Louis XIV had enjoyed an unprecedentedly long reign. His successor, Louis XV, was to enjoy one almost equally long. He occupied the throne of France from 1715 to 1774. These two kings between them covered a decidedly wide span in the world's history. When the earlier of them was proclaimed, the first Puritan settlements were just fairly taking root in New England. When the second of them reached his dishonored end, the British colonies in North America were almost in the very act of organizing that armed resistance which was to lead straight to the battle-smoke of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. It is the transition from the age of Charles I and of Cromwell to that of Franklin, George Washington, and the Declaration of Independence. Much water surely had run through the nation's mills!
During all the long reign of Louis XV there were to be no important changes in the system of government for France. Wars there were to be, but they were to change the European boundaries of the kingdom very little, though they were to cost her most of her colonies and bring her grief and not glory. The epoch was not to be one of any great outward strokes of public policy, but of a gradual intellectual and social change, which, radiating from France, was to affect the philosophy and cultural life of all Europe, and then, passing at the ripe moment from the realm of theory to that of action, was to produce the greatest political explosion the world has so far known – the French Revolution, a revolution which affected by no means only France, but all civilized Europe.
The domestic annals of the reign of Louis XV are seldom significant. The old monarchy seems to stand as before; there is a semi-divine king with the solemn levers and cult of royalty, and Versailles with all its pomp and circumstance; but the master, Louis XIV, who, with all his faults, knew how to put on genuine majesty, is no longer there. The splendors become tawdry; the ceremonial hollow; and men come to recognize ever more clearly that instead of worshiping a god they are only bowing before an idol. At length the pretense wears thin. The Old Régime is then approaching ruin.
Probably the march of events would then, in any case, have ultimately destroyed the prestige and authority of the "Lieutenant of God" such as Louis XIV felt himself to be. But the process was assuredly intensified and hastened by the wretched personality of the new King. The Grand Monarch, despite his sins, knew how to look and to play his part. His great-grandson did everything possible to destroy the "divinity which doth hedge a king," not merely by the evils of his private life, but by his utter lack of dignity, his unabashed frivolity, and his gross and notorious neglect of public business. No man was ever a more dangerous if unconscious foe to autocracy than this very absolute Louis XV.
The new King was only five years old, when amid an awful hush the French courtiers were told that "Louis the Great" had passed away. A regency was of course indispensable, and the first Prince of the Blood was Philip of Orléans. The late King had left a will carefully designed to hamper this magnate whom Louis XIV had disliked, but Philip promptly swept the document aside, aided in his purpose by the Parlement of Paris, glad to assert its authority now that its great master was gone forever. The last years of the late reign had been spent in an atmosphere of piety and even of a kind of asceticism, as Louis XIV outgrew his youthful dissipations. Instantly now the restraining hand was relaxed. All France breathed easier. The Regent hardly pretended to be a pious Catholic. He is said to have celebrated Good Friday with an eleborate feast and revel. Everywhere there was a letting-down of old barriers and prohi- bitions. The oppressed Protestants lifted their heads a little. There were some attempts to reform the finances. A number of royal prisoners were let out of their dungeons. It was, in short, a general period of mental, moral, and political relaxation. France was learning to live her life without the oppressive supervision of her long-time autocrat.
Philip of Orléans was a debauchee, but he was no fool. He was on bad terms with his kinsman, the King of Spain, and therefore he leaned to friendship with England. France needed rest from wars, and down to 1733 she was, for all practical purposes, given conditions of prosperous peace. The Regent had as his main confidant and Prime Minister Cardinal Dubois, a man of low birth and equally low character, who had nothing sacred about him but his red robe, but who was, like his patron, clever and not without insight into what France required. It was therefore not at all as calamitous an epoch for the country as the personal character of its rulers might have indicated. In 1723 Louis XV was declared of legal age, although only thirteen. Orléans and Dubois expected to retain their essential power, for a boy of thirteen cannot actually govern, but both of these very equivocal men died in that same year.
