Europe: A History (126 page)

For the enforcement of his decisions the King relied in the early days on special commissions, which would be sent out to regulate specific matters. But increasingly he relied on his
Intendants
, who were soon turned from mere inspectors of inquiry into permanent viceroys, each overseeing the financial and judicial affairs of their
généralités
or areas of competence. In the last resort he relied on the military reforms, which abolished the old noble levy and created a huge standing army entirely subordinated to royal command. This army was an instrument of internal as well as external policy.

The realities of French society bore little relation to the structures enshrined in the three traditional Estates. In theory, the Estates should have been autonomous,
self-regulating communities. In practice, they were highly fragmented; they were deprived of any serious autonomy, and all were increasingly subordinated to royal control. The clergy (the First Estate) was alone in retaining its own organization, the quinquennial assemblies. But it was deprived of any corporate initiative by the King’s patronage of over 600 leading abbatial and episcopal appointments, and by the glaring chasm of interest and outlook between high and low clergy.

The nobility (the Second Estate) had been tamed by Richelieu and disgraced by the failure of the Fronde. It was equally divided against itself. The grandees were turned into royal pensioners, boasting more titles than influence. Most of the old noble families depended increasingly on royal service, either in the
noblesse de robe
, through legal or administrative positions, or in the
noblesse d’épée
, through army commissions. Their influence was greatly diluted by the influx of a mass of upstarts and promotees—the
bourgeois gentilhommes
of whom Molière made such fun. Trouble-makers such as the petty nobles and robber lords of the remoter districts like the Auvergne found themselves brought violently to heel by hanging commissions.

As for the Third Estate, which contained everyone not included in the other two, it had no chance whatsoever of developing a sense of common purpose. The best hope of social advancement lay in buying a royal office or a patent of nobility. Least concern was shown for the peasants—the absolute majority of the population—who remained triple-taxed serfs, oppressed by their lord, their priest, and the royal officials. They lived on the verge of starvation. The academician La Bruyère called them ‘animaux farouches’. They repeatedly described their own condition in terms of ‘la Peur’, the primordial fear of extinction. Their frequent, desperate, and ineffectual revolts were part of the rural landscape.

Economic policy constituted an important part of the Great Experiment. Under Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), the original ‘homme de marbre’ and a
bourgeois gentilhomme par excellence
, a systematic plan was conceived to put the finances, taxes, and commerce of the country onto a sound footing. This
Colbertisme
represented a specially
dirigiste
form of mercantilism, and is often considered a failure, especially in the later period. But it was the engine which made all the other projects of Louis XIV possible; and it can only be judged against the colossal demands made by the King’s truly insatiable financial appetite.

In the financial sector, Colbert created the
Controle Général
(1665) through which all other subordinate institutions were supervised—the
Trésor de Vépargne
(Treasury), the
Conseil Royal
, the
Êtat de Prévoyance
and the
Êtat au Vrai
(the annual forward estimates and balance-sheet), and the
Grand Livre
(the ledger of state accounts). From 1666 the Mint struck the handsome
louis d’or
and the silver
écu
, which maintained a stable value for nearly 30 years.

In the fiscal sector, the
Caisse des Emprunts
(1674) was created to raise money from state loans. The
Ferme Générale
(1680) was created to co-ordinate the collection of all taxes except for the notorious
Taille
or land-tax (which was left to the
Intendants)
. After Colbert’s death the budgetary deficit mounted, and a variety
of expedients were tried, including the
capitation
or poll-tax in 1695, the
billets de monnaie
or paper money of 1701, and the
dixième
or state tithe of 1710.

In the commercial sector, Colbert introduced a régime which attempted to lock all private activity into state regulations, and to give priority to state enterprise, especially in manufactures and foreign trade. The
Code de la Draperie
(1669) or ‘Textile Code’ was an example of his mania for detailed regulation. The great Vanrobais textile factory at Abbeville, or the state Gobelin factory brought to Paris from Brussels, were monuments to his penchant for manufacturing. The various state trading companies—
des Indes Orientales
(1664),
des Indes Occidentales
(1664),
du Nord
(1669),
du Levant
(1670)—were monuments to his belief that the country’s total wealth could only be increased by what was brought in from abroad. Colbert’s enthusiasm for the navy, and for the construction of naval ports and state arsenals, derived from the common mercantilist dogma that foreign trade involved an international struggle over finite resources. Successful competition required military force. Significantly, France’s principal industry— agriculture—received little attention, except as the object of regulated prices and the source of cheap food.

