reflected lights, these satellites professed to share their master’s Royal despotism. honor of all individual and collective rights of such a nature as to impose any check upon his public authority. Louis XIV. detested the states-general and never convoked them, and the parlements were definitely reduced to silence in 1673; he completed the destruction of municipal liberties, under pretext of bad financial administration; suffered no public, still less private criticism; was ruthless when his exasperated subjects had recourse to force; and made the police the chief bulwark of his government. Prayers and resignation were the only solace left for the hardships endured by his subjects. All the ties of caste, class, corporation and family were severed; the jealous despotism of Louis XIV. destroyed every opportunity of taking common action; he isolated every man in private life, in individual interests, just as he isolated himself more and more from the body social. Freedom he tolerated for himself alone.
His passion for absolutism made him consider himself master of souls as well as bodies, and Bossuet did nothing to contravene an opinion which was, indeed, common to every sovereign of his day. Louis XIV., like Philip II., pretending to not only political but religious authority, Louis XIV. and the Church. would not allow the pope to share it, still less would he abide any religious dissent; and this gave rise to many conflicts, especially with the pope, at that time a temporal sovereign both at Rome and at Avignon, and as the head of Christendom bound to interfere in the affairs of France. Louis XIV.’s pride caused the first struggle, which turned exclusively upon questions of form, as in the affair of the Corsican Guard in 1662. The question of the right of regale (right of the Crown to the revenues of vacant abbeys and bishoprics), which touched the essential rights of sovereignty, further inflamed the hostility between Innocent XI. and Louis XIV. Conformably with the traditions of the administrative monarchy in 1673, the king wanted to extend to the new additions to the kingdom his rights of receiving the revenues of vacant bishoprics and making appointments to their benefices, including taking oaths of fidelity from the new incumbents. A protest raised by the bishops of Pamiers and Aleth, followed by the seizure of their revenues, provoked the intervention of Innocent XI. in 1678; but the king was supported by the general assembly of the clergy, which declared that, with certain exceptions, the regale extended over the whole kingdom (1681). The pope ignored the decisions of the assembly; so, dropping the regale, the king demanded that, to obviate further conflict, the assembly should define the limits of the authority due respectively to the king, the Church and the pope. This was the object of the Declaration of the Four Declaration of the Four Articles. Articles: the pope has no power in temporal matters; general councils are superior to the pope in spiritual affairs; the rules of the Church of France are inviolable; decisions of the pope in matters of faith are only irrevocable by consent of the Church. The French laity transferred to the king this quasi-divine authority, which became the political theory of the ancien régime; and since the pope refused to submit, or to institute the new bishops, the Sorbonne was obliged to interfere. The affair of the “diplomatic prerogatives,” when Louis XIV. was decidedly in the wrong, made relations even more strained (1687), and the idea of a schism was mooted with greater insistence than in 1681. The death of Innocent XI. in 1689 allowed Louis XIV. to engage upon negotiations rendered imperative by his check in the affair of the Cologne bishopric, where his candidate was ousted by the pope’s. In 1693, under the pontificate of Innocent XII., he went, like so many others, to Canossa.
Recipient now of immense ecclesiastical revenues, which, owing to the number of vacant benefices, constituted a powerful engine of government, Louis XIV. had immense power over the French Church. Religion began to be identified with the state; and the king combated heresy and dissent, not only as a religious duty, but as a matter of political expediency, unity of faith being obviously conducive to unity of law.
Richelieu having deprived the Protestants of all political guarantees for their liberty of conscience, an anti-Protestant party (directed by a cabal of religious devotees, the Compagnie du Saint Sacrement) determined to suppress it completely by conversions and by a jesuitical interpretation of the Louis XIV. and the Protestants. terms of the edict of Nantes. Louis XIV. made this impolitic policy his own. His passion for absolutism, a religious zeal that was the more active because it had to compensate for many affronts to public and private morals, the financial necessity of augmenting the free donations of the clergy, and the political necessity of relying upon that body in his conflicts with the pope, led the king between 1661 and 1685 to embark upon a double campaign of arbitrary proceedings with the object of nullifying the edict, conversions being procured either by force or by bribery. The promulgation and application of systematic measures from above had a response from below, from the corporation, the urban workshop, and the village street, which supported ecclesiastical and royal authority in its suppression of heresy, and frequently even went further: individual and local fanaticism co-operating with the head of the state, the intendants, and the military and judiciary authorities. Protestants were successively removed from the states-general, the consulates, the town councils, and even from the humblest municipal offices; they were deprived of the charge of their hospitals, their academies, their colleges and their schools, and were left to ignorance and poverty; while the intolerance of the clergy united with chicanery of procedure to invade their places of worship, insult their adherents, and put a stop to the practice of their ritual. Pellisson’s methods of conversion, Suppression of the edict of Nantes (1685). considered too slow, were accelerated by the violent persecution of Louvois and by the king’s galleys, until the day came when Louis XIV., deceived by the clergy, crowned his record of complaisant legal methods by revoking the edict of Nantes. This was the signal for a Huguenot renaissance, and the Camisards of the Cévennes held the royal armies in check from 1703 to 1711. Notwithstanding this, however, Louis XIV. succeeded only too well, since Protestantism was reduced both numerically and intellectually. He never perceived how its loss threw France back a full century, to the great profit of foreign nations; while neither did the Church perceive that she had been firing on her own troops.
The same order of ideas produced the persecution of the Jansenists, as much a political as a religious sect. Founded by a bishop of Ypres on the doctrine of predestination, and growing by persecution, it had speedily recruited adherents among the disillusioned followers of the Louis XIV. and the Jansenists. Fronde, the Gallican clergy, the higher nobility, even at court, and more important still, among learned men and thinkers, such as the great Arnauld, Pascal and Racine. Pure and austere, it enjoined the strictest morals in the midst of corruption, and the most dignified self-respect in face of idolatrous servility. Amid general silence it was a formidable and much dreaded body of opinion; and in order to stifle it Louis XIV., the tool of his confessor, the Jesuit Le Tellier, made use of his usual means. The nuns of Port Royal were in their turn subjected to persecution, which, after a truce between 1666 and 1679, became aggravated by the affair of the regale, the bishops of Aleth and Pamiers being Jansenists. Port Royal was destroyed, the nuns dispersed, and the ashes of the dead scattered to the four winds. The bull Unigenitus launched by Pope Clement XI. in 1713 against a Jansenist book by Father Quesnel rekindled a quarrel, the end of which Louis XIV. did not live to see, and which raged throughout the 18th century.
Bossuet, Louis XIV.’s mouthpiece, triumphed in his turn over the quietism of Madame Guyon, a mystic who recognized neither definite dogmas nor formal prayers, but abandoned herself “to the torrent of the forces of God.” Fénelon, who in his Maximes des Saints had Louis XIV. and the Libertins. given his adherence to her doctrine, was obliged to submit in 1699; but Bossuet could not make the spirit of authority prevail against the religious criticism of a Richard Simon or the philosophical polemics of a Bayle. He might exile their persons; but their doctrines, supported by the
