The Age of Louis XIV

  Meanwhile the dragonnades had begun. It was an old custom in France to lodge troops in and at the expense of communes or homes. Louvois, minister of war, proposed to the King (April 11, 1681) that converts to Catholicism be exempt for two years from such billeting of troops. It was so ordered. Louvois now directed the military administrators of the provinces of Poitou and Limousin to house their dragoons (mounted soldiers) among Huguenots, especially among the well-to-do. In Poitou Maréchal de Marillac let his troops understand that he would not resent some apostolic zeal in their treatment of their heretic hosts. Soon the soldiers were robbing, beating, raping the Huguenots. When Louis heard of these excesses he reproved Marillac, and when they continued he dismissed him. 93 On May 19 he ordered the suspension of conversion by billeting, and condemned the acts of violence committed in some places against the Reformers. 94 Louvois notified provincial administrators that they might continue the dragonnades, but warned them to keep all knowledge of this from the King. The dragonnades spread through a large part of France, and brought in thousands of converts; some towns and provinces—Montpellier, Nîmes, Béarn—abjured wholesale their Calvinistic faith. The majority of the Huguenots, terrified, pretended conversion; but thousands, defying the laws, abandoned their homes and property and fled across frontiers or overseas. Louis was told that very few Huguenots were left in France, and that the Edict of Nantes had become meaningless. In 1684 the general assembly of the clergy petitioned the King that the edict be completely annulled, and that “the undisturbed reign of Jesus Christ. . . be re-established in France.” 95

  On October 17, 1685, the King revoked the Edict of Nantes as now unnecessary in a France almost entirely Catholic. All Huguenot worship and schooling were henceforth forbidden. All Huguenot conventicles were to be destroyed or transformed into Catholic churches. Huguenot clergymen were ordered to leave France within fourteen days, but emigration of other Huguenots was prohibited on pain of condemnation to the galleys for life. Half the goods of lay emigrants was pledged to informers. 96 All children born in France were to be baptized by priests, and were to be brought up in the Catholic faith. A final clause promised that the few remaining Huguenots would be allowed to dwell peacefully in certain towns. This article was carried out in Paris and its suburbs; Huguenot tradesmen there were protected and reassured by the lieutenant of police; there were no dragonnades in or near Paris; the dancing could go on at Versailles, and the King could sleep with a good conscience. But in many provinces, under Louvois’ urging, 97 the dragonnades continued, and obdurate Huguenots were subjected to pillage and torture. Says the leading French authority on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes:

  All was permitted to the soldiers except murder. They made the Huguenots dance till exhausted; they tossed them up in blankets; they poured boiling water down their throats . . . ; they beat the soles of their feet; they pulled out the hair of beards . . .; they burned the arms and legs of their hosts with candle flame . . .; they forced them to hold burning charcoal in their hands . . . They burned the feet of many, holding them long before a great fire . . . They forced women to stand naked in the street, to bear the mockery and outrages of passersby. They bound a nursing mother to a bedpost, and held away from her the infant crying for her breast; and when she opened her mouth to plead with them they spat into her mouth. 98

  This holy terror of 1685, Michelet thought, was far worse than the Revolutionary Terror of 1793. 99 Some 400,000 “converts” were forced to attend Mass and receive the Eucharist; a few who spat out the consecrated wafers when they left the church were condemned to be burned alive. 100 Obstinate Huguenot males were imprisoned in subterranean dungeons or unheated cells. Obdurate Huguenot women were sent to confinement in convents, where they received unexpectedly merciful treatment from the nuns. 101

  Two provinces resisted with special valor. Of the Vaudois in French Dauphiné and Savoyard Piedmont we shall hear later. In the valleys of the Cevennes range in Languedoc thousands of “converted” Huguenots secretly retained their faith, waiting for time and chance to free them; and their “prophets,” claiming divine inspiration, assured them that the time was near at hand. When the War of the Spanish Succession seemed to absorb French arms, the peasants formed rebel groups of “Camisards,” who donned white shirts to be recognized by one another at night. In one foray they killed the Abbé du Chayla, who had persecuted them with special ardor. A regiment of soldiery suddenly came down upon them, massacred them indiscriminately, and destroyed their houses and crops (1702). A remnant fought back ferociously until the conciliatory methods of Maréchal de Villars pursuaded them to peace.