After a brief interval the young King entrusted the management of affairs to another adroit churchman, the Cardinal Fleury; a personage of considerably superior quality to Dubois, and one who rejoiced in a singular piece of good fortune. He was one of the veryfew individuals for whom Louis XV maintained a real affection. So long as he lived, Fleury retained office, and he consistently favored peace and kept out of wild-goose foreign adventures. Diplomatic events were too strong for him at times. Twice he had to see France drift into serious hostilities, but at least the faults of the aggressor were not his. According to his light, and so far as his master let him have the power, he tried to reorganize the state finances and to do away with abuses which seemed to have become inveterate. In 1738 there was an event rare in the annals of the Old Régime. The royal finances balanced. It was the first time since 1672, in the days of Colbert, that a year had closed without a deficit. There was not to be another such year in France till the days of Napoleon Bonaparte.In 1743 the aged Fleury died. Henceforth in name at least Louis XV governed for himself.
France was still passionately attached to its monarchy, which seemed to sum up the glory of the country. Frenchmen taunted Englishmen with having murdered their king, Charles I – no such stain rested on the annals of "the Great Nation!" Louis XV was, for the first part of his reign, the recipient of an amount of popularity and affection which nothing in his character could warrant. "Louis the Well-Beloved" his subjects styled him. When, in 1744, he lay sick at Metz, all Paris seemed rushing to the churches to say prayers for his recovery. In the chapel of Notre Dame alone six thousand masses were required by the people in his behalf. Toward the end of his reign this popularity ceased completely, but there was never an end to the flattery and lip-service before the King's face.
Louis XV was, indeed, utterly unfortunate in his childhood and in his education. He was first left an orphan, then he became a monarch at five. His tutors taught him to bow and to dance gracefully, and to carry his part at court functions; otherwise they left him profoundly ignorant of everything that pertained to his great-grandfather's "profession of king." The young boy was filled with extreme notions of his own irresponsibility and importance. "Sire, all these people are yours!" said his tutor, the supple old Marshal de Villeroy, when from a balcony the King saw thousands of Parisians gathered to catch sight of him. The King was personally handsome: he was (when he chose to amuse himself by thinking) not without a fair amount of intelligence; but there is universal testimony to his selfishness, sensuality, and brutality. Said Choiseul (who served him later in the reign as a high minister), "He was a man without love, without spirit, liking the evil as children like to torment dumb animals, and having the faults of the vilest and most sordid." It is probable that he realized that all was not well in the Government, and that the whole State was drifting toward calamity. Deliberately he remained inactive – reforms would require unpleasant exertions, and as he remarked with iniquitous cynicism, "The machine [of government] will last through my time!" Louis XIV had, at least, always devoted weary hours to all the minutiæ of state policy. His successor's ministers counted themselves lucky if their master could spare them half an hour per day for serious business. Hunting – of which he was very fond – chatter with his favorites, drinking coffee in the apartments of his daughters, reading the reports of the secret police, and going through private correspondence which had been intercepted by his agents, consumed most of his time – when he was not indulging in pleasures ultra-sensual. Possessing all the world, this king could really enjoy nothing. "From youth to age the King was bored. He wearied of his throne, his court, and of himself: he was indifferent to all things and unconcerned as to the weal or the woe of his people, or of any living person."
All through the reign of this unworthiest of monarchs the royal prerogative seemed absolutely untouched. The fortunate ecclesiastics who were invited to preach before royalty in the chapel in Versailles exhausted their ingenuity in what was technically known as "the complement." Said one preacher in 1742, "The Lord has rendered Your Majesty the support of kingdoms and empires, the subject of universal admiration, the beloved of his people, the delight of the court, the terror of his enemies; yet all this will but raise your great soul above what is perishable and lead you to embrace virtue and to aspire to universal beatitude." Louis's own theories of his power would have rejoiced his great-grandfather. He wrote in 1766, ten years before the American Declaration of Independence: "In my person alone is the sovereign authority. Legislative power belongs to me alone. Public order emanates from me. I am its supreme guardian."
