nearly the whole of Europe.

It was an important point in the policy of Charlemagne to humble the nobles. He wished to surround his throne with an aristocracy enjoying privilege and splendor, but deprived of all political power. He wished himself to appoint the rulers of the provinces, and not to allow those offices to be hereditary with the counts and the dukes. Therefore he endeavored to ally the people with himself in resisting the powerful barons. He also, with the same object in view, sedulously courted the affections of the Church, conferring many of the most important offices of the state upon the high ecclesiastics.

Charlemagne ordered the Assembly to meet twice every year. Every count was commanded to bring to this congress thirteen of the most influential of the people within his jurisdiction. They usually met in two bodies, the ecclesiastical leaders in one spot, the military in another. Sometimes, by order of the king, they both met together. The king held his court at a little distance, and by messengers received constant reports from the two bodies. Weighing the result of their deliberations, he issued his decree, which all recognized as law. Such was the germ of deliberative assemblies in France.

Charlemagne established several schools. In these he assembled for severe study many of the young men of the empire, selecting the low-born as well as the sons of the nobles. As he was very desirous that his reign should be embellished by the attainments of men of letters, he frequently examined these schools himself. One of the historians of those days writes:

"When, after a long absence, Charlemagne returned to Gaul, he ordered the children to be brought to him, to show him their exercises and verses. Those belonging to the lower classes exhibited works beyond all hope, but those of noble descent had only trifles to show. The wise monarch, imitating the Eternal Judge, placed those who had done well on his right hand, and thus addressed them:

"'A thousand thanks, my sons, for your diligence in laboring according to my orders and for your own good. Proceed. Endeavor to perfect yourselves, and I will reward you with magnificent bishoprics and abbeys, and you shall be ever honorable in my sight.'

"Then he bent an angry countenance upon those on his left hand, and, troubling their consciences with a lightning look, with bitter irony, and thundering rather than speaking, he burst upon them with this terrible apostrophe:

"'But for you, nobles, you sons of the great—delicate and pretty minions as you are, proud of your birth and your riches—you have neglected my orders and your own glory, and the study of letters, and have given yourselves up to ease, sports, and idleness.'

"After this preamble, raising on high his august head and his invincible arm, he fulminated his usual oath:

"'By the King of Heaven I care little for your nobility and beauty, however others may admire you. You may hold it for certain that, if you do not make amends for your past negligence by vigilant zeal, you will never obtain any thing from Charles.'"[6]

Wherever Charlemagne led his legions, he baptized the vanquished; and the conquered tribes and nations called themselves Christians. The ignorant barbarians eagerly accepted the sacrament for the sake of the white baptismal robe which was given to each proselyte.

The vast empire of Charlemagne under his effeminate successors rapidly crumbled to pieces. In ceaseless conflicts and fluctuations the chiefs of the tribes, or nobles, gradually regained the power which had been wrested from them by Charlemagne. Upon the ruins of the empire arose the feudal system, and France became a monarchy but in name. The throne, shorn of its energies, retained but the shadow of power. Haughty dukes, surrounded by their warlike retainers, and impregnable in massive castles which had been the work of ages, exercised over their own vassals all the prerogatives of royalty, and often eclipsed the monarch in wealth and splendor. The power of the duke became so absolute over the serfs who tilled his acres, and who timidly huddled for protection beneath the ramparts of the castle, that, in the language of the feudal code, the duke "might take all they had, alive or dead, and imprison them when he pleased, being accountable to none but God."

France again became but a conglomeration of independent provinces, with scarcely any bond of union. The whole landscape was dotted with castles strongly built upon the river's bluff, or upon the craggy hill. These baronial fortresses, massive and sombre, were flanked by towers pierced with loop-holes and fortified with battlements. A ditch often encircled the walls, and an immense portcullis or suspended gate could at any moment be let down, to exclude all entrance. The apartments were small and comfortless, with narrow and grated windows. There was one large banqueting-hall, the seat of baronial splendor, where the lord met his retainers and vassals in intercourse in which aristocratic supremacy and democratic equality were most strangely blended. Every knight swore fealty to the baron, the baron to the duke, the duke to the king. The sovereign could claim military service from his vassals, but could exercise no power over their serfs, either legislative or judicial. It not unfrequently happened that some duke had a larger retinue and a richer income than the king himself.

A poor knight implored of the Count of Champagne a marriage-portion for his daughter. A wealthy citizen who chanced to be present said, "My lord has already given away so much that he has nothing left." "You do not speak the truth," said the count, "since I have got yourself;" and he immediately delivered him up to the knight, who seized him by the collar, and would not liberate him until he had paid a ransom of twenty-five hundred dollars. A French knight relates this story as an instance of the count's generosity.

These lords were often highway robbers. Scouts traversed the country, and armed men who filled their castles watched for travelers. The rich merchant who chanced to fall into their hands was not only despoiled of all his goods, but was often thrown into a dungeon, and even tortured until he purchased his ransom at a price commensurate with his ability.

Under this feudal sway the eldest son was the sole possessor. "As for the younger children," exclaims Michelet, with indignant sarcasm, "theirs is a vast inheritance! They have no less than all the highways, and over and above, all that is under the vault of heaven. Their bed is the threshold of their father's house, from which, shivering and ahungered, they can look upon their elder brother sitting alone by the hearth where they too have sat in the happy days of their childhood, and perhaps he will order a few morsels to be flung to them notwithstanding the dogs do growl. 'Down, dogs, down, they are my brothers! they must have something as well as you.'"

The Church was the only asylum for the younger sons of these great families. In her bosom ambitious ecclesiastics, as bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, often attained a degree of splendor and of authority which the baron, the count, or the duke in vain strove to emulate. The unmarried daughters took refuge in the monasteries, or were shut up, in seclusion which was virtual imprisonment, in the corners of the old chateaux. Thus the convents, those castles of the Church, were reared and supported mainly to provide for the privileged class. The peasant in the furrow looked with equal dread upon the bishop and the baron, and regarded them equally as his oppressors.

These proud bishops assumed the character and the haughty air of feudal lords. They scorned to ride upon the lowly mule, but vaulted upon the back of the charger neighing for the battle. They were ever ready for a fray, and could strike as sturdy blows as ever came from the battle-axe of a knight. The vows of celibacy were entirely disregarded. Some took wives; others openly kept concubines. These younger sons of the nobles, dressed in the garb of the Church, were found to be such dangerous characters that there was a general demand that they should be married. "Laymen are so convinced," says one of the ancient writers, "that none ought to be unmarried, that in most parishes they will not abide a priest except he have a concubine." The lords spiritual endeavored to fashion the Church upon the model of the feudal system. Abbeys and bishoprics, with all their rich endowments, passed by descent to the children of the bishops.[7]

An incident which occurred in the year 911 throws much light upon the rudeness of those barbaric times. Rollo, the chieftain of a band of Norman pirates, entered the Seine, committing fearful ravages. Charles IV., appropriately called Charles the Simple, alarmed by his progress and unable to raise a force sufficient to check him, sent an archbishop to offer him the possession of Normandy, with the title of hereditary duke, if he would peaceably take possession of this territory and swear allegiance to the king. Rollo eagerly accepted the magnificent offer. In performing the ceremony of swearing fealty, it was necessary, according to custom, for Rollo to prostrate himself before the king and kiss his feet. The haughty Norman, when called upon to perform the ceremony, indignantly drew himself up, exclaiming,

"Never, never will I kiss the foot or bow the knee to mortal man."

After some delay it was decided that the act of homage should be performed by proxy, and Rollo ordered one of his stalwart soldiers to press his lip upon the foot of the king. The burly barbarian strode forward, as if in obedience to the command, and, seizing the foot of the monarch, raised it high above his head, and threw the monarch prostrate upon the floor. The Norman soldiers filled the hall with derisive shouts of laughter, while the king and his courtiers, intimidated by barbarians so fierce and defiant, prudently concealed their chagrin.

The Carlovingian dynasty held the throne for two hundred and thirty-five years. Louis V., the last of this race, died in 987. He was called, from his indolence and imbecility, the Idler. As he sank into an inglorious grave, an energetic and powerful noble, Hugh Capet, Duke of the Isle of France, with vigorous arm thrust the hereditary claimant into a prison and ascended the throne. Thus was established the third dynasty, called the Capetian.

For two hundred and fifty years under the Capets, France could hardly be called a kingdom. Though the name of king remained, the kingly authority was extinct. The history of France during this period is but a history of the independent feudal lords, each of whom held his court in his own castle. None of these kings had power to combine the heterogeneous and discordant elements. The fragile unity of the realm was broken by differences of race, of customs, of language, and of laws. But in this apparent chaos there was one bond of union, the Church, which exerted an almost miraculous sway over these uncultivated and warlike men. The ecclesiastics were strongly in favor of the Capets, and were highly instrumental in placing them upon the throne.

With the Capets commenced a royal line which, in its different branches, running through the houses of Valois and of Bourbon, retained the throne for eight hundred years, until the fall of Louis XVI. in 1793.

About the year 1100 we begin to hear the first faint murmurs of the people. Some bold minds ventured the suggestion that a man ought to be free to dispose of the produce of his own labor, to marry his children without the consent of another, to go and come, sell and buy without restriction. Indeed, in Normandy the peasants broke out in a revolt. But steel-clad knights, in sweeping squadrons, cut them down mercilessly and trampled them beneath iron hoofs. The most illustrious of the complainants were seized and hung to the trees, as a warning to all murmurers. The people were thus taught that trees made good gibbets. When their turn came they availed themselves of this knowledge.

In the year 1294 Philip the Fair established a court in Paris called the Parliament. This was purely an aristocratic body, and was, in general, entirely subservient to the king's wishes. Similar parliaments were established by the great feudal princes in their provinces. There were occasional contentions between the parliaments and the king, but the king usually succeeded in compelling them to obedience. The Parliament enjoyed only the privilege of registering the royal edicts. In the reign of Louis XIV. the Parliament ventured to express a little objection to one of the tyrannical ordinances of the monarch.

The boy-king, eighteen years of age, was astounded at such impudence. He left the chase, and, hastening to the hall, entered it whip in hand. He could send them one and all to the Bastille or the block, and they knew it, and he knew it. The presence of the king brought them to terms, and they immediately became as submissive as fawning spaniels.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Greg. Tur., book ii., c. 28.

[6] Monach. Sangall, b. i., c. ii., sqq., as quoted by Michelet.

[7] See the abundant proof of these statements in Michelet's History of France, p. 193.

[CHAPTER II.]

THE HOUSES OF VALOIS AND BOURBON.

The House of Valois.—Luxury of the Court and the Nobles.—Insurrection.—Jaques Bonhomme.—Henry III.—Henry IV., of Navarre.—Cardinal Richelieu.—French Academy.—Regency of Anne of Austria.—Palaces of France.—The Noble and the Ennobled.—Persecution of the Protestants.—Edict of Nantes.—Its Revocation.—Distress of the Protestants.—Death of Louis XIV.

In the year 1328 the direct line of the Capets became extinct by the death of Charles IV., who left no male descendant. The nobles, assembled in parliament at Paris, assigned the crown to Philip, Count of Valois, a nephew of the former king. He was crowned at Rheims, in May, 1328, as Philip VI. The nobles, having thus obtained a king according to their wishes, complained to him that they had borrowed large sums of money from wealthy merchants and artisans, which it was inconvenient for them to pay, and that it was not consistent with the dignity of the French nobility that they should be harassed by debts due to the low-born. The king promptly issued a decree that all these debts should be cut down one fourth, that four months grace should be allowed without interest, and then, that these plebeian creditors might be reduced to a proper state of humility, he ordered them all to be imprisoned and their property to be confiscated. The merciless monarch doubled the taxes upon the people, and created a court at Paris of such magnificence that the baronial lords abandoned their castles and crowded to the metropolis to share its voluptuous indulgences. Even neighboring kings, attracted by the splendor of the Parisian court, took up their abode in Paris. The nobles needed vast sums of money to sustain them in such measureless extravagance. They accordingly left stern overseers over their estates, to drive the peasants to their toil and to extort from them every possible farthing.