  Of the 1,500,000 Huguenots who had been living in France in 1660, some 400,000, in the decade before and after the Revocation, escaped across guarded borders at the risk of their lives. A thousand tales of heroism survived for a century from those desperate years. Protestant countries welcomed the fugitives. Geneva, a city of sixteen thousand souls, found room for four thousand Huguenots. Charles II and James II, despite their Catholicism, offered Huguenots material aid, and eased their absorption into English economic and political life. The Elector of Brandenburg gave them so friendly a reception that by 1697 over a fifth of Berlin’s population was French. Holland opened its doors, built a thousand homes to house the newcomers, lent them money to set up business, and guaranteed them all the rights of citizenship; Dutch Catholics joined Protestants and Jews in raising funds for Huguenot relief. The grateful refugees not only enriched industry and trade in the United Provinces, they enlisted in Dutch and English armies fighting France. Some of them accompanied or followed William III to England to help him against James II; the French Calvinist Marshal Schomberg, who had won victories for Louis XIV, led an English army against the French, and died in defeating them in the battle of the Boyne (1690). Everywhere in these hospitable lands the Huguenots brought their skills in crafts, commerce and finance; all Protestant Europe profited from the victory of Catholicism in France. An entire quarter of London was occupied by French silk workers. Huguenot exiles in England became interpreters of English thought to France, and prepared the conquest of the French mind by Bacon, Newton, and Locke.

  A minority of French Catholics privately condemned the massacres of the Revocation, and gave secret help and refuge to many victims. But the vast majority hailed the destruction of the Huguenots as the King’s culminating achievement; now at last, they said, France was Catholic and one. The greatest writers—Bossuet, Fénelon, La Fontaine, La Bruyère, even the Jansenist patriarch Arnauld—extolled the courage of the King in implementing what they conceived to be the national will. “Nothing could be finer,” wrote Mme. de Sévigné; “no king has done or will do anything more memorable.” 102 Louis himself was happy at having apparently completed a disagreeable but holy task. Says Saint-Simon:

  He believed himself to have renewed the days of the preaching of the Apostles . . . The bishops wrote panegyrics of him, the Jesuits made the pulpit resound with his praises . . . He heard nothing but eulogies, while the good and true Catholics and bishops groaned in spirit to see the orthodox act toward error and heretics as heretical tyrants and heathen had acted against the truth, the confessors, and the martyrs. They could not endure this immensity of perjury and sacrilege. 103

  Saint-Simon and Vauban were among the few Frenchmen who realized, at the outset, the economic loss to France through the exodus of so many industrious citizens. Caen lost its textile manufactures, Lyon and Tours lost three fourths of their silk looms. Of sixty paper mills in the province of Angoumois only sixteen remained; of 109 shops in the town of Mézières eight survived; of four hundred tanneries in Tours, fifty-four were left. 104 Ports like Marseilles declined through the loss of markets in countries that now, by the work and instructions of Huguenots, produced what formerly they had imported from France. The great reconstruction of the French economy by Colbert was partly undone; the industries that he had labored to develop in France went to nourish her competitors. As revenues from indust
ry were sharply reduced, the government fell back into the hands of the moneylenders from whom Colbert had rescued it. The French navy lost nine thousand sailors, the army six hundred officers and twelve thousand troops; perhaps this depletion shared in the defeats that almost shattered France in the War of the Spanish Succession. And the will of Protestant Europe to unite against France had been strengthened by the ominous barbarity of the persecution, and by the pleas of the emigrés.

  The Revocation may have been indirectly helpful to the arts, the manners, and the graces of life in France. The Calvinistic spirit, distrusting adornment, graven images, and levity, discouraged art, elegance, and wit; a Puritan France would have been an anomaly and a mistake. But the Revocation was a disaster for French religion. Bacon had remarked that the spectacle of the religious wars would have made Lucretius “seven times more epicure and atheist than he was”; 105 what would he have said now? No stopping point was left for the Gallic mind between Catholicism and unbelief. Whereas in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and England Protestantism had served to express rebellion against the Church, no such vehicle of resentment remained in France; the reaction against Romanism found it safer to be thoroughly skeptical than openly Protestant. The French Renaissance, unimpeded by Protestantism, passed directly into the Enlightenment after the death of the King.