Louis was entirely wrong in his assertions of autocratic independence. The most powerful personage in France was by no means always himself, but was very often the woman he chose to take as his chief mistress. The King's life was vile; his concubines numerous enough for a Solomon; but there was usually one female whom he chose to honor above all others and to allow to interfere freely in the public destinies of France. From 1745 to 1764 this woman was Jeanne Poisson, a clever, merry, artistic bourgeoise, whom Louis XV made famous under the title of the Marquise de Pompadour. She lived at Versailles, and everybody recognized her high position and honored her accordingly. She made and unmade ministers, gave or withdrew the command of armies. Great state treaties were discussed in her boudoir. It was thanks to her, very largely, that France threw over her old alliance with Prussia, made league with her ancient foe Austria, and embarked on the utterly disastrous Seven Years' War. She was not without refined tastes, and gave to Voltaire and other prominent men of letters a modest amount of patronage. No ordinary woman, indeed, could have maintained the ascendancy which she did over a creature like Louis XV down to the very time of her death; but it was useless to look to such an uncrowned queen for any wise policy for France. Her whole aim was to use the State to reward her favorites, to pay off her grudges, to gratify her whims, and to confirm her hold on the King. Obsequiousness to her interests was a surer passport to high office than great abilities and years of faithful public service. The treasury to her and her minions was not a trust, but an opportunity. Such was the woman to whom Providence consigned the destinies of France in years when the national enemies were to be led by Frederick the Great of Prussia and the elder Pitt (Chatham) of England. Not wrongly did the French people declare her to be the author of their public woes and execrate her name before she died.
After she departed, Louis presently (1769) consoled himself with another "first" mistress, a woman of much coarser grain, the notorious Countess du Barry. She was little better than a handsome prostitute, selfish and brazen, on whom the now senile old King squandered his wealth and affection. One of the first acts of the next reign was to dismiss this woman from court, but her evil memory was not to be forgotten. In 1793, when the Revolution was running its course and the guillotine was very busy, the Jacobins arrested her, revived old scandals, and sent her to the scaffold. They slew more innocent victims.
With such a king and such female dictators the only ministers who could keep office for long were those who made it their first object to serve the royal pleasures, their second, possibly, to benefit the State. Not all of the Fifteenth Louis's ministers were hopelessly mediocre men. The King could make intelligent choices when he tried, and the Pompadour also understood the practical advantages of having things go well rather than go ill; but no minister could count on any consistent support in a given policy, much less on anything but opposition if he undertook any radical reform; and as a matter of fact France became involved in two serious wars, the first expensive and indecisive, the second expensive and absolutely calamitous, which between them made anything like a firm home policy impossible. As for "economies" the very word was hateful to Louis XV. Were not the revenues a synonym for the privy purse of an absolute monarch?" When you speak to His Majesty about economy and retrenching court expenses," ruefully wrote d' Argenson, "he turns his back on the ministers who talk to him!" The expenses of the royal court ate up a calamitously large percentage of the entire national revenues. The Pompadour seems to have enjoyed alone the personal spending of about $1,000,000 per year. The King was very fond of fireworks displays. On these nearly $1,000,000 was literally "burned up" in 1751. Even in times of peace there lacked funds to pay the army, while the salaries of the officers were in chronic arrears. Always the treasury receipts were being "anticipated"; always, after Fleury, there was a deficit; always borrowing was resorted to as an ordinary source of public income. The King was told all these things and cynically ignored them: "The only way to pay these debts is to declare bankruptcy," he coolly remarked – and continued to send in his sight drafts on the treasury.
