elevation of thought and vigour of style, and further characterized by the proud though somewhat restricted freedom conceded to men like Corneille, Descartes and Pascal, but soon to disappear.
It was also necessary to win back from Spain the territory which the Frondeurs had delivered up to her. Both countries, exhausted by twenty years of war, were incapable of bringing it to a successful termination, yet neither would be first to give in; Mazarin, therefore, disquieted War with Spain. by Condé’s victory at Valenciennes (1656), reknit the bond of Protestant alliances, and, having nothing to expect from Holland, he deprived Spain of her alliance with Oliver Cromwell (March 23, 1657). A victory in the Dunes by Turenne, now reinstalled in honour, and above all the conquest of the Flemish seaboard, were the results (June 1658); but when, in order to prevent the emperor’s intervention in the Netherlands, Mazarin attempted, on the death of Ferdinand III., to wrest the Empire from the Habsburgs, he was foiled by the gold of the Spanish envoy Peñaranda (1657). When the abdication of Christina of Sweden caused a quarrel between Charles Gustavus of Sweden and John Casimir of Poland, by which the emperor and the elector of Brandenburg hoped to profit, Mazarin (August 15, 1658) leagued the Rhine princes against them; while at the same time the substitution of Pope Alexander VII. for Innocent X., and the marriage of Mazarin’s two nieces with the duke of Modena and a prince of the house of Savoy, made Spain anxious about her Italian possessions. The suggestion of a marriage between Louis XIV. and a princess of Savoy Peace of the Pyrenees. decided Spain, now brought to bay, to accord him the hand of Maria Theresa as a chief condition of the peace of the Pyrenees (November 1659). Roussillon and Artois, with a line of strongholds constituting a formidable northern frontier, were ceded to France; and the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine under certain conditions was ratified. Thus from this long duel between the two countries Spain issued much enfeebled, while France obtained the preponderance in Italy, Germany, and throughout northern Europe, as is proved by Mazarin’s successful arbitration at Copenhagen and at Oliva (May-June 1660). That dream of Henry IV. and Richelieu, the ruin of Philip II.’s Catholic empire, was made a realized fact by Mazarin; but the clever engineer, dazzled by success, took the wrong road in national policy when he hoped to crown his work by the Spanish marriage.
The development of events had gradually enlarged the royal
prerogative, and it now came to its full flower in the administrative
monarchy of the 17th century. Of this system
Louis XIV. was to be the chief exponent. His
reign may be divided into two very distinct periods.
Louis XIV.
(1661–1715).
The death of Colbert and the revocation of the edict
of Nantes brought the first to a close (1661–1683–1685); coinciding
with the date when the Revolution in England definitely
reversed the traditional system of alliances, and when the
administration began to disorganize. In the second period
(1685–1715) all the germs of decadence were developed until the
moment of final dissolution.
In a monarchy so essentially personal the preparation of
the heir to the throne for his position should have been the chief
task. Anne of Austria, a devoted but unintelligent
mother, knew no method of dealing with her son,
save devotion combined with the rod. His first
Education of
Louis XIV.
preceptors were nothing but courtiers; and the most
intelligent, his valet Laporte, developed in the royal child’s
mind his natural instinct of command, a very lively sense of his
rank, and that nobly majestic air of master of the world which
he preserved even in the commonest actions of his life. The
continual agitations of the Fronde prevented him from persevering
in any consistent application during those years which are
the most valuable for study, and only instilled in him a horror
of revolution, parliamentary remonstrance, and disorder of
all kinds; so that this recollection determined the direction
of his government. Mazarin, in his later years, at last taught
him his trade as king by admitting him to the council, and by
instructing him in the details of politics and of administration.
In 1661 Louis XIV. was a handsome youth of twenty-two,
of splendid health and gentle serious mien; eager for pleasure,
but discreet and even dissimulating; his rather mediocre
intellectual qualities relieved by solid common sense; fully
alive to his rights and his duties.
The duties he conscientiously fulfilled, but he considered he need render no account of them to any one but his Maker, the last humiliation for God’s vicegerent being “to take the law from his people.” In the solemn language of the “Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin” His political ideas. he did but affirm the arbitrary and capricious character of his predecessors’ action. As for his rights, Louis XIV. looked upon these as plenary and unlimited. Representative of God upon earth, heir to the sovereignty of the Roman emperors, a universal suzerain and master over the goods and the lives of his vassals, he could conceive no other bounds to his authority than his own interests or his obligations towards God, and in this he was a willing believer of Bossuet. He therefore had but two aims: to increase his power at home and to enlarge his kingdom abroad. The army and taxation were the chief instruments of his policy. Had not Bodin, Hobbes and Bossuet taught that the force which gives birth to kingdoms serves best also to feed and sustain them? His theory of the state, despite Grotius and Jurieu, rejected as odious and even impious the notion of any popular rights, anterior and superior to his own. A realist in principle, Louis XIV. was terribly utilitarian and egotistical in practice; and he exacted from his subjects an absolute, continual and obligatory self-abnegation before his public authority, even when improperly exercised.
This deified monarch needed a new temple, and Versailles, where everything was his creation, both men and things, adored its maker. The highest nobility of France, beginning with the princes of the blood, competed for posts in the royal household, where an army of ten thousand The forms of Louis XIV.’s monarchy. soldiers, four thousand servants, and five thousand horses played its costly and luxurious part in the ordered and almost religious pageant of the king’s existence. The “anciennes cohues de France,” gay, familiar and military, gave place to a stilted court life, a perpetual adoration, a very ceremonious and very complicated ritual, in which the demigod “pontificated” even “in his dressing-gown.” To pay court to himself was the first and only duty in the eyes of a proud and haughty prince who saw and noted everything, especially any one’s absence. Versailles, where the delicate refinements of Italy and the grave politeness of Spain were fused and mingled with French vivacity, became the centre of national life and a model for foreign royalties; hence if Versailles has played a considerable part in the history of civilization, it also seriously modified the life of France. Etiquette and self-seeking became the chief rules of a courtier’s life, and this explains the division of the nobility into two sections: the provincial squires, embittered by neglect; and the courtiers, who were ruined materially and intellectually by their way of living. Versailles sterilized all the idle upper classes, exploited the industrious classes by its extravagance, and more and more broke relations between king and kingdom.
But however divine, the king could not wield his power unaided. Louis XIV. called to his assistance a hierarchy of humbly submissive functionaries, and councils over which he regularly presided. Holding the very name of roi fainéant in abhorrence, he abolished the office Louis XIV.’s ministers. of mayor of the palace—that is to say, the prime minister—thus imposing upon himself work which he always regularly performed. In choosing his collaborators his principle was never to select nobles or ecclesiastics, but persons of inferior birth. Neither the immense fortunes amassed by these men, nor the venality and robust vitality which made their families veritable races of ministers, altered the fact that De Lionne, Le Tellier, Louvois and Colbert were in themselves of no account, even though the parts they played were much more important than Louis XIV. imagined. This was the age of plebeians, to the great indignation of the duke and peer Saint Simon. Mere