  VII. BOSSUET: 1627–88

  For the present, however, the French Church was triumphant, and stood at the summit of splendor and authority. Intolerant in its corporate spirit, and cruel in its power, it had nonetheless the best-educated body of men in Europe, and its tyrants were rivaled by its saints. Several of its bishops were humanitarians sincerely devoted to the public good as they saw it; and two of them entered almost as brilliantly as Pascal, and in their time more prominently, into the literature of France. Rarely had French ecclesiastics rivaled the prestige of Bossuet, or the popularity of Fénelon.

  Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (whose middle name better fitted Fénelon) was born prosperous to a prominent lawyer and member of the Parlement of Dijon (1627). His parents dedicated him to the priesthood, had him tonsured at eight, and made him at thirteen a canon in the cathedral of Metz. At fifteen he was sent to the Collège de Navarre in Paris. At sixteen he was already so eloquent that the bluestockings at the Hôtel de Rambouillet persuaded him, shyly proud, to preach a sermon to them in mid-salon. Graduating with honors, he returned to Metz, was ordained, and soon advanced to a doctorate in theology. He was scandalized to find that ten thousand of Metz’s thirty thousand souls were God-damned Protestants. He entered into a polite controversy with Paul Ferry, a Huguenot leader; he admitted some evils in Catholic practice, but argued that schism was a greater evil still. He remained on friendly terms with Ferry for twelve years, just as, later, he was to labor amicably with Leibniz for a reunion of Christendom. Anne of Austria, hearing him preach at Metz, thought him too good for so unseemly an environment, and persuaded the King to invite him to Paris. Thither he moved in 1659.

  At first he preached to simple audiences in the Monastery of St.-Lazare, under the auspices of Vincent de Paul. In 1660 he addressed the fashionable congregation at the Church of Les Minimes near the Place Royale. The King heard him, and recognized in the young orator a judicious union of eloquence, orthodoxy, and strong character. He invited him to preach the Lenten sermons of 1662 in the Louvre; he attended these discourses with conspicuous piety, except on the Sunday when he galloped off to recapture Louise de La Vallière from a convent. The presence of the King stimulated Bossuet to clear his style of provincial crudities, scholastic scaffolding, and dialectical argument; the refinement of the court passed to the upper clergy, and generated an age of pulpit eloquence rivaling the forensic oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero. During the next eight years Bossuet made himself the favorite preacher in the chapels of the court. He became director of conscience to highborn ladies like Henrietta “Madame” d’Orléans, Mme. de Longueville, and Mlle, de Montpensier. 106 Sometimes in his sermons he addressed the King directly, usually with excessive flattery, once with an earnest call to abandon his adulteries and return to his wife. For a while he forfeited the royal smile, but he regained it by converting Turenne. In 1667 Louis chose him to deliver the funeral oration at the burial of Anne of Austria. Two years later he preached over the remains of Henrietta Maria, dowager Queen of England, and in 1670 he had the melancholy task of delivering the burial sermon for the younger Henrietta, his beloved penitent, who had died in his arms in the precarious charm of her youth.

  Those sermons over the mother and the sister of England’s Charles II are the most renowned in the literature of France—for the still more famous address of Pope Urban II, calling Europe to the First Crusade (1095), was spoken in Latin, though on French soil. The earlier of these oraisons funèbres began with Bossuet’s brave and favorite theme: that kings should learn from the lessons of history, and that a divine nemesis of revenge will punish them if they do not use their power for the public good. But instead of seeing in Charles I of England an example of such retribution, he found no fault in him except too great clemency, and none at all in his devoted wife. He apostrophized the dead Queen as a saint who had labored to make her husband and England Catholic. He digressed at length on another topic dear to him: the endless variations of Protestantism, and the disorder of morals that results from the disturbance of faith; the Great Rebellion had been God’s punishment for England’s apostasy from Rome. But how exemplary had been the behavior of the Queen after the horrible and criminal execution of her husband! She had accepted her sorrows as an atonement and a blessing, had thanked God for them, and had lived for eleven years in humble and patient prayer. At last she had been rewarded; her son was restored to his throne, and the Queen Mother might again have dwelt in palaces. She had preferred to live in a convent in France, making no use of her new fortune except to multiply her charities.

