associated the nation with himself in the work of reconstructing the shattered monarchy. But during the atrocious holocausts formidable states had grown up around France, observing her and threatening her; and on the other hand, as on the morrow of the Hundred Years’ War, the lassitude of the country, the lack of political feeling on the part of the upper classes and their selfishness, led to a fresh abdication of the nation’s rights. The need of living caused the neglect of that necessity for control which had been maintained by the states-general from 1560 to 1593. And this time, moderation on the part of the monarchy no longer made for success. Of the two contrary currents which have continually mingled and conflicted throughout the course of French history, that of monarchic absolutism and that of aristocratic and democratic liberty, the former was now to carry all before it.
The kingdom was now issuing from thirty-eight years of civil war. Its inhabitants had grown unaccustomed to work; its finances were ruined by dishonesty, disorder, and a very heavy foreign debt. The most characteristic symptom of this distress was the brigandage carried The Bourbons. France in 1610. on incessantly from 1598 to 1610. Side by side with this temporary disorder there was a more serious administrative disorganization, a habit of no longer obeying the king. The harassed population, the municipalities which under cover of civil war had resumed the right of self-government, and the parlements elated with their social importance and their security of position, were not alone in abandoning duty and obedience. Two powers faced each other threateningly: the organized and malcontent Protestants; and the provincial governors, all great personages possessing an armed following, theoretically agents of the king, but practically independent. The Montmorencys, the D’Epernons, the Birons, the Guises, were accustomed to consider their offices as hereditary property. Not that these two powers entered into open revolt against the king; but they had adopted the custom of recriminating, of threatening, of coming to understandings with the foreign powers, which with some of them, like Marshal Biron, the D’Entragues and the duc de Bouillon, amounted to conspiracy (1602–1606).
As to the qualifications of the king: he had had the good
fortune not to be educated for the throne. Without much
learning and sceptical in religious matters, he had the
lively intelligence of the Gascon, more subtle than
profound, more brilliant than steady. Married to a
Character
of Henry IV.
woman of loose morals, and afterwards to a devout
Italian, he was gross and vulgar in his appetites and pleasures.
He had retained all the habits of a country gentleman of his
native Béarn, careless, familiar, boastful, thrifty, cunning,
combined since his sojourn at the court of the Valois with a
taint of corruption. He worked little but rapidly, with none
of the bureaucratic pedantry of a Philip II. cloistered in the dark
towers of the Escurial. Essentially a man of action and a soldier,
he preserved his tone of command after he had reached the
throne, the inflexibility of the military chief, the conviction of
his absolute right to be master. Power quickly intoxicated
him, and his monarchy was therefore anything but parliamentary.
His personality was everything, institutions nothing. If, at
the gathering of the notables at Rouen in 1596, Henry IV.
spoke of putting himself in tutelage, that was but preliminary
to a demand for money. The states-general, called together ten
times in the 16th century, and at the death of Henry III. under
promise of convocation, were never assembled. To put his
absolute right beyond all control he based it upon religion, and
to this sceptic disobedience became a heresy. He tried to
make the clergy into an instrument of government by recalling the
Jesuits, who had been driven away in 1594, partly from fear of
their regicides, partly because they have always been the best
teachers of servitude; and he gave the youth of the nation into
the hands of this cosmopolitan and ultramontane clerical order.
His government was personal, not through departments; he
retained the old council though reducing its members; and his
ministers, taken from every party, were never—not even Sully—anything
more than mere clerks, without independent position,
mere instruments of his good pleasure. Fortunately this was
not always capricious.
Henry IV. soon realized that his most urgent duty was to
resuscitate the corpse of France. Pilfering was suppressed,
and the revolts of the malcontents—the Gauthiers of
Normandy, the Croquants and Tard-avisés of Périgord
later with a sterner hand. He then provided for the
The achievements
of Henry IV.
security of the country districts, and reduced the taxes on the
peasants, the most efficacious means of making them productive
and able to pay. Inspired by Barthélemy de Laffémas (1545–1612),
controller-general of commerce, and by Olivier de Serres
(1539–1619),[1] Henry IV. encouraged the culture of silk, though
without much result, had orchards planted and marshes drained;
while though he permitted the free circulation of wine and corn,
this depended on the harvests. But the twofold effect of civil
war—the ruin of the farmers and the scarcity and high price of
rural labour—was only reduced arbitrarily and by fits and
starts.
Despite the influence of Sully, a convinced agrarian because
of his horror of luxury and love of economy, Henry IV. likewise
attempted amelioration in the towns, where the state
of affairs was even worse than in the country. But the
edict of 1597, far from inaugurating individual liberty,
Industrial policy
of Henry IV.
was but a fresh edition of that of 1581, a second
preface to the legislation of Colbert, and in other ways no better
respected than the first. As for the new features, the syndical
courts proposed by Laffémas, they were not even put into
practice. Various industries, nevertheless, concurrent with
those of England, Spain and Italy, were created or reorganized:
silk-weaving, printing, tapestry, &c. Sully at least provided
renascent manufacture with the roads necessary for communication
and planted them with trees. In external commerce
Laffémas and Henry IV. were equally the precursors of Colbert,
freeing raw material and prohibiting the import of products
similar to those manufactured within the kingdom. Without
regaining that preponderance in the Levant which had been
secured after the victory of Lepanto and before the civil wars,
Marseilles still took an honourable place there, confirmed by
the renewal in 1604 of the capitulations of Francis I. with the
sultan. Finally, the system of commercial companies, antipathetic
to the French bourgeoisie, was for the first time practised
on a grand scale; but Sully never understood that movement
of colonial expansion, begun by Henry II. in Brazil and continued
in Canada by Champlain, which had so marvellously enlarged
the European horizon. His point of view was altogether more
limited than that of Henry IV.; and he did not foresee, like
Elizabeth, that the future would belong to the peoples whose
national energy took that line of action.
His sphere was essentially the superintendence of finance, to which he brought the same enthusiasm that he had shown in fighting the League. Vain and imaginative, his reputation was enormously enhanced by his “Économies royales”; he was no innovator, and The work of Sully. being a true representative of the nation at that period, like it he was but lukewarm towards reform, accepting it always against the grain. He was not a financier of genius; but he administered the public moneys with the same probity and exactitude which he used in managing his own, retrieving alienated property, straightening accounts, balancing expenditure and receipts, and amassing a reserve in the Bastille. He did not reform the system of aides and tailles established by Louis XI. in 1482; but by charging much upon indirect taxation, and slightly lessening the burden of direct taxation, he avoided an appeal to the states-general and gave an illusion of relief.
Nevertheless, economic disasters, political circumstances and the personal government of Henry IV. (precursor in this also
- ↑ Olivier de Serres, sieur de Pradel, spent most of his life on his model farm at Pradel. In 1599 he dedicated a pamphlet on the cultivation of silk to Henry IV., and in 1600 published his Théâtre d’agriculture et ménage des champs, which passed through nineteen editions up to 1675.