The mobilization of France’s military resources required a sustained effort over several decades. Colbert himself laid great emphasis on the formation of a navy that could hold its own against the Dutch and the English. Apart from the traditional
chiourmes
or convict gangs which manned the galleys based at Toulon, he created a register of all the sailors and ships in the land, all liable to conscription. In twenty years he increased the ships of the line from 30 to 107, of which the four-masted
Royal-Louis
, armed with 118 cannons, was the pride and joy. He founded the naval base of Rochefort, fortified the northern ports of Brest, Le Havre, Calais, and Dunkerque, and opened naval dockyards and naval academies.

For obvious reasons, however, France looked more to its land borders than to the sea. Louis XIV set foot aboard one of his warships on only one occasion. Under the
Bureau de guerre
of Colbert’s chief rival, the ruthless war minister Francois Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois (1641–91), the main effort was devoted to the army. Louvois’s bureaucrats took control of every detail. The old noble levy was abandoned and regimental structures revolutionized. New formations of grenadiers (1667), fusiliers (1667), and bombardiers (1684) were created. The traditional supremacy of the cavalry was handed to the infantry. Subjected to rigorous drill and training, armed with flintlock and bayonet, and dressed in fine uniforms, the new formations foreshadowed the practices of the eighteenth century. The artillery and the corps of engineers, once contracted out to civilians, were integrated into the overall command. Professional officers, trained in military academies and promoted on merit, were led by commanders of renown— first the old Turenne, then the young Condé and the dashing Maréchal du Villars. Massive barracks and arsenals were built in all the major cities. On the initiative of the celebrated siege-master,
ingénieur du roi
and
commissaire-général des fortifications
, Marshal Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), a magnificent chain of 160 fortresses was constructed along the northern and eastern frontiers.
The likes of Saarlouis, Landau, Neubreisach, and Strasbourg cost France even more than Versailles. The net result was a military machine that could only be stopped by the concerted strength of all France’s neighbours. Its motto was
Nee pluribus impar
(a match for many),
[
ELSASS
]

Religion stood necessarily near the centre of affairs. Louis XIV displayed little more than conventional Catholic piety, but he was guided by the tradition which demanded that
le Roi Très Chrétien
should be master in his own house, and that religious dissidence posed a threat to national unity. After his secret second marriage to Mme de Maintenon in 1685, he was strongly influenced by the advice of Jesuits. The overall result was one of considerable inconsistency and, as in other spheres, of striking contrast between the King’s early and declining years. In 1669, when Molière’s long-delayed anticlerical satire
Tartuffe
was finally performed, it received the royal applause; in 1680 it was banned.

For thirty years Louis was a true Gallican—packing the French bishoprics with the relatives of his ministers, authorizing the Declaration of the Four Articles (1682), and provoking in 1687–8 an open rupture with the Papacy. The Four Articles, the purest formulation of Gallican doctrine, were ordered to be taught in all the seminaries and faculties of France:

1. The authority of the Holy See is limited to spiritual matters.

2. The decisions of Church Councils are superior to those of the Pope.

3. Gallican customs are independent of Rome.

4. The Pope is not infallible, except by consent of the universal Church.

But then, distressed by his isolation from the Catholic powers, Louis turned tail. In 1693 he retracted the Four Articles, and for the rest of his life gave unstinting support to the ultramontane faction. His decree of 1695, handing the episcopate full control over the livings and property of the parish clergy, earned him the lasting opposition of the radicals. In the quarrel over Quietism, his decision to favour the bombastic Bishop Bossuet, ‘the Eagle of Meaux’, against the Quietists’ champion, Bishop Fénelon, ‘the Swan of Cambrai’, offended both the aristocratic and the more spiritual elements. After all, it was Bossuet who had once enjoined Louis ‘to be a god for his people’.

In his policy towards the Protestants, Louis passed from passive discrimination through petty harassment to violent persecution. At first, under Mazarin’s tutelage, the King felt disinclined to disrupt a community that had demonstrated its loyalty throughout the wars of the Fronde. From the weavers of Abbeville to the great Turenne himself, the Huguenots were hard-working and influential. Unfortunately, breaches of the Edict of Nantes and the supposedly preferential treatment of the ‘RPR’
(religion prétendue réformée
or ‘so-called reformed religion’) were the two issues which united all wings of Catholic opinion. Hence from 1666 all Huguenot activities not specifically approved by the Edict were regarded as illegal. The first chapels were razed; a
caisse des conversions
or ‘conversion fund’ was created to reward the NCs
(nouveaux convertís)
at six livres per head. From 1679 a series of legal and military measures sought to extirpate Protestantism by.
force. In the vicious
dragonnades
of Poitou, Beam, and Languedoc, where soldiers were billeted on all families refusing conversion, unspeakable atrocities were committed. Finally in October 1685, pressed by Louvois (Le Tellier), and the depraved Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvallon, the King revoked the edict of toleration. Bishop Bossuet awarded him the epithet of the ‘New Constantine’. Up to a million of France’s most worthy citizens were forced to submit or to flee amidst a veritable reign of terror. Resistance in the Dauphiné and the Cévennes persisted for thirty years.

Similarly, in its treatment of the Jansenists, royal policy wavered between compromise and repression. Jansen’s ideas were eagerly received by one wing of the French Church, and were widely disseminated through the works of the Abbé de St Cyran (1581–1643), of Antoine Arnauld I (1612–94), and, above all, of Blaise Pascal. Jansenist activities centred on the Cistercian convent of Port-Royal in Paris and on the ubiquitous Arnauld clan, who had strong connections at Court—with the King’s cousin, Mme de Longueville, with the King’s foreign minister, Simon Arnauld, Marquis de Pomponne (1616–99), with Racine, a former pupil of Port-Royal’s school, even with Bossuet. But from the 1650s, when the ‘Five Propositions’ taken from Jansen’s
Augustinus
were officially judged heretical, the Jansenists were treated as subversives. Pascal and others were forced to publish in secret. In 1661 a Formulation of Obedience denouncing the Propositions caused an open breach; and the sisters of Port-Royal, ‘pure as angels, proud as demons’, were rusticated to a new location at Port-Royal-les-Champs near Versailles. This first round of persecution ended in the strange
Paix de l’Église
(1668), which enabled the Jansenists to sign the Formulation whilst upholding their conscientious objections ‘in respectful silence’. But further attacks were launched in concert with the campaign against the Huguenots. Arnauld
le Grand
was driven into exile at Brussels in 1679.

The decisive round followed the publication in 1693 of the
Reflexions
of the Oratorian Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719). When the ensuing furore became entangled with the other feud between Bishops Bossuet and Fénelon over Quietism, the King resolved to act. In 1705 the Pope was persuaded to retract the compromise regarding ‘respectful silence’, and in 1713 the Bull
Unigenitus
comprehensively condemned the Jansenists and all their works. In the process the convent of Port-Royal was closed, its church destroyed, its cemetery razed. The remains of Pascal and Racine had to be rescued from their tombs by night. At a stroke, Louis turned a doctrinal squabble into a lasting confrontation between the reigning Establishment of Church and State and its intellectual critics. Here lay the true beginning of the French Enlightenment.

Nothing has been more schematized in the history books than the policy of Louis XIV to the arts. This ‘Intellectual Absolutism’ is sometimes described as a model where royal taste and patronage could determine the entire cultural life of an age. ‘Classicism is made to appear as an official doctrine corresponding on the literary plane to the doctrines of monarchical order and religious unity which prevailed in the political and spiritual spheres.’
²¹
In the words of Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711), the principal literary critic of the day, ‘Un Auguste aisément peut faire des Virgües’ (an Augustus can easily create Virgils).