  More moving, and closer to history and French memories, was the sermon that Bossuet delivered ten months later over Henrietta Anne. He had recently been made bishop of Condom in southwest France; for this oration he came to the abbey church of St.-Denis in full episcopal state, preceded by heralds and crowned with the miter; and on his finger shone the great emerald given him by the dead princess. Usually, in these sermons, the emotion of the speaker had been checked by his thinking of death in general terms; now it was the death of one who only yesterday had been the joy of the King and the radiance of the court; and the stately prelate broke into tears as he recalled the bitter suddenness of the blow that had set all France mourning and marveling at the ways of God. He described Henrietta with no cold objectivity, but with the prejudice of love—“always sweet and peaceful, generous and benevolent” 107—and he merely hinted, with discreet brevity, that her happiness had not been proportioned to her deserts. For a moment even the careful bishop, pillar and guardian of orthodoxy, dared to ask God why so much evil and injustice flourish on the earth. 108 He consoled himself and his auditors with the remembrance of Henrietta’s dying piety, of the sacraments that had cleansed her of all worldly attachments; surely so tender and purified a spirit merited salvation, and would grace Paradise itself!

  It was through a rare mistake in judging character that Louis, moved by such eloquence, appointed Bossuet (1670) preceptor to the Dauphin, and trusted him to train the stolid, backward lad in the knowledge and character required to rule France. Bossuet gave himself faithfully to this task; he resigned his bishopric to be near his ward and the court, and he wrote for the young Louis such earnest manuals of world history, logic, the Christian faith, government, and the duties of a king, as should have made the boy a monster of perfection and power.

  In one of these treatises, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture sainte (1679, 1709)—Politics as Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture—Bossuet defended absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings with more than the ardor of Cardinal Bellarmine upholding the supremacy of the popes. Was it not said in the Old Testament
that “God has given to every people its ruler”? 109 And in the New Testament, with all the authority of St. Paul, that “the powers that be are ordained of God”? 110 Yes, and the Apostle had added: “Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves eternal damnation.” Obviously, anyone who accepts the Bible as the word of God must honor the king as God’s vice-regent, or, as Isaiah called Cyrus, “the anointed of the Lord.” 111 Consequently the royal person is sacred, the royal power is divine and absolute, the king is responsible only to God. But that responsibility lays upon him severe obligations: he must in every word and deed obey the laws of God. Fortunately for Louis, the God of the Bible had been well disposed toward polygamy.

  For the Dauphin, too, Bossuet wrote (1679) his famous Discours sur l’histoire universelle. Scandalized by Descartes’ suggestion that—given one initial push by God—all events in the objective world could be explained mechanically as following from the laws and constitution of nature, Bossuet retorted that on the contrary every major event in history was part of a divine plan, was an act of Providence leading up to the sacrifice of Christ and the development of Christianity into an expanding City of God. Again taking the Bible as divinely inspired, he centered all history on the career of the Old Testament Jews and the nations enlightened by Christianity. “God used the Assyrians and the Babylonians to chastise His chosen people, the Persians to restore them, Alexander to protect them, Antiochus to test them, the Romans to preserve Jewish liberty against Syrian kings.” If this seems foolish, we must remember that it was also the view of the authors of the Bible, whom Bossuet confidently identified with God. So he began with a summary of Old Testament history, and he performed that task with his usual flair for order, compactness, and vigorous eloquence. The chronology was taken from Archbishop Ussher’s scheme, dating the creation at 4004 B.C. Bossuet took only passing notice of the nations that lay outside the Biblical reference, but of these he gave synoptical accounts of remarkable insight and power, and showed a sympathetic understanding of pagan virtues and accomplishments. Through all the kaleidoscope of rising and falling empires he saw some advance; in him, as in Charles Perrault and other contemporary defenders of the moderns versus the ancients, the idea of progress took form and flesh, and prepared, from afar off, for Turgot and Condorcet. With all its faults, the book created the modern philosophy of history, which is achievement enough for one man.