The king, to replenish his ever-exhausted purse, assumed the sole right of making and selling salt throughout the realm. Each family, always excepting the nobles, who were then exempted from every species of tax, was required to take a certain quantity at an exorbitant price.

Vincennes was then the great banqueting-hall of Europe. In its present decay it exhibits but little of the grandeur it presented four hundred years ago, when its battlements towered above the forest of oaks, centuries old, which surrounded the castle—when plumed and blazoned squadrons met in jousts and tournaments, and when, in meteoric splendor, hunting bands of lords and ladies swept the park. Brilliant as was this spectacle, no healthy mind can contemplate it but with indignation. To support this luxury of a few thousand nobles, thirty millions of people were plunged into the extreme of ignorance, poverty, and misery.

Again the king and the nobles had empty purses, and were greatly in debt. By an arbitrary decree all the coin of the kingdom was called in. It was then passed through the mint greatly debased. With this debased coin the debts were paid, and then an order was issued that the coin should be regarded at its depreciated value.

With the lapse of centuries intelligence had gradually increased, and there was now quite a growing middling class between the peasants and the nobles—artisans, merchants, manufacturers, and literary and professional men. These outrages had at length become intolerable. Human nature could endure no more. This middle class became the leaders of the blind and maddened masses, and hurled them in fury upon their foes. The conspiracy spread over the kingdom, and in all the towns and throughout the country the signal for revolt was simultaneously given. It was a servile insurrection, accompanied by all the horrors inevitable to such a warfare. The debased populace, but little elevated above the brute, were as merciless as the hyena or the wolf. Phrensied with rage and despair, in howling bands they burst upon the castles, and the wrongs of centuries were terrifically avenged. We need not tell the story. Violence, torture, flame, and blood exhausted their energies. Mothers and maidens suffered all that mortals can endure in terror, brutal indignities, shame, and woe. In war even the refined and courteous often become diabolical; but those who have been degraded by ages of ignorance and oppression, when they first break their fetters, generally become fiends incarnate.

The nobles so thoroughly despised the peasants that they had not dreamed that the starving, cringing boors would dare even to think of emerging from their mud hovels to approach the lordly castle of rock, with its turrets and battlements and warlike defenders. The sheep might as well conspire against the dogs and the wolves. The peasant had hardly individuality enough even to receive a name. He was familiarly called Jack Goodman, Jacques Bonhomme. This insurrection of the Jacks, or of the Jacquerie as it is usually called, was, after much devastation and bloodshed, quelled. Barbaric phrensy can seldom long hold out against disciplined valor. One half of the population of France fell a prey to the sword, or to the pestilence and famine which ensued.

This was the first convulsive movement made by the people. Defeated though they were, and with their fetters riveted anew, they obtained new ideas of power and right which they never forgot. Already we begin to hear many of the phrases which four hundred years later were upon all lips, when the monarchy and the feudal aristocracy were buried in one common grave.

The house of Valois retained the throne for two hundred and sixty-one years. During these two and a half centuries, as generations came and went, storms of war and woe were incessantly sweeping over France. The history of the kingdom during these dreary ages is but the record of the intrigues of ecclesiastics, the conflicts between monarchs and nobles, and the sweep of maddened armies. The Third Estate, the people, continued to be deprived of almost all social and political rights. They were debased by ignorance and depressed by intolerable burdens. The monarchy was gradually centralizing power. The chiefs and sub-chiefs of the conglomerated tribes were losing their feudal authority and lapsing into nobles of higher and lower rank, whose splendor was obtained by exemption from all the burdens of the state, and by enormous taxation of the people. The Roman Catholic Church, under the Popes, blazed with almost supernatural splendor over Europe; and the high dignitaries of the Church, as lords spiritual, were as luxurious, haughty, and domineering as were any of the lords temporal.

Henry III., the last of the Valois race, was stabbed by a friar in 1589, and died leaving no issue. Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre, as the nearest relative, claimed the crown. He ascended the throne as Henry IV., and after several years of civil war put down all opposition. He was the first of the Bourbon family who swayed the sceptre, and by far the most able and energetic. Under his vigorous sway the kingdom became consolidated, the throne attained a great supremacy over the nobles, and the resources of the realm were greatly developed. Henry IV. was sincerely devoted to the interests of France. He encouraged commerce, manufactures, and the arts; endeavored to enforce equitable laws, and under his wise administration the people made decided advances in wealth and intelligence. He retained the throne for twenty-one years, until 1610, when he died beneath the dagger of an assassin. Though Henry governed for the people, he did not admit them to any voice in public affairs. During his long reign no assembly was convened in which the people had any representation.

Henry IV. at his death left a son, Louis, nine years of age. The mother of this child, Mary of Medicis, was invested with the regency. When this prince was fourteen years of age he was considered by the laws of France as having attained his majority. He accordingly, while thus but a boy, marrying a bride of fifteen, Anne of Austria, ascended the throne as Louis XIII. For twenty-eight years this impotent prince sat upon the throne, all the time in character a bashful boy devoid of any qualities which could command respect. Cardinal Richelieu was during this reign the real monarch of France. Measurelessly ambitious, arrogant, and cruel, he consolidated the despotism of the throne, and yet, by far-reaching policy, greatly promoted the power and grandeur of the kingdom. This renowned minister, stern, vindictive, cruel, shrinking from no crime in the accomplishment of his plans, with the dungeons of the Bastilles of France and the executioner's axe at his command, held the impotent king and the enslaved kingdom for nearly thirty years in trembling obedience to his will.

The Chateau of Versailles was commenced by Richelieu. He also, in the year 1635, established the French Academy, which has since exerted so powerful an influence upon literature and science throughout Europe. Richelieu died in December, 1642, and six months after, in May, 1643, Louis XIII., who, during his reign, had been but a puppet in the hands of the cardinal, followed him to the tomb. As the monarch was lying upon his dying bed, he called his little son, five years of age, to his side, and said to him, "What is your name?" "Louis Fourteenth," answered the proud boy, already eager to grasp the sceptre. "Not yet, not yet," sadly rejoined the dying father.

Anne of Austria held the regency for nine years, until her son, having attained the age of fourteen, had completed his minority and assumed the crown. Under this powerful prince the monarchy of France, as an unlimited despotism, became firmly established. The nobles, though deprived of all political power, were invested with such enormous privileges, enabling them to revel in wealth and luxury, that they were ever ready to unite with the king in quelling all uprising of the people, who were equally robbed by both monarch and noble. During the long reign of this monarch, for Louis XIV. sat upon the throne for seventy-two years, if we consider his reign to have commenced when he was proclaimed king upon the death of his father, France made vast strides in power, wealth, and splendor. Palaces arose almost outvying the dreams of an Oriental imagination. The saloons of Marly, the Tuileries, the Louvre, and Versailles, were brilliant with a splendor, and polluted with debaucheries, which Babylon, in its most festering corruption, could not have rivaled. The nobles, almost entirely surrendered to enervating indulgence, were incapacitated for any post which required intellectual activity and energy. Hence originated a class of men who became teachers, editors, scientific and literary writers, jurists, and professional men. In the progress of commerce and manufactures, wealth increased with this class, and the king, to raise money, would often sell, at an enormous price, a title of nobility to some enriched tradesman.

A numerous and powerful middle class, rich and highly educated, was thus gradually formed, who had emerged from the people, and whose sympathies were entirely with them. The nobles looked upon all these, however opulent, or cultivated in mind, or polished in manners, with contempt, as low-born. They refused all social intercourse with them, regarding them as a degraded caste. They looked with even peculiar contempt upon those who had purchased titles of nobility.

They drew a broad line of distinction between the nobles and the ennobled. The hereditary aristocracy, proud of a lineage which could be traced through a hundred generations, and which was lost in the haze of antiquity, exclaimed with pride, instinct to the human heart:

"You may give a lucky tradesman, in exchange for money, a title of nobility, but you can not thus make him a nobleman; you can not thus constitute him a lineal descendant of the old Frank barons; you can not thus constitute him a Lorraine, a Montmorency, a Rohan. God alone can create a nobleman."

Thus they regarded a man who had been ennobled by a royal decree, or who had descended from a father or a grandfather thus ennobled, as a new man, an upstart, one hardly redeemed from contempt. The doors of their saloons were closed against him, and he was every where exposed to mortifying neglect. A noble whose lineage could be traced for two or three centuries, but whose origin was still distinctly defined, was considered as perhaps belonging to the aristocratic calendar, though of low estate. The fact that the time once was, when his ancestors were known to be low-born, was a damaging fact, which no subsequent ages of nobility could entirely efface. He only was the true noble, the origin of whose nobility was lost in the depths of the past, the line of whose ancestry ran so far back into the obscurity of by-gone ages that no one could tell when it commenced.

It has generally been said that there were three estates in the realm; the clergy composing the first, the nobles the second, and the people the third. But the higher class of the clergy, luxuriating in the bishoprics and the abbacies, with their rich emoluments, were the sons of the nobility, and shared in all the privileges and popular odium pertaining to that class. The lower clergy, devoted to apostolic labors and poverty, belonged to the people, and were with them in all their sympathies. Thus there were in reality but two classes, the privileged and the unprivileged, the patrician and the plebeian, the tax payer and the tax receiver. The castle, whether baronial or monastic in its architecture, was the emblem of the one, the thatched cottage the symbol of the other. Louis XIV., as Madame de Maintenon testifies, was shocked to learn that Jesus Christ associated with the poor and the humble, and conversed freely with them.

Soon after the succession of Louis XIV. to the throne he became convinced that the maintenance of the Romish hierarchy was essential to the stability of his power. He consequently commenced a series of persecutions of the Protestants, with the determination of driving that faith entirely from France. In 1662 he issued a decree that no Protestant should be buried except after sunset or before sunrise. Protestant mechanics or shop-keepers were not allowed to have apprentices. Protestant teachers were permitted to instruct only in the first rudiments of letters, and not more than twelve Protestants were allowed to meet together for the purposes of worship. No Protestant woman could be a nurse in the chamber of infancy; no Catholic could embrace Protestantism or marry a Protestant woman under pain of exile. Catholic magistrates were empowered to enter the dying chambers of the Protestants to tease them, when gasping in death, to return to the Catholic faith. In four years, between 1680 and 1684, more than twenty royal edicts were issued against the Protestants, decreeing, among other things, that no Protestant should be a lawyer, doctor, apothecary, printer, or grocer. Children were often taken by violence from Protestant parents, that they might be trained in the Catholic faith.

Madame de Maintenon, the unacknowledged wife of Louis XIV., wished to bring back into the fold of Rome a young lady, Mademoiselle de Murgay. She consequently wrote to her brother:

"If you could send her to me you would do me a great pleasure. There are no other means than violence, for they will be much afflicted in the family by De Murgay's conversion. I will send you a lettre de cachet (secret warrant) in virtue of which you will take her into your own house until you find an opportunity of sending her off."[8]

Such outrages as these were of constant occurrence. Zeal for the conversion of the Protestants never rose to a higher pitch. At the same time Louis XIV. could bid defiance to God's commands, and insult the moral sense of the nation by traveling with his wife and his two guilty favorites, Madame de Montespan and Madame la Vallière, all in the same carriage. The profligacy of the ecclesiastics and the debauchery of the court and the nobles, though less disguised during the wild saturnalia of the succeeding regency, was never more universal than during this reign. This was the golden age of kings. Feudality had died, and democracy was not born. The monarchy was absolute. The nobles, deprived of all political power, existed merely as a luxurious appendage and embellishment to the throne, while the people, unconscious of either power or rights, made no movements to embarrass the sovereign.[9]

In the year 1681 Louis XIV. commenced his system of dragooning the Protestants into the Catholic faith. He sent regiments of cavalry into the provinces, quartered them in the houses of the Protestants, placing from four to ten in each family, and enjoined it upon these soldiers to do every thing they could to compel the Protestants to return to the Catholic faith. Scenes ensued too awful to be narrated. He who has nerves to endure the recital can find the atrocities minutely detailed in "L'Histoire de l'Édit de Nantes, par Elias Benoît."

The brutal soldiery, free from all restraint, committed every conceivable excess. They scourged little children in the presence of their parents, that the shrieks of agony of the child might induce the parents to abjure their faith. They violated the modesty of women and girls, and mangled their bodies with the lash. They tortured, mutilated, disfigured. And when human nature in its extreme of agony yielded, the exhausted victim was compelled to sign a recantation of his faith, declaring that he did it of his own free will, without compulsion or persuasion. In their terror the Protestants fled in all directions, into the fields, the forests, to caves, and made desperate endeavors to escape from the kingdom. Multitudes died of exhaustion and famine by the way-side and on the sea-shore. Large tracts of country were thus nearly depopulated. Madame de Maintenon wrote to her brother, sending him a present of a large sum of money:

"I beseech you employ usefully the money you are to have. The lands in Poitou are sold for nothing. The distresses of the Protestants will bring more into market. You can easily establish yourself splendidly in Poitou."

The Protestant countries, England, Switzerland, Holland, and Denmark, issued proclamations to these persecuted Christians offering them an asylum. The court was alarmed, and interdicted their leaving the kingdom under penalty of condemnation to the galleys, confiscation of their property, and the annulling of all contracts they should have made for a year before their emigration.[10]

The condition of the Protestants was now miserable in the extreme. It was the determination of the court utterly to exterminate the reformed faith. The Archbishop of Paris made out a list of the works of four hundred authors who were considered as assailing Catholicism, and all the libraries, public and private, of the kingdom were searched that the condemned books might be burned.

There were between two and three millions of Protestants in France.[11] The dragoons were sent in every direction through the kingdom, enjoined by the court, to secure, at whatever expense of torture, a return to Catholicism. One of the tortures which these merciless fanatics were fond of applying was to deprive their victim of sleep. They kept the sufferer standing, and relieved each other in their cruel work of pinching, pricking, twitching, pulling with ropes, burning, suffocating with offensive fumes, until after successive days and nights of torture the victim was driven to madness, and to promise any thing to escape from his tormentors. By these means, it was boasted that in the district of Bordeaux, where there were one hundred and fifty thousand Protestants, one hundred and forty thousand were converted in a fortnight. The Duke of Noailles wrote to the court that in the district to which he had been sent with his dragoons there had been two hundred and forty thousand Protestants, but he thought that by the end of the month none could be left.

In the year 1598 Henry IV., by the Edict of Nantes, had granted freedom of conscience and of worship to the Protestants. Louis XIV. now issued a decree revoking this edict. The revocation, which was signed the 18th of October, 1685, states in the preamble that "since the better and the greater part of our subjects of the pretended reformed religion have embraced the Catholic faith, the maintenance of the Edict of Nantes remains superfluous." It then declares that no more exercise of the reformed worship is to be tolerated in the realm. All the Protestant pastors were to leave the kingdom within fifteen days, and were forbidden to exercise their office under pain of the galleys. Parents were forbidden to instruct their children in the reformed faith, and were enjoined to send them to the Catholic church to be baptized and to be instructed in the Catholic schools and catechism, under penalty of a fine of five hundred livres. The Protestant laity were prohibited from emigrating under pain of the galleys for the men, and imprisonment for life for the women.

Notwithstanding the penalty, vast numbers escaped from the kingdom. No vigilance could guard such extended frontiers. In one year after the revocation, Vauban wrote that France had lost one hundred thousand inhabitants, twelve thousand disciplined soldiers, six hundred officers, and her most flourishing manufactures. The Duke of St. Simon records that "a fourth part of the kingdom was perceptibly depopulated."

These crimes perpetrated against religion filled the land with infidelity. There were even Catholics of noble name and note, as Fénélon and Massillon, who energetically remonstrated. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mirabeau, not distinguishing between Christianity and the Papal Church, uttered cries of indignation which thrilled upon the ear of Europe and undermined the foundations of Christianity itself.

The edict of revocation was executed with the utmost rigor. The pastors in Paris were not allowed even the fifteen days which the edict granted, but were ordered to leave in forty-eight hours. Those pastors who had children over seven years of age had those children taken from them. Fathers and mothers, thus robbed of their children, in poverty and heart-broken, were driven into exile. "Old men of eighty or ninety years were seen gathering up the last remains of their life to undertake distant journeys, and more than one died before reaching the asylum where he was to rest his weary foot and drooping head."[12]

The court became alarmed by the magnitude of emigration. Guards were posted at the gates of towns, at the fords of rivers, on the bridges, on the highways, and at all points of departure upon the frontiers. Still the fugitives, hiding in caverns by day and traveling by night through by-paths, in great numbers eluded their foes. Every conceivable disguise was adopted, as of shepherds, pilgrims, hunters, valets, merchants. Women of rank—for there were not a few such among the Protestants, who had been accustomed to all the delicacies and indulgences of life—traveled on foot, exposed to hunger and storms, two or three hundred miles. Girls of sixteen, of all ranks in life, incurred the same hardships and perils. They disfigured their faces, wore coarse and ragged garments, and trundled wheel-barrows filled with manure, or carried heavy burdens, to elude suspicion. Some assumed the disguise of men or boys and took the office of servants; others feigned insanity or to be deaf and dumb. In these ways large numbers escaped to Rotterdam.[13]

Those near the sea-shore concealed themselves in ships among bales of merchandise, and in hogsheads stowed away among the freight. There were children who passed whole weeks in such lurking places without uttering a cry. Some desperately pushed out to sea in open boats, trusting to winds and waves to bear them to a place of safety. Thousands perished of cold, exposure, and starvation. Thousands were seized, loaded with chains, and dragged through the realm in derision and contempt, and were then condemned to pass the remainder of their days as galley-slaves. The galleys of Marseilles were crowded with these victims, among whom were many of the noblest men who have ever dwelt on earth. The prisons were crowded with women arrested in their flight and doomed to life-long captivity.

It is estimated that five hundred thousand found a refuge in foreign lands. Thirteen hundred passed through the city of Geneva in one week. England formed eleven regiments out of the refugees. One of the faubourgs of London was entirely peopled by these exiles. M. de Sismondi estimates that as many perished in the attempt to escape as escaped. A hundred thousand in the Province of Languedoc died prematurely, and of these ten thousand perished by fire, the gallows, or the wheel.[14] We can not but sympathize with the indignation of Michelet as he exclaims:

"Let the Revolutionary Reign of Terror beware of comparing herself with the Inquisition. Let her never boast of having, in her two or three years, paid back to the old system what it did for us for six hundred years! The Inquisition would have good cause to laugh. What are the twelve thousand men guillotined of the one, to the millions of men butchered, hung, broken on the wheel—to that pyramid of burning stakes—to those masses of burnt flesh which the other piled up to heaven. The single inquisition of one of the provinces of Spain states, in an authentic monument, that in sixteen years it burned twenty thousand men!

"History will inform us that in her most ferocious and implacable moments the Revolution trembled at the thought of aggravating death, that she shortened the sufferings of victims, removed the hand of man, and invented a machine to abridge the pangs of death.

"And it will also inform us that the Church of the Middle Ages exhausted itself in inventions to augment suffering, to render it poignant, intense; that she found out exquisite arts of torture, ingenious means to contrive that, without dying, one might long taste of death; and that, being stopped in that path by inflexible Nature, who, at a certain degree of pain, mercifully grants death, she wept at not being able to make man suffer longer."[15]

Louis XIV. died in 1715. He did not allow any assembly of the states to be convened during his reign. Every body began to manifest discontent. The nobility were humbled and degraded, and hungered for more power. The people had become very restive. The humbler class of the clergy, sincere Christians and true friends of their parishioners, prayed earnestly for reform. The Jesuits alone united with the monarch and his mistresses to maintain despotic sway. The court was utterly corrupt; the king a shameless profligate. Every thing was bartered for money. Justice was unknown. The court reveled in boundless luxury, while the mass of the people were in a state almost of starvation. The burden had become intolerable.

The monarchy of France attained its zenith during the reign of Louis XIV. Immense standing armies overawed Europe and prevented revolt at home. Literature and art flourished, for the king was ambitious to embellish his reign with the works of men of genius. Great freedom of opinion and of utterance was allowed, for neither king nor courtiers appear to have had any more fear of a rising of the peasants than they had of a revolt of the sheep. Vast works were constructed, which the poor and the starving alone paid for. Still there were not a few who perceived that the hour of vengeance was at hand. One of the magistrates of Louis XIV. remarked, "The conflict is soon to arrive between those who pay and those whose only function is to receive." The Duke of Orleans, who was regent after the death of Louis XIV., said, "If I were a subject I would most certainly revolt. The people are good-natured fools to suffer so long."

Louis XIV. left the throne to his great-grandchild, a boy five years of age. The populace followed the hearse of the departed monarch with insults and derisive shouts to the tomb. The hoary despot, upon a dying bed, manifested some compunctions of conscience. He left to his successor the words:

"I have, against my inclination, imposed great burdens on my subjects; but have been compelled to do it by the long wars which I have been obliged to maintain. Love peace, and undertake no war, except when the good of the state and the welfare of your people render it necessary."

These words were not heeded, until the people were, in their terrible might, inspired by fury and despair.

There is nothing more mournful to contemplate than the last days of Louis XIV. He was the victim of insupportable melancholy, dreading death almost with terror. His children and his grandchildren were nearly all dead. The people were crushed by burdens which they could no longer support. The treasury was in debt over eight hundred millions of dollars. Commerce was destroyed, industry paralyzed, and the country uncultivated and in many places almost depopulated. The armies of France had been conquered and humiliated; a disastrous war was threatening the realm, and the king from his dying bed could hear the execrations of the people, rising portentously around his throne.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Histoire de Madame de Maintenon, et des principaux Evenements du Regne de Louis XIV. Par M. le Duc de Noilles, Paris, 1848.

[9] "Madame de Maintenon," writes St. Simon, "had men, affairs, justice, religion, all, without exception, in her hands, and the king and the state her victims."

[10] Under these circumstances the Protestants sent the following touching petition: "It being impossible for us to live without the exercise of our religion, we are compelled, in spite of ourselves, to supplicate your majesty, with the most profound humility and respect, that you may be pleased to allow us to leave the kingdom, with our wives, our children, and our effects, to settle in foreign countries, where we can freely render to God the worship which we believe indispensable, and on which depends our happiness or our misery for eternity." This petition met only the response of aggravated severities.—Hist. of the Protestants of France, by G. de Félice, p. 486.

[11] History of the Protestants of France, by G. de Félice, p. 405.

[12] History of the Protestants of France, by G. de Félice, p. 408.

[13] Histoire de l'Édit de Nantes, par Elias Benoît, tome v., p. 953.

[14] Boulainvilliers.

[15] "It is painful to detect continually the hand of the clergy in these scenes of violence, spoliation, and death. The venerable Malesherbes, the Baron de Breteuil, Rulhières, Joly de Fleury, Gilbert de Voisins, Rippert de Monclus, the highest statesmen, the most eminent magistrates, who have written upon the religious affairs of this period, utter but one voice on it. They agree in signalizing the influence of the priests, an influence as obstinate as incessant, sometimes haughty, sometimes supple and humble, but always supplicating the last means of restraint and severity for the re-establishment of religious unity."—History of the Protestants of France, by G. de Félice, p. 487.

[CHAPTER III.]

THE REGENCY AND LOUIS XV.

State of France.—The Regency.—Financial Embarrassment.—Crimes of the Rulers.—Recoining the Currency.—Renewed Persecution of the Protestants.—Bishop Dubois.—Philosophy of Voltaire.—Anecdote of Franklin.—The King's Favorites.—Mademoiselle Poisson.—Her Ascendency.—Parc aux Cerfs.—Illustrative Anecdote.—Letter to the King.—Testimony of Chesterfield.—Anecdote of La Fayette.—Death of Pompadour.—Mademoiselle Lange.—Power of Du Barry.—Death of Louis XV.

The reign of Louis XIV. was that of an Oriental monarch. His authority was unlimited and unquestioned. The people had two powerful foes, the king and the nobles. The nobles, as the most numerous, were the most dreaded. The people consequently looked to the kings to protect them against the nobles, as sheep will look to their natural enemy, the dogs, to defend them from their still worse enemies, the wolves. The king had now obtained a perfect triumph over the nobles, and had gathered all the political power into his own hands. He had accomplished this by bribery, as well as by force. The acquiescence of the nobles in his supremacy was purchased by his conferring upon them all the offices of honor and emolument, by exempting them from all taxes, and by supporting them in indolence, luxury, and vice, from the toil of the crushed and starving masses. There were now in the nation two classes, and two only, with an impassable gulf between them. On the one side were eighty thousand aristocratic families living in idleness and luxury; on the other were twenty-four millions of people, who, as a mass, were kept in the lowest poverty, maintaining by their toil the haughty nobles, from whom they received only outrage and contempt.

Louis XIV. just before his death drew up an edict appointing a council of regency during the minority of his great-grandson, the young king. The Parliament of Paris, however, declared the will null, and appointed the Duke of Orleans, who was considered favorable to the nobles, regent! For eight years, from 1715 to 1723, the regent, by shameless profligacy and extravagance, was but filling up the measure of wrath which had been accumulating for ages. Nothing was done to promote the welfare of the people, and, notwithstanding the misery which was actually depopulating the provinces, the gorgeous palaces of France exhibited scenes of voluptuousness which the wealth of the Orient had never paralleled.

Louis XIV. had expended upon the single palace of Versailles more than two hundred millions of dollars. The roofs of that vast pile would cover a surface of twenty-five French acres. Thirty thousand laborers were frequently employed simultaneously in embellishing the magnificent park sixty miles in circuit.[16] Marly, with its fountains, its parks, and gardens, had also been constructed with equal extravagance. Both of these palaces exhibited scenes of measureless profligacy gilded by the highest fascinations of external refinement and elegance. Louis XIV. left the nation in debt eight hundred and fifty millions of dollars. For several years the expenditure had exceeded the income by nearly thirty millions of dollars a year. The regent during the seven years of his profligate administration had added to this debt a hundred and fifty millions of dollars.

There was now fearful embarrassment in the finances. All the measures for extorting money seemed to be exhausted, and it was found impossible to raise the sums necessary to meet the expenses of the court and to pay the interest upon the debt. Taxation had gone to its last extremity; and no more money could be borrowed. The Duke of St. Simon proposed that the treasury should declare itself bankrupt.

"The loss," said he, "will fall upon the commercial and moneyed classes, whom no one fears or pities. The measure," he continued, "will also be a salutary rebuke to the ignoble classes, teaching them to beware how they lend money to the king which will enable him to gain the supremacy over the nobles."

The Duke of Orleans, who was regent only, not king, could sympathize in these views. The general discontent, however, was such, that he did not dare to resort to so violent a measure. The end was accomplished in a more circuitous way. A commission of courtiers was appointed to examine the accounts of the public creditors. Three hundred and fifty millions of francs ($76,000,000) were peremptorily struck from their claims. There was no appeal. This mode of paying debts seemed so successful that the commission established itself as an inquisitorial chamber, and summoned before it all those who had been guilty of lending money to the king. Most of these were thrown into prison, and threatened with death unless they purchased pardon for the crime with large sums of money. The regent and the nobles made themselves merry with the woes of these low-born men of wealth, and filled their purses by selling their protection.

A wealthy financier was perishing in one of the dungeons of the Bastille. A count visited him and offered to procure his release for sixty thousand dollars. "I thank you, Monsieur le Comte," was the reply, "but Madame, your countess, has just been here, and has promised me my liberty for half that sum."

The reign of the regent Duke of Orleans was the reign of the nobles, and they fell eagerly upon the people, whom Louis XIV. had sheltered from their avarice that more plunder might be left for him. The currency was called in and recoined, one fifth being cut from the value of each piece. By this expedient the court gained nearly fifteen millions of dollars.

Soon this money was all gone. The horizon was darkening and the approaching storm gathering blackness. Among the nobles there were some who abhorred these outrages. A party was organized in Paris opposed to the regent. They sent in a petition that the States-General might be assembled to deliberate upon the affairs of the realm. All who signed this petition were sent to the Bastille. There had been no meeting of the States-General called for more than one hundred years. The last had been held in 1614. It consisted of 104 deputies of the clergy, 132 of the nobles, and 192 of the people. The three estates had met separately and chosen their representatives. But the representatives of the people in this assembly displayed so much spirit that the convention was abruptly dismissed by the king, and neither king nor nobles were willing to give them a hearing again.

A bank was now established with a nominal capital of six millions of francs ($1,200,000). The shares were taken up by paying half in money and half in valueless government bills. Thus the real capital of the bank was $600,000. Upon this capital bills were issued to the amount of three thousand millions of francs ($600,000,000). Money was of course for a time plenty enough. The bubble soon burst. This operation vastly increased the financial ruin in which the nation was involved. Five hundred thousand citizens were plunged into bankruptcy.[17] The Parliament of Paris, though composed of the privileged class, made a little show of resistance to such outrages and was banished summarily to Pontoise.

Dubois, one of the most infamous men who ever disgraced even a court, a tool of the regent, and yet thoroughly despised by him, had the audacity one morning to ask for the vacant archbishopric of Cambray. Dubois was not even a priest, and the demand seemed so ridiculous as well as impudent that the regent burst into a laugh, exclaiming,

"Should I bestow the archbishopric on such a knave as thou art, where should I find a prelate scoundrel enough to consecrate thee?"

"I have one here," said Dubois, pointing to a Jesuit prelate who was ready to perform the sacrilegious deed. Dubois had promised Rohan that if he would consecrate him he would bring back the favor of the court to the Jesuit party. One of the mistresses of the regent had been won over by Dubois, and the bloated debauchee was consecrated as Archbishop of Cambray. Dubois was now in the line of preferment. He soon laid aside his mitre for a cardinal's hat, and in 1722 was appointed prime minister. The darkness of the Middle Ages had passed away, and these scandals were perpetrated in the full light of the 18th century. The people looked on with murmurs of contempt and indignation. It was too much to ask, to demand reverence for such a church.[18]

The infamous Jesuit, Lavergne de Tressan, Bishop of Nantes, who consecrated Dubois, revived from their slumber the most severe ordinances of Louis XIV. Louis XV. was then fourteen years of age. Royal edicts were issued, sentencing to the galleys for life any man and to imprisonment for life any woman who should attend other worship than the Catholic. Preachers of Protestantism were doomed to death; and any person who harbored such a preacher, or who should neglect to denounce him, was consigned to the galleys or the dungeon. All children were to be baptized within twenty-four hours of their birth by the curate of the parish, and were to be placed under Catholic instructors until the age of fourteen. Certificates of Catholicity were essential for all offices, all academical degrees, all admissions into corporations of trade. This horrible outrage upon human rights was received by the clergy with transport. When we contemplate the seed which the king and the court thus planted, we can not wonder at the revolutionary harvest which was reaped.

The Catholic Church thus became utterly loathsome even to the most devout Christians. They preferred the philosophy of Montesquieu, the atheism of Diderot, the unbelief of Voltaire, the sentimentalism of Rousseau, to this merciless and bloody demon, assuming the name of the Catholic Church, and swaying a sceptre of despotism which was deluging France in blood and woe. The sword of persecution which had for a time been reposing in its scabbard was again drawn and bathed in blood. Many Protestant ministers were broken upon the wheel and then beheaded. Persecution assumed every form of insult and cruelty. Thousands fled from the realm. Religious assemblies were surrounded by dragoons, and fired upon with the ferocity of savages, killing and maiming indiscriminately men, women, and children. Enormous sums of money were, by the lash, torture, the dungeon, and confiscation, extorted from the Protestants. Noblemen, lawyers, physicians, and rich merchants were most eagerly sought.

The seizure of Protestant children was attended with nameless outrages. Soldiers, sword in hand, headed by the priests, broke into the houses, overturned every thing in their search, committed brutal violence upon the parents, and, reckless of their lamentations and despair, seized the terrified children, especially the young girls, and forced them into the convents.

Fanaticism so cruel was revolting to the intelligence and to the general conscience of the age. Maddened priests could easily goad on a brutal and exasperated populace to any deeds of inhumanity, but intelligent men of all parties condemned such intolerance. It is, however, worthy of note that few of the philosophers of that day ventured to plead for religious toleration. They generally hated Christianity in all its forms, and were not at all disposed to shield one sect from the persecutions of another. Voltaire, however, was an exception. He had spent a year and a half in the Bastille on the charge of having written a libel against the government, which libel he did not write. When it was proved to the court that he did not write the libel he was liberated from prison and banished from France. Several years after this, Voltaire, having returned to France, offended a nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan. The chevalier disdainfully sent his servant to chastise the poet. Voltaire, enraged by the degradation, sent a challenge to De Rohan. For the crime of challenging a noble he was again thrown into the Bastille. After six months he was released and again exiled. Soon after his Lettres Philosophiques were condemned by the Parliament to be burned, and an order was issued for his arrest. For many years he was compelled to live in concealment. He thus learned how to sympathize with the persecuted. In his masterly treatise upon toleration, and in his noble appeals for the family of the murdered Protestant, Jean Calas, he spoke in clarion tones which thrilled upon the ear of France. When Franklin in Paris called upon Voltaire, with his grandson, he said, "My son, fall upon your knees before this great man." The aged poet, then over eighty years of age, gave the boy his blessing, with the characteristic words, "God and freedom." The philosophy of Voltaire overturned the most despicable of despotisms. His want of religion established another despotism equally intolerable.

The miserable regent died in a fit in the apartment of his mistress in 1723. The young king was now fourteen years of age. He was a bashful boy, with no thought but for his own indulgence. When a child he was one day looking from the windows of the Tuileries into the garden, which was filled with a crowd.

"Look there, my king," said Villeroi, his tutor; "all these people belong to you. All that you see is your property; you are lord and master of it."

Louis XV. carried these principles into vigorous practice during his long reign of fifty-nine years. When fifteen years of age he married Maria, daughter of Stanislaus, the exiled King of Poland. Maria was not beautiful, but through a life of neglect and anguish she developed a character of remarkable loveliness and of true piety. There is but little to record of France during these inglorious years which is worthy of the name of history. The pen can only narrate a shameful tale of puerility, sin, and oppression. Weary and languid with worn-out excitements, the king at one time took a sudden freak for worsted-work, and the whole court was thrown into commotion as imitative nobles and ecclesiastics were busy in the saloons of Versailles with wool, needles, and canvas.

The king at one of his private suppers noticed a lady, Madame de Mailly, whose vivacity attracted him. Simply to torture the queen he took her for his favorite, and received her into the apartment from which he excluded his meek and virtuous wife. Maria could only weep and look to God for solace. Madame de Mailly had a sister, a bold, spirited girl, Mademoiselle de Nesle. She came to visit the court, and after vigorous efforts succeeded in supplanting her sister, and took her degrading place. She was suddenly cut off in her sins by death; but there was another sister of the same notorious family, Madame Tournelle, who endeavored to solace the king by throwing herself into his arms. The king received her, and she became his acknowledged favorite, and for some time maintained the position of sultana of the royal harem. Wherever she went a suite of court-ladies followed in her train. All were compelled to pay homage to the reigning favorite of the day, for all power was in her hands, and she was the dispenser of rewards and punishments. The king conferred upon this guilty woman, who was as cruel as she was guilty, the title of Duchess of Chateauroux. Madame de Tencin, one of the ladies of the court, in a confidential letter to Richelieu, written at this time, says:

"What happens in his kingdom seems to be no business of the king's. It is even said that he avoids taking any cognizance of what occurs, averring that it is better to know nothing than to learn unpleasant tidings. Unless God visibly interferes, it is physically impossible that the state should not fall to pieces."

Even Madame Chateauroux, herself one of the most corrupt members of that court of unparalleled corruption, remarked to a friend,

"I could not have believed all that I now see. If no remedy is administered to this state of things, there will, sooner or later, be a great overthrow."[19]

Though the Duchess of Chateauroux was the reigning favorite, she had another younger sister who was a member of the royal harem. The princess of the blood, Mademoiselle Valois, and the Princess of Conti were also in this infamous train. These revolting facts must be stated, for they are essential to the understanding of the French Revolution. Up to this time the king, of whom the people knew but little, was regarded with affection. They looked upon him as the only barrier to protect them from the nobles. Soon after this Madame Chateauroux was taken sick and died in remorse, crying bitterly for mercy, and promising, if her life could be spared, amendment and penance. She was so detested by the people that an armed escort conducted her remains to the grave to shield them from popular violence.

The king, for a time, was quite chagrined by the death of this woman, who had obtained a great control over him. While profligacy and boundless extravagance were thus rioting in the palace, bankruptcy was ruining merchants and artisans, and misery reigned in the huts of the peasants.

A citizen of Paris by the name of Poisson had a daughter of marvelous grace and beauty. Mademoiselle Poisson married a wealthy financier, M. Etoilles. She then, conscious of her beauty and of her unrivaled powers of fascination, formed the bold and guilty resolve to throw herself into the arms of the king. When the king was hunting in the forest of Senart she placed herself in his path, as if by accident, in an open barouche, dressed in a manner to shed the utmost possible lustre upon her charms. The voluptuous king fixed his eye upon her and soon sent for her to come to the palace of Versailles. The royal mandate was eagerly obeyed. She immediately engrossed the favor of the king, was established in the palace, and henceforth became the great power before which all France was constrained to bow. Her disconsolate husband, who had loved her passionately, entreated her to return to him, promising to forgive every thing. Scornfully she refused to turn her back upon the splendors of Versailles. Receiving from the king as the badge of her degradation the title of Marchioness of Pompadour, Jeannette Poisson was enthroned as the real monarch of France. She was a woman of vast versatility of talent, brilliant in conversation, and possessed unrivaled powers of fascination. For twenty years she held the king in perfect subjection to her sway. She never for one moment lost sight of her endeavor to please and to govern the monarch. "Sometimes she appeared before him clad as a peasant-girl, assuming all the simplicity and rustic grace of this character. She took with equal ease the appearance of a languishing Venus or the proud beauty of a Diana. To these disguises often succeeded the modest garb of a nun, when, with affected humility and downcast eyes, she came to meet the king."

Her power soon became unlimited and invincible, for her heart was of iron, and even her feminine hand could wield all the terrors of court banishment, confiscation, exile, and the Bastille. It is said that a witticism of Frederic II. of Prussia, at her expense, plunged France into all the horrors of the Seven Years' War. The most high-born ladies in the land were her waiting-women. Her steward was a knight of the order of St. Louis. When she rode out in her sedan-chair, the Chevalier d'Hénin, a member of one of the noblest families of the kingdom, walked respectfully by her side, with her cloak upon his arm, ready to spread it over her shoulder whenever she should alight.

She summoned embassadors before her, and addressed them with the regal we, assuming the style of royalty. She appointed bishops and generals, and filled all the important offices of Church and State with those who would do her homage. She dismissed ministers and created cardinals, declared war and made peace. Voltaire paid court to her, and devoted his muse to the celebration of her beauty and her talents. Montesquieu, Diderot, and Quesnay waited in her antechamber, imploring her patronage. Those authors who pleased her she pensioned and honored; those who did not were left in poverty and neglect. Even the imperial Maria Theresa, seeking the alliance of France, wrote to her with her own hand, addressing her as her "dear friend and cousin." "Not only," said Madame de Pompadour one day to the Abbé de Bernis, "not only have I all the nobility at my feet, but even my lap-dog is weary of their fawnings." Rousseau, strong in the idolatry of the nation, refused to join the worshipers at the shrine of Pompadour. She dared not send him to the Bastille, but vexatiously exclaimed "I will have nothing more to do with that owl."

As Madame de Pompadour found her charms waning, she maintained her place by ministering to the king's appetites in the establishment of the most infamous institution ever tolerated in a civilized land. Lacretelle, in his History of France, thus describes this abomination:

"Louis XV., satiated with the conquests which the court offered him, was led by a depraved imagination to form an establishment for his pleasures of such an infamous description that, after having depicted the debaucheries of the regency, it is difficult to find terms appropriate to an excess of this kind. Several elegant houses, built in an inclosure called the Parc aux Cerfs, near Versailles, were used for the reception of beautiful female children, who there awaited the pleasure of their master. Hither were brought young girls, sold by their parents, and sometimes forced from them. It was skillfully and patiently fostered by those who ministered to the profligacy of Louis; whole years were occupied in the debauchery of girls not yet in a marriageable age, and in undermining the principles of modesty and fidelity in young women."

When some one spoke to Madame de Pompadour of this establishment, she replied,

"It is the king's heart that I wish to possess, and none of these little uneducated girls will deprive me of that."

If the king in his rides chanced to see a pretty child who gave promise of unusual beauty, he sent his servants to take her from her parents to be trained in his harem. The parents had their choice to submit quietly at home, or to submit in the dungeons of the Bastille. One incident, related by Soulavie, in his "Anecdotes of the Reign of Louis XV.," illustrates the mode of operation:

"Among the young ladies of very tender age with whom the king amused himself during the influence of Madame de Pompadour or afterward, there was also a Mademoiselle Treicelin, whom his majesty ordered to take the name of Bonneval the very day she was presented to him. The king was the first who perceived this child, when not above nine years old, in the care of a nurse, in the garden of the Tuileries, one day when he went in state to his good city of Paris; and having in the evening spoken of her beauty to Le Bel, the servant applied to M. de Sartine, who traced her out and bought her of the nurse for a few louis. She was the daughter of M. de Treicelin, a man of quality, who could not patiently endure an affront of this nature. He was, however, compelled to be silent; he was told his child was lost, and that it would be best for him to submit to the sacrifice unless he wished to lose his liberty also."

The expense of the Parc aux Cerfs alone, according to Lacretelle, amounted to 100,000,000 francs—$25,000,000.

These were not deeds of darkness. They were open as the day. France, though bound hand and foot, saw them, and exasperation was advancing to fury. An anonymous letter was sent to Louis, depicting very vividly the ruinous state of affairs and announcing the inevitable shock. Madame de Hausset, in her memoirs, gives the following synopsis of this letter:

"Your finances are in the greatest disorder, and the great majority of states have perished through this cause. Your ministers are without capacity. Open war is carried on against religion. The encyclopedists, under pretense of enlightening mankind, are sapping the foundations of Christianity. All the different kinds of liberty are connected. The philosophers and the Protestants tend toward republicanism. The philosophers strike at the root, the others lop the branches, and their efforts will one day lay the tree low. Add to these the economists, whose object is political liberty, as that of others is liberty of worship, and the government may find itself in twenty or thirty years undermined in every direction, and it will then fall with a crash. Lose no time in restoring order to the state of the finances. Embarrassments necessitate fresh taxes, which grind the people and induce toward revolt. A time will come, sire, when the people will be enlightened, and that time is probably near at hand."

The king read this letter to Madame de Pompadour, and then, turning upon his heel, said,

"I wish to hear no more about it. Things will last as they are as long as I shall."

On another occasion, Mirabeau the elder remarked in the drawing-room of Madame de Pompadour,

"This kingdom is in a deplorable state. There is neither national energy nor money. It can only be regenerated by a conquest like that of China, or by some great internal convulsion. But woe to those who live to see that. The French people do not do things by halves."

Madame de Pompadour herself was fully aware of the catastrophe which was impending, but she flattered herself that the storm would not burst during her life. She often said, "Après nous le déluge"—"After us comes the deluge."

The indications of approaching ruin were so evident that they could not escape the notice of any observing man. Even Louis XV. himself was not blind to the tendency of affairs, and only hoped to ward off a revolution while his day should last.

Lord Chesterfield visited France in 1753, twenty years before the death of Louis XV., and wrote as follows to his son:

"Wherever you are, inform yourself minutely of, and attend particularly to the affairs of France. They grow serious, and, in my opinion, will grow more so every day. The French nation reasons freely, which they never did before, upon matters of religion and government. In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions now exist and daily increase in France."

The great difficulty of raising money and the outrages resorted to for the accomplishment of that purpose alarmed the courtiers. One night, an officer of the government, sitting at the bedside of the king conversing upon the state of affairs, remarked,

"You will see, sire, that all this will make it absolutely necessary to assemble the States-General."

The king sprang up in his bed, and, seizing the courtier by his arm, exclaimed,

"Never repeat those words. I am not sanguinary; but, had I a brother, and did he dare to give me such advice, I would sacrifice him within twenty-four hours to the duration of the monarchy and the tranquillity of the kingdom."

It is not strange that in such a court as this Christianity should have been reviled, and that infidelity should have become triumphant.

"When I was first presented to his majesty Louis XV.," La Fayette writes, "I well remember finding the eldest son of the Church, the King of France and Navarre, seated at a table between a bishop and a prostitute. At the same table was seated an aged philosopher, whose writings had conveyed lustre upon the age in which he flourished; one whose whole life had been spent in sapping the foundation of Christianity and undermining monarchy. Yet was this philosopher, at that moment, the object of honor from monarchs and homage from courtiers. A young abbé entered with me, not to be presented to royalty, but to ask the benediction of this enemy of the altar. The name of this aged philosopher was Voltaire, and that of the young abbé was Charles Maurice Talleyrand."

Nearly all the infidel writers of the day—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert—were men hopelessly corrupt in morals. Many of them were keen-sighted enough distinctly to perceive the difference between Christianity and the lives of debauched ecclesiastics. But most of them hated Christianity and its restraints, and were glad to avail themselves of the corruptions of the Church that they might bring the religion of Christ into contempt. But there were not wanting, even then, men of most sincere and fearless piety, who advanced Christianity by their lives, and who with heroism rebuked sin in high places.

The Bishop of Senez was called to preach before the king. With the spirit of Isaiah and Daniel he rebuked the monarch for his crimes in terms so plain, direct, and pungent as to amaze the courtiers. The king was confounded, but God preserved his servant as Daniel was preserved in the lions' den.

At length Madame de Pompadour died, in 1764, and the execrations of France followed her to her burial. It was a gloomy day of wind and rain when the remains of this wretched woman were borne from Versailles to the tomb. The king had now done with her, and did not condescend to follow her to her burial. As the funeral procession left the court-yard of the palace he stood at a window looking out into the stormy air, and chuckled at his heartless witticism as he said, "The marchioness has rather a wet day to set out on her long journey." This remark is a fair index of the almost inconceivable heartlessness of this contemptible king.

Madame de Pompadour breathed her last at Versailles in splendid misery. She was fully conscious of the hatred of the nation, and trembled in view of the judgment of God. "My whole life," said she, in a despairing hour, "has been a continual death."

"Very different indeed," beautifully writes Julia Kavanagh, "were the declining years of Maria Lecsinska and those of the Marchioness of Pompadour. The patient and pious queen laid her sufferings at the foot of the cross. Insulted by her husband and his mistresses, neglected by the courtiers, deeply afflicted by the loss of her children, whom she loved most tenderly, she still found in religion the courage necessary to support her grief, and effectual consolation in the practice of a boundless benevolence."[20]

The old king was now utterly whelmed in the vortex of dissipation; character, and even self-respect, seemed entirely lost. He looked around for another female to take the place of Jeannette Poisson. In one of the low haunts of Parisian debauchery, the courtiers of the king found a girl of extraordinary beauty, calling herself Mademoiselle Lange. She had been sewing in the shop of a milliner, but was now abandoned to vice. She was introduced as a novelty to the voluptuous monarch, and succeeded in fascinating him. She received the title of Countess du Barry, and was immediately installed at Versailles as the acknowledged favorite of the king. Vice never rises, but always descends in the scale of degradation. The king had first selected his favorites from the daughters of nobles, he then received one from the class whom he affected to despise as low-born; and now a common prostitute, taken from the warehouses of infamy in Paris, uneducated, and with the manners of a courtesan, is presented to the nation as the confidant and the manager of the despicable sovereign. All the high-born ladies, accustomed as they were to the corruptions of the court, regarded this as an insult too grievous to be borne. The nobles, the clergy, the philosophers, and the people, all joined in this outcry. But Madame du Barry, wielding the authority of the king, was too strong for them all. She dismissed and banished from the court the Duke of Choiseul, the king's minister, and to his post she raised one of her own friends. She then, with astounding boldness, suppressed the Parliaments, thus leaving to France not even the shadow of representative power. Thus she proceeded, step by step, removing enemies and supplanting them by friends, until the most noble of the land were emulous of the honor of admission to the saloon of this worthless woman.

It is an appalling and a revolting fact that for half a century before the revolution France was governed by prostitutes. The real sovereign was the shameless woman who, for the time being, kept control of the degraded and sensual king. "The individual," says De Tocqueville, "who would attempt to judge of the government by the men at the head of affairs and not by the women who swayed those men, would fall into the same error as he who judges of a machine by its outward action and not by its inward springs."

The king was now so execrated that he dared not pass through Paris in going from his palace at Versailles to Compiègne. Fearing insult and a revolt of the people if he were seen in the metropolis, he had a road constructed which would enable him to avoid Paris. As beautiful female children were often seized to replenish his seraglio at the Parc aux Cerfs, the people received the impression that he indulged in baths of children's blood, that he might rejuvenate his exhausted frame. The king had become an object of horror.[21]

Such was the state of affairs when the guilty king was attacked by the small-pox, and died at Versailles in 1774, in the sixty-fourth year of his age and the fifty-ninth of his reign. Such in brief was the career of Louis XV. His reign was the consummation of all iniquity, and rendered the Revolution inevitable. The story of his life, revolting as it is, must be told; for it is essential to the understanding of the results which ensued. The whirlwind which was reaped was but the legitimate harvest of the wind which was sown. Truly does De Tocqueville say, "The Revolution will ever remain in darkness to those who do not look beyond it. It can only be comprehended by the light of the ages which preceded it. Without a clear view of society in the olden time, of its laws, its faults, its prejudices, its sufferings, its greatness, it is impossible to understand the conduct of the French during the sixty years which have followed its fall."

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Galignani's Paris Guide.

[17] History of French Revolution, by E.E. Crowe, vol. ii., p. 150.—Enc. Am.

[18] The Duke of St. Simon, who was one of the council of the regency, in his admirable memoirs, gives the following sketch of Dubois: "Dubois was a little, thin, meagre man, with a polecat visage. All the vices, falsehood, avarice, licentiousness, ambition, and the meanest flattery contended in him for the mastery. He lied to such a degree as to deny his own actions when taken in the fact. In spite of his debauchery he was very industrious. His wealth was immense, and his revenue amounted to millions."

[19] Women of France, p. 91.

[20] Women of France, p. 170.

[21] Historical View of the French Revolution, by J. Michelet, vol. i., p. 46.

[CHAPTER IV.]

DESPOTISM AND ITS FRUITS.

Assumptions of the Aristocracy.—Molière.—Decay of the Nobility.—Decline of the Feudal System.—Difference between France and the United States.—Mortification of Men of Letters.—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau.—Corruption of the Church.—Diderot.—The Encyclopedists.—Testimony of De Tocqueville.—Frederic II. of Prussia.—Two Classes of Opponents of Christianity.—Enormity of Taxation.—Misery of the People.—"Good old Times of the Monarchy!"

Having given a brief sketch of the character of Louis XV., let us now contemplate the condition of France during his long reign. It has been estimated that the privileged class in both Church and State consisted of but one hundred and fifty thousand. It was their doctrine, enforced by the most rigorous practice, that the remaining twenty-five millions of France were created but to administer to their luxury; that this was the function which Providence intended them to perform. Every office which could confer honor and emolument in the Church, the army, the State, or the Court, was filled by the members of an aristocracy who looked with undisguised contempt upon all those who were not high-born, however opulent or however distinguished for talents and literary culture. Louis XV., surrounded by courtesans and debauched courtiers, deemed it presumption in Voltaire to think of sitting at the same table with the king. "I can give pensions to Voltaire, Montesquieu, Fontinelle, and Maupertius," said the king, "but I can not dine and sup with these people."[22]

The courtiers of Louis XIV. manifested in the most offensive manner the mortification which they felt in being obliged to receive Molière, the most distinguished comic dramatist of France, to their table. No degree of genius could efface the ignominy of not being nobly born.[23] But, notwithstanding the arrogance of the nobles, they, as a class, had fallen into contempt. All who could support a metropolitan establishment had abandoned their chateaux and repaired to Paris. The rural castle was shut up, silence reigned in its halls, and grass waved in its court-yard. The bailiff only was left behind to wring the last farthing from the starving tenantry. Many of the noble families were in decay. Their poverty rendered their pride only the more contemptible. Several of the provinces contained large numbers of these impoverished aristocratic families, who had gradually parted with their lands, and who were living in a state of very shabby gentility. They were too proud to work and too poor to live without working. Turgot testifies that in the Province of Limousin there were several thousand noble families, not fifteen of whom had an income of four thousand dollars a year.[24] One of the crown officers wrote in 1750:

"The nobility of this section are of very high rank, but very poor, and as proud as they are poor. The contrast between their former and their present condition is humiliating. It is a very good plan to keep them poor, in order that they shall need our aid and serve our purposes. They have formed a society into which no one can obtain admission unless he can prove four quarterings. It is not incorporated by letters patent, but it is tolerated, as it meets but once a year and in the presence of the intendant. These noblemen hear mass, after which they return home, some on their Rosinantes, some on foot. You will enjoy this comical assembly."

In days of feudal grandeur the noble was indeed the lord and master of the peasantry. He was their government and their sole protector from violence. There was then reason for feudal service. But now the noble was a drone. He received, and yet gave nothing, absolutely nothing, in return. The peasant despised as well as hated him, and derisively called him the vulture.

The feudal system is adapted only to a state of semi-barbarism. It can no more survive popular intelligence than darkness can exist after the rising of the sun. When, in the progress of society, nobles cease to be useful and become only drones; when rich men, vulgar in character, can purchase titles of nobility, so that the nobles cease to be regarded as a peculiar and heaven-appointed race; when men from the masses, unennobled, acquire opulence, education, and that polish of manners which place them on an equality with titled men; when men of genius and letters, introduced into the saloons of the nobles, discover their own vast superiority to their ignorant, frivolous, and yet haughty entertainers; and when institutions of literature, science, and art create an aristocracy of scholarship where opulence, refinement, and the highest mental culture combine their charms, then an hereditary aristocracy, which has no support but its hereditary renown, must die. Its hour is tolled.

Such was the state of France at the close of the reign of Louis XV. It is estimated that there were in France at that time five hundred thousand well-informed citizens.[25] This fact explains both the outbreak of the Revolution and its failure. They were too many to submit to the arrogance of the nobles; hence the insurrection. They were too few to guide and control the infuriated masses when the pressure was taken from them, and hence the reign of terror, the anarchy and blood. The United States, with a population about the same as that of France in the morning of her Revolution, has four or five millions of intelligent and well-educated men. These men support our institutions. But for them, the republic would be swept away like chaff before the wind.

As we have before said, men of letters were patronized by the king and the court, but it was a patronage which seemed almost an insult to every honorable mind. The haughty duke would look down condescendingly, and even admiringly, upon the distinguished scholar, and would admit him into his saloon as a curiosity. High-born ladies would smile upon him, and would condescend to take his arm and listen to his remarks. But such mingling with society stung the soul with a sense of degradation, and none inveighed with greater bitterness against aristocratic assumption than those men of genius who had been most freely admitted into the halls of the great. They were thus exasperated to inquire into the origin of ranks, and their works were filled with eulogiums of equality and fraternity.

It was this social degradation which was one of the strongest incentives to revolution. This united all the industrial classes in France, all who had attained wealth, and all men of intellectual eminence, in the cry for reform. Equality of rights was the great demand thus forced from the heart of the nation. Fraternity became the watch-word of the roused and rising masses.[26]

Thought was the great emancipator. Men of genius were the Titans who uphove the mountains of prejudice and oppression. They simplified political economy, and made it intelligible to the popular mind. Voltaire assailed with keenest sarcasm and the most piercing invectives the corruptions of the Church, unjustly, and most calamitously for the interests of France, representing those corruptions as Christianity itself. Montesquieu popularized and spread before the nation those views of national policy which might render a people prosperous and happy; and Rousseau, with a seductive eloquence which the world has never seen surpassed, excited every glowing imagination with dreams of fascinating but unattainable perfection. Nearly all the revolutionary writers represented religion not merely as a useless superstition, but as one of the worst scourges of the state. Thus they took from the human heart the influence which alone can restrain passion and humanize the soul.

They represented man but as a lamb, meek and innocent, dumb before his shearers, and seeking only to live harmlessly and happily in the outflowings of universal benevolence and love. This lamb-like man needed no more religion than does the butterfly or the robin. He was to live his joyous day, unrestrained by customs, or laws, or thoughts of the future, and then was to pass away like the lily or the rose, having fulfilled his function. Death an eternal sleep, was the corner-stone of their shallow and degrading philosophy. The advocates of this sentimentalism were amazed when they found the masses, brutalized by ignorance and ages of oppression, and having been taught that there was no God before whom they were to stand in judgment, come forth into the arena of the nations, not as lambs, but as wolves, thirsting for blood and reckless in devastation. Libertines in France are still infidels, but they have seen the effect of their doctrines, and no longer dare to proclaim them. "Where is the Frenchman of the present day," says De Tocqueville, "who would write such books as those of Diderot or Helvetius?"[27]

Unfortunately, fatally for the liberties of France, the leading writers were infidels. Mistaking the corruptions of Christianity for Christianity itself, they assailed religion furiously, and succeeded in eradicating from men's souls all apprehensions of responsibility to God. Nothing could more effectually brutalize and demonize the soul of man. And yet the Papal Church, as a towering hierarchy, had become so corrupt, such an instrument of oppression, and such a support of despotism, that no reform could have been accomplished but by its overthrow.[28] It was the monarch's right arm of strength; it was the rampart which was first to be battered down.

The Church had no word of censure for vice in high places. It spread its shield before the most enormous abuses, and, by its inquisitorial censorship of the press, protected the most execrable institutions. The Church, enervated by wealth and luxurious indulgence, had also become so decrepit as to invite attack. No man could summon sufficient effrontery to attempt her defense. The only reply which bloated and debauched ecclesiastics could make to their assailants was persecution and the dungeon. There were a few truly pious men in the Church; they did, however, but exhibit in clearer contrast the general corruption with which they were surrounded.

Diderot, though educated by the Jesuits—perhaps because he was educated by the Jesuits—commenced his career by an attack upon Christianity in his Pensées Philosophiques. He was sent to prison, and his book burned by the public executioner. Still, multitudes read and so warmly applauded that he was incited to form the plan of the celebrated Encyclopedia which was to contain a summary of all human knowledge. In this grand enterprise he allied with him the ablest scholars and writers of the day—Mably, Condillac, Mercier, Raynal, Buffon, Helvetius, D'Alembert, and others. Nearly all these men, despising the Church, were unbelievers in Christianity. They consequently availed themselves of every opportunity to assail religion. The court, alarmed, laid a prohibition upon the work, but did not dare to punish the writers, as they were too numerous and powerful. Thus infidelity soon became a fashion. Notwithstanding the prohibition, the work was soon resumed, and became one of the most powerful agents in ushering in the Revolution.

"Christianity was hated by these philosophers," writes De Tocqueville, "less as a religious doctrine than as a political institution; not because the ecclesiastics assumed to regulate the concerns of the other world, but because they were landlords, seigneurs, tithe-holders, administrators in this; not because the Church could not find a place in the new society which was being established, but because she then occupied a place of honor, privilege, and might in the society which was to be overthrown."

Christianity is the corner-stone of a true democracy. It is the unrelenting foe of despotism, and therefore despotism has invariably urged its most unrelenting warfare against the Bible. When papacy became the great spiritual despotism which darkened the world, the Bible was the book which it hated and feared above all others. With caution this corrupt hierarchy selected a few passages upon submission and obedience, which it allowed to be read to the people, while the majestic principles of fraternity, upon which its whole moral code is reared, were vigilantly excluded from the public mind. The peasant detected with a Bible was deemed as guilty as if caught with the tools of a burglar or the dies of a counterfeiter.

It was impossible, however, to conceal the fact that the Bible was the advocate of purity of heart and life. Its teachings created a sense of guilt in the human soul which could not be effaced. Corrupt men were consequently eager to reject the Bible, that they might appease reproachful conscience. Frederick II., of Prussia, an atheist and a despiser of mankind, became the friend and patron of Voltaire in his envenomed assaults upon Christianity. Louis XV., anxious to maintain friendly political relations with Prussia, hesitated to persecute the recognized friend of the Prussian king. The courtiers, generally with joy, listened to those teachings of unbelief which relieved them from the restraints of Christian morality. Thus Christianity had two classes of vigorous assailants. The first were those who knew not how to discriminate between Christianity and its corruptions. They considered Christianity and the Papal Church as one, and endeavored to batter the hateful structure down as a bastille of woe. Another class understood Christianity as a system frowning upon all impurity, and pressing ever upon the mind a final judgment. They were restive under its restraints, and labored for its overthrow that guilt might find repose in unbelief.

Astonishment is often expressed at the blindness with which the upper classes of the Old Régime allowed their institutions to be assailed. "But where," asks De Tocqueville, "could they have learned better. Ruling classes can no more acquire a knowledge of the dangers they have to avoid, without free institutions, than their inferiors can discern the rights they ought to preserve in the same circumstances."[29]

The measureless extravagance of the court had plunged the nation into a state of inextricable pecuniary embarrassment. The whole burden of the taxes, in myriad forms, for the support of the throne in Oriental luxury, for the support of the nobles, who were perhaps the most profligate race of men the world has ever known; for the support of the Church, whose towering ecclesiastics, performing no useful functions, did not even affect the concealment of their vices, and who often vied with the monarch himself in haughtiness and grandeur; for the support of the army, ever engaged in extravagant wars, and employed to keep the people in servitude—all these taxes so enormous as to sink the mass of the people in the lowest state of poverty, debasement, and misery, fell upon the unprivileged class alone.

Taxes ran into every thing. The minister who could invent a new tax was applauded as a man of genius. All the offices of the magistracy were sold. Judges would pay an enormous sum for their office, and remunerate themselves a hundred-fold by selling their decisions. Thus justice became a farce. Titles of nobility were sold, which, introducing the purchaser into the ranks of the privileged class, threw the heavier burden upon the unprivileged. All the trades and professions were put up for sale. Even the humble callings of making wigs, of weighing coal, of selling pork, were esteemed privileges, and were sold at a high price. There was hardly any thing which a man could do, which he was not compelled to buy the privilege of doing. A person who undertook to count the number of these offices or trades for which a license was sold, growing weary of his task, estimated them at over three hundred thousand.[30]

An army of two hundred thousand tax-gatherers devoured every thing. To extort substance from the starving people the most cruel expedients were adopted. All the energies of galleys, gibbets, dungeons, and racks were called into requisition. When the corn was all absorbed, the cattle were taken. The ground, exhausted for want of manure, became sterile. Men, women, and children yoked themselves to the plow. Deserts extended, the population died off, and beautiful France was becoming but a place of graves.

The people thus taxed owned but one third of the soil, the clergy and the nobles owning the other two thirds. From this one third the people paid taxes and feudal service to the nobles, tithes to the clergy, and imposts to the king. They enjoyed no political rights, could take no share in the administration, and were ineligible to any post of honor or profit. No man could obtain an office in the army unless he brought a certificate, signed by four nobles, that he was of noble blood.

The imposition of the tax was entirely arbitrary. No man could tell one year what his tax would be the next. There was no principle in the assessment except to extort as much as possible. The tax-gatherers would be sent into a district to collect one year one million of francs, perhaps the next year it would be two millions. No language can describe the dismay in the humble homes of the peasants when these cormorants, armed with despotic power, darkened their doors. The seed-corn was taken, the cow was driven off, the pig was taken from the pen. Mothers plead with tears that food might be left for their children, but the sheriff, inured to scenes of misery, had a heart of rock. He always went surrounded by a band of bailiffs to protect him from violence. Fearful was the vengeance he could wreak upon any one who displeased him.

The peasant, to avoid exorbitant taxation, assumed the garb of poverty, dressed his children in rags, and carefully promoted the ruin and dilapidation of his dwelling. "Fear," writes de Tocqueville, "often made the collector pitiless. In some parishes he did not show his face without a band of bailiffs and followers at his back. 'Unless he is sustained by bailiffs,' writes an intendant in 1764, 'the taxables will not pay. At Villefranche alone six hundred bailiffs and followers are always kept on foot.'"[31]

Indeed, the government seemed to desire to keep the people poor. Savages will lop off the leg or the arm of a prisoner that he may be more helplessly in their power. Thus those despotic kings would desolate their realms with taxation, and would excite wars which would exhaust energy and paralyze industry, that the people thus impoverished and kept in ignorance might bow more submissively to the yoke. The wars which in endless monotony are inscribed upon the monuments of history were mostly waged by princes to engross the attention of their subjects. When a despot sees that public attention is directed, or is likely to be directed, to any of his oppressive acts, he immediately embarks in some war, to divert the thoughts of the nation. This is the unvarying resource of despotism. After a few hundred thousand of the people have been slaughtered, and millions of money squandered in the senseless war, peace is then made. But peace brings but little repose to the people. They must now toil and starve that they may raise money to pay for the expenses of the war. Such, in general, has been the history of Europe for a thousand years. Despots are willing that billows of blood should surge over the land, that the cries of the oppressed may thus be drowned.

So excessive was the burden of taxation, that it has been estimated by a very accurate computation that, if the produce of an acre of land amounted to sixteen dollars, the king took ten, the duke, as proprietor, five, leaving one for the cultivator.[32] Thus, if we suppose a peasant with his wife and children to have cultivated forty acres of land, the proceeds of which, at sixteen dollars per acre, amounted to six hundred and forty dollars, the king and the duke and the Church took six hundred of this, leaving but forty dollars for the support of the laborers.

Let us suppose a township in the United States containing twenty square miles, with five thousand inhabitants. Nearly all these are cultivators of the soil, and so robbed by taxes that they can only live in mud hovels and upon the coarsest food. Clothed in rags, they toil in the fields with their bareheaded and barefooted wives and daughters. The huts of these farmers are huddled together in a miserable dirty village. In the village there are a few shop-keepers, who have acquired a little property, and have become somewhat intelligent. There is also a physician, and a surgeon, and a poor, dispirited, half-starved parish priest. Upon one of the eminences of the town there is a lordly castle of stone, with its turrets and towers, its park and fish-pond. This massive structure belongs to the duke. Weary of the solitude of the country, he has withdrawn from the castle, and is living with his family in the metropolis, indulging in all its expensive dissipations. His purse can only be replenished by the money which he can extort from the cultivators of the land who surround his castle; and his expenses are so enormous that he is ever harassed by an exhausted purse.

For a few weeks in the summer he comes down to his castle, from the metropolis, with his city companions, to engage in rural sports. Wild boars, deer, rabbits, and partridges abound in his park. The boars and the deer range the fields of the farmers, trampling down and devouring their crops; but the farmer must not harm them, lest he incur the terrible displeasure of the duke. The rabbits and the partridges infest the fields of grain; but the duke has issued a special injunction that the weeds even must not be disturbed, lest the brooding partridges should be frightened away, to the injury of his summer shooting.

Perhaps one half of the land in the township belongs to the duke, and the farmers are mere tenants at will. During past ages, about half of the land has been sold and is owned by those who till it. But even they have to pay a heavy ground-rent annually to the duke for the land which they have bought. If a farmer wishes to purchase a few acres from his neighbor, he must first pay a sum to the duke for permission to make the purchase. For three or four days in the week the farmer is compelled, as feudal service, to work in the fields of the duke, without remuneration. When he has gathered in the harvest on his own land, a large portion of it he must cart to the granaries of the duke as a tax. If he has any grain to be ground, or grapes to press, or bread to bake, he must go to the mill, the wine-press, and the oven of the duke, and pay whatever toll he may see fit to extort. Often even the use of hand-mills was prohibited, and the peasant had to purchase the privilege of bruising his grain between two stones. He could not even dip a bowl of water from the sea, and allow it to evaporate to get some salt, lest he should interfere with the monopoly of the king. If he wishes to take any of his produce to market, he must pay the duke for permission to travel on the highway. Thus robbed under the name of custom and law, the farmer toils joylessly from the cradle to the grave, with barely sufficient food and shelter to keep him in respectable working order; and when he dies, he leaves his children to the same miserable doom. Such was the condition of the great mass of the French people during the long reign of Louis XV.

This intolerable bondage spread all through the minutiæ of social life. It was, of course, impossible but that the masses of the people should be in the lowest state of ignorance and indigence. Their huts, destitute of all the necessities of civilized life, were dark and comfortless, and even the merriment with which they endeavored at times to beguile their misery was heartless, spasmodic, and melancholy.[33]

In the year 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to Mrs. Trist, of Philadelphia, "Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion that there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence, than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States."[34]

Again he writes, in the same year, to M. Bellini, a Florentine gentleman who was professor in William and Mary College, "I find the general state of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire's observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil."

FOOTNOTES:

[22] Madame Campan's Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, vol. i., p. 388.

[23] Ib.

[24] "Men of rank sold their land piecemeal to the peasantry, reserving nothing but seigneurial rents, which furnished a nominal but not a substantial competency."—The Old Régime, De Tocqueville, p. 103.

[25] History of the French Revolution, by M. Rabaud de St. Etienne, p. 188.

[26] "A lord," writes Montesquieu, bitterly, "is a man who sees the king, speaks to the minister, has ancestors, debts, and pensions."

[27] The Old Régime, by De Tocqueville, p. 18.

"It is a singularity worth remarking that the Gospel is nothing but a declaration of rights. Its mysteries were a long time hidden, because they attacked the priests and the great."—M. Rabaud de St. Etienne, p. 174.

[28] "Shall we say, then, Woe to Philosophism that it destroyed Religion, what it called 'extinguishing the abomination'—écraser l'infâme? Woe rather to those that made the Holy an abomination and extinguishable."—Carlyle, French Revolution, i., 56.

[29] Old Régime, p. 175.

Count Segur, a peer of France, in his Memoirs, has very frankly described the feelings with which he and the young nobles who were his companions regarded the writings of the philosophers:

"We felt disposed to adopt with enthusiasm the philosophical doctrines professed by literary men, remarkable for their boldness and their wit. Voltaire seduced our imagination. Rousseau touched our hearts. We felt a secret pleasure in seeing that their attacks were directed against an old fabric which presented to us a Gothic and ridiculous appearance. We were pleased with this petty war, although it was undermining our own ranks and privileges and the remains of our ancient power. But we felt not these attacks personally. It was, as yet, but a war of words and paper, which did not appear to us to threaten the superiority of existence which we enjoyed, consolidated as we thought it by a possession of many centuries."

[30] History of the Revolution of France, by M. Rabaud de St. Etienne.

[31] For appalling proof of the sufferings of the tax-payers, turn to the pages of Michelet, of De Tocqueville, of any writer upon the Old Régime.

[32] Arthur Young, vol. i., p. 574; Marshall's Travels, vol. iv., p. 322.

[33] "Care must be taken not to misunderstand the gayety which the French have often exhibited in the greatest affliction. It is a mere attempt to divert the mind from the contemplation of misfortune which seems inevitable."—The Old Régime, by De Tocqueville, p. 167.

[34] Life of Jefferson, by Henry T. Randall, vol. i., p. 432.

[CHAPTER V.]

THE BASTILLE.

Absolute Power of the King.—Lettres de Cachet.—The Bastille.—Cardinal Balue.—Harancourt.—Charles of Armanac.—Constant de Renville.—Duke of Nemours.—Dungeons of the Bastille.—Oubliettes.—Dessault.—M. Massat.—M. Catalan.—Latude.—The Student.—Apostrophe of Michelet.

The monarchy was now so absolute that the king, without any regard to law, had the persons and the property of all his subjects entirely at his disposal. He could confiscate any man's estate. He could assign any man to a dungeon for life without trial and even without accusation. To his petted and profligate favorites he was accustomed to give sealed writs, lettres de cachet, whose blanks they could fill up with any name they pleased. With one of these writs the courtiers could drag any man who displeased them to one of the dungeons of the Bastille, where no light of the sun would ever gladden his eyes again. Of these sealed writs we shall speak hereafter. They were the most appalling instruments of torture despotism ever wielded.

The Bastille. At the eastern entrance of Paris stood this world-renowned fortress and prison. In gloomy grandeur its eight towers darkened the air, surrounded by a massive wall of stone nine feet thick and a hundred feet high. The whole was encircled by a ditch twenty-five feet deep and one hundred and twenty feet wide. The Bastille was an object exciting universal awe. No one could ever pass beneath its shadow without thinking of the sighs which ceaselessly resounded through all its vaults. It was an ever-present threat, the great upholder of despotic power, with its menace appalling even the boldest heart. It is easy to brave death from the bullet or the guillotine; but who can brave the doom of Cardinal Balue, who, for eleven years, was confined in an iron cage, so constructed that he could find no possible position for repose; or the fate of Harancourt, who passed fifteen years in a cage within the Bastille, whose iron bars required in their riveting the labors of nineteen men for twenty days? To be thus torn from wife, children, and home, and to be consigned for life to the unearthly woe of such a doom must terrify even the firmest soul. It is painful to dwell upon these details, but they must be known in explanation of the scenes of violence and blood to which they finally gave birth.

Charles of Armanac, for no crime whatever of his own, but because his brother had offended Charles XI., was thrown into prison. For fourteen years he lingered in the dungeon, until his reason was dethroned and his spirit was bewildered and lost in the woes of the maniac. Constant de Renville, a Norman gentleman, was accused, while in exile in Holland, of writing a satirical poem against France. For eleven years he was immured in one of the most loathsome dungeons of the Bastille. He appears to have been a man of true piety, and upon his release wrote an account of the horrors of his prison-house, which thrilled the ear of Europe.

The Duke of Nemours was accused of an intrigue against Louis XI. He was dragged from the presence of his wife, exciting in her such terror that she fell into convulsions and died. After two years' imprisonment he was condemned to be executed. A scaffold was erected with openings beneath the planks, and his three children were placed beneath the planks, bareheaded, clothed in white robes, and with their hands bound behind their backs, that the blood of their beheaded father might drop upon them, and that his anguish might be increased by witnessing the agony of his children. The fearful tragedy being over, these tender children, the youngest of whom was but five years of age, were again locked up in one of the gloomiest vaults of the Bastille, where they remained for five years. Upon the death of Louis XI. they were released. The two eldest, however, emaciate with privation and woe, soon died. The youngest alone survived.

Imagination can not conceive of an abode more loathsome than some of these horrible dens. The cold stone walls, covered with the mould of ages, were ever dripping with water. The slimy floor swarmed with reptiles and all kinds of vermin who live in darkness and mire. A narrow slit in the wall, which was nine feet thick, admitted a few straggling rays of light, but no air to ventilate the apartment where corruption was festering. A little straw upon the floor or upon a plank supported by iron bars fixed in the wall afforded the only place for repose. Ponderous double doors, seven inches thick and provided with enormous locks and bolts, shut the captive as effectually from the world and from all knowledge of what was passing in the world as if he were in his grave. His arrest was frequently conducted so secretly that even his friends had no knowledge of what had become of him; they could make no inquiries at the gloomy portals of the Bastille, and the unhappy captive was left to die unknown and forgotten in his dungeon. If by any happy chance he was liberated, he was first compelled to take an oath never to repeal what he had seen, or heard, or suffered within the walls of the Bastille.

Thus any person who became obnoxious to the king or any of his favorites was immediately transferred to these dungeons of despair. Cardinal Richelieu filled its cells with the victims of his tyranny. The captive immediately received the name of his cell, and his real name was never uttered within the precincts of the Bastille.

The Bastille was often full to overflowing, but there were other Bastilles in France sufficiently capacious to meet all the demands of the most inexorable tyranny.

It is the more necessary to dwell upon these details since the Bastille was the mailed hand with which aristocratic usurpation beat down all resistance and silenced every murmur. The Bastille, with its massive walls and gloomy towers and cannon frowning from every embrasure, was the terrific threat which held France in subjection. It was the demon soul of demoniac despotism. So awful was the terror inspired, that frequently the victim was merely enjoined by one of the warrants bearing the seal of the king to go himself to the dungeon. Appalled and trembling in every nerve, he dared not for one moment disobey. Hastening to the prison, he surrendered himself to its glooms, despairingly hoping, by prompt obedience, to shorten the years of his captivity.

There were vaults in the Bastille and other prisons of France called oubliettes, into which the poor victim was dropped and left to die forgotten. These were usually shaped like a bottle, with a narrow neck and expanding beneath. In one of these tombs of massive stone, twenty-two feet deep and seventeen or eighteen feet in diameter, with a narrow neck through which the captive could be thrust down, the inmate was left in Egyptian darkness amid the damp and mould of ages, and, trampling upon the bones of those who had perished before him, to linger through weary hours of starvation and woe until death came to his relief. Sometimes he thus lingered for years, food being occasionally thrown down to him.

There were twenty bastilles in France. In Paris, besides the Bastille, there were thirty prisons, where people might be incarcerated without sentence, trial, or even accusation. The convents were amply supplied with dungeons. All these prisons were at the disposal of the Jesuits. They were instruments of torture. The wretched victim, once consigned to those cells, was enshrouded by the oblivion of the tomb. The rich man was robbed of his wealth and taken there to be forgotten and to die. Beauty, whose virtue bribes could not destroy, was dragged to those apartments to minister to the lust of merciless oppressors. The shriek of despair, smothered by walls of stone and doors of iron, reached only the ear of God.[35]

During the reign of Louis XV. one hundred and fifty thousand of these lettres de cachet were issued, making an average of two thousand five hundred annually.[36] The king could not refuse a blank warrant to his mistress or to a courtier. All those who had influence at court could obtain them. They were distributed as freely as in this country members of Congress have distributed their postage franks. St. Florentin alone gave away fifty thousand. These writs were often sold at a great price. Any man who could obtain one had his enemy at his disposal. One can hardly conceive of a more awful despotism. Such were "the good old times of the monarchy," as some have insanely called them. Even during the mild reign of Louis XVI. fourteen thousand lettres de cachet were issued. Let us enter the prison and contemplate the doom of the captive.

A gentleman by the name of Dessault offended Richelieu by refusing to execute one of his atrocious orders. At midnight a band of soldiers entered his chamber, tore him from his bed, and dragged him through the dark streets to the Bastille, and there consigned him to a living burial in one of its cold damp tombs of iron and stone. Here in silence and solitude, deprived of all knowledge of his family, and his family having lost all trace of him, he lingered eleven years.

"Oh, who can tell what days, what nights he spent
Of tideless, waveless, sailless, shoreless woe!"

At last his jailer ventured to inform him that Richelieu was on a dying bed. Hoping that in such an hour the heart of the haughty cardinal might be touched with sympathy, he wrote to him as follows:

"My lord, you are aware that for eleven years you have subjected me to the endurance of a thousand deaths in the Bastille—to sufferings which would excite compassion if inflicted even upon the most disloyal subject of the king. How much more then should I be pitied, who am doomed to perish here for disobeying an order, which, obeyed, would have sent me to the final judgment with blood-stained hands, and would have consigned my soul to eternal misery. Ah! could you but hear the sobs, the lamentations, the groans which you extort from me, you would quickly set me at liberty. In the name of the eternal God, who will judge you as well as me, I implore you, my lord, to take pity on my woe, and, if you wish that God should show mercy to you, order my chains to be broken before your death-hour comes. When that hour arrives you will no longer be able to do me justice, but will persecute me even in your grave."

The iron-hearted minister was unrelenting, and died leaving his victim still in the dungeon. There Dessault remained fifty years after the death of Richelieu. He was at length liberated, after having passed sixty-one years in a loathsome cell but a few feet square. The mind stands aghast in the contemplation of such woes. All this he suffered as the punishment of his virtues. The mind is appalled in contemplating such a doom. Even the assurance that after death cometh the judgment affords but little relief. Michelet, an unbeliever in Christian revelation, indignantly exclaims, "though a sworn enemy to barbarous fictions about everlasting punishment, I found myself praying to God to construct a hell for tyrants."