The external history of France in this long, bad reign is largely summed up in two wars. Neither of these wars was quite so wantonly provoked as that of the Spanish Succession; but both could have been avoided by firm, peace-loving diplomacy. In 1740 the Emperor of Austria, Charles VI, died without a son. Could a daughter, Maria Theresa, inherit all that huge conglomerate of peoples even then ruled by the German Hapsburgs? Instantly every other covetous Power began scheming to dismember her dominions. France supported the claims of Frederick II of Prussia to the great province of Silesia. Prussia then seemed a very young and feeble kingdom, quite useful to France as an agent for humiliating and tearing to pieces her old Austrian rival. Louis XV plunged into this war wholly unprovoked by Maria Theresa, and against the advice of his shrewd old minister Fleury. The war soon took on a wide scope. Maria Theresa resisted stoutly. England came to her aid, attacked France by sea and sent armies to the Continent. Louis had indeed the good fortune to find in Marshal Saxe a really competent general. In 1745 he won a famous and hard-fought battle at Fontenoy in Belgium over the allied Dutch and English. It was a combat conducted with chivalrous bravery on both sides, and the result reflected great credit upon the victors, but Louis XV lacked the energy to follow up such a success. Frederick having gained Silesia was anxious to drop the war, and almost everywhere else Maria Theresa, the Austrian Empress-Queen, was holding her own. In 1748 peace was signed at Aix-la- Chapelle. Each side gave up all its more important conquests, save only Silesia which was kept by Prussia. The French had overrun much of Belgium, but Louis made no serious attempts to use these conquests to get better terms for France. In the meantime the English navy had nearly ruined the commerce of her great rival and driven her fleet from the seas. This war therefore brought nothing to Louis XV and his subjects except some glorious but useless victories, economic prostration, and a debt increased by the equivalent of nearly $600,000,000. The next war was to bring things even worse.
In 1750, despite governmental torpor and blundering, France seemed on the point of possessing a great colonial empire. The story of her attempt to use Canada as the center for a great adventure to make all North America subject to Versailles rather than to London, is a tale reasonably familiar to every American who has studied the history of his own country. It is by no means so well understood how close the French were to becoming the lords of India at the very moment their voyageurs and traders were building blockhouses along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. There can be no higher tribute to the inherent genius and capacity of the French people than this fact, that at a time when their Government seemed addicted to almost hopeless blundering, this same Government's subjects, not because of it, but in spite of it, seemed on the point of making their King the lord alike of North America and of the Golden East. This attempt, however, was now about to fail, and the failure was not entirely chargeable to the gross ineptitude of Louis XV, the Pompadour, and their selected minister.
It may be fairly granted that as a people the French have taken less readily to maritime hazards than have their English contemporaries, and that their talents have been less naval than military. Also, it may be granted, the French peasantry was held more firmly by home ties than the English, emigrated less readily, and were less open to the lure of foreign adventure. These facts, however, do not go to the root of the matter. The truth was that in the seventeenth century Louis XIV was throwing dice for the military supremacy of Europe. To humiliate and to cut short Austria, Spain, and Holland by land fighting demanded all his best energies, and in the end the task proved too great even for him. The efforts of Colbert had created for the Grand Monarch a navy able to compete on fairly equal terms with that of either England or Holland. The French ships were excellently designed, the sailors brave, the admirals skillful. When, however, the King's policy drove Holland and England into alliance, his sea power was simply overmatched. A great naval defeat at La Hogue (1692) had left the French hope- lessly at a disadvantage upon the seas. They could not hope to regain the maritime leadership, unless their Government saw fit to resign nearly all its Continental ambitions and to devote the main energies of the nation to building and sustaining a navy and a great merchant marine. This neither Louis XIV nor Louis XV was ever able or willing to do.
French naval power, therefore, continued as merely secondrate. Holland was sinking in decline, but the English fleet was becoming ever more formidable. The French colonies as a consequence remained a risky experiment. However they might prosper, the link that bound them to the home country might be severed and each colony left isolated, and doomed to be reduced separately the moment the English asserted their mastery of the seas. Nevertheless, despite this second-class navy, the attempt to found a great colonial empire came very close to success.
In 1750 France held, besides Canada, Louisiana, and her great claims on the rest of North America, the rich "sugar" colony of Hayti (western San Domingo), Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies, some trading posts on the Gold Coast of Africa, other posts in Madagascar, the prosperous islands of Mauritius and Reunion in the Indian Ocean, and a whole string of valuable trading posts on the coasts of India itself – these last so many potential starting-points for the actual conquest of India. Devoted Jesuit missionary, hardy trapper or trader, indomitable Norman or Breton seaman, clever and insinuating Bordeaux merchant – all these had coöperated first with Richelieu, then with Colbert, then with less prominent ministers to make the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy float over northern woods and tropic seas. It was a great heritage, and in the eighteenth century it was growing rapidly. The French traders, missionaries, and administrators were on the whole more flexible and adroit in conciliating the various types of natives they dealt with and ruled, than were their English rivals. The English colonial and commercial enterprise was, however, growing by leaps and bounds even faster than the French. Collision, humanly speaking, was inevitable. Had Louis XV and his ministers been statesmen, they would have recognized that there were only two things France might do: either (1) to keep out of every kind of land hostilities near home, and to concentrate the national wealth and energies upon creating a naval power fit to compete with the English: or (2) frankly to resign all schemes for colonial dominions, give up the seas to the English, and expect greatness for France solely as a land power. They did neither. They neglected the fleet, they mishandled their army, and they very naturally met with a great disaster.
The period between 1748 and 1756 was one of the most prosperous, economically, which France had ever known. All the port towns reported increased exports and imports. The sugar and coffee of the French Antilles were driving out the similar products of the English colonies. In the Turkish Levant, French commerce was likewise flourishing. It was, however, only a lull before a calamitous hurricane. Already in India an enormous opportunity was being frittered away. In 1740 the English and French alike had possessed a number of small "factories" or trading stations, mostly along the east coast of Hindustan. The English headquarters had been at Madras and Calcutta, the French at Pondicherry. So long as the power of the Mogul Emperors had been formidable, both sets of European visitors had been content to pose as mere traders. But the Mogul Empire was now breaking up. The various nawabs (viceroys) and rajahs (petty princes) had been eager to put themselves under the protection of whichever foreign invader could give them the amplest guarantees against their rivals. Native troops (sepoys) were quite willing to fight under European orders, provided the Western leaders could have a small body of their own countrymen to stiffen their armies. In India the Governor of Pondicherry had been Dupleix, a man of remarkable adroitness and energy, very skillful in winning the allegiance of the natives. He never ceased dreaming dreams and seeing visions of a great Indian Empire governed by France. In 1746 the French had actually taken Madras from the English, but it had been handed back by the treaty of peace in 1748. Had Louis XV realized that in Dupleix he had a servant who might win for him the splendid crown of the Indies, and sustained him heartily, French and not English might at this day be the official language for three hundred million Hindus. But no such support was accorded the Governor. He made various blunders which impaired his power over the natives. In 1754 he was most foolishly recalled at the very moment when the English were finding in young Robert Clive the very conqueror and proconsul that Dupleix might have been had he been well seconded by his King. The natives were not slow to discover which of the European intruders seemed the more aggressive and successful power. In 1757 Clive was to win the Battle of Plassey, which immediately gave his country control of the great province of Bengal; and which ultimately determined the fate of mighty India. A new French governor had been sent out, the brave, incompetent Lally; who came too late to prevent Clive from getting complete ascendancy over the natives. France and England were now again at open war. Lally was defeated in a pitched battle at Wandewash (1760), Pondicherry was taken, and the whole chance for an Indian Empire escaped from the French forever. It was one of those chains of blunders and disasters which make world history.
Simultaneously another like chain of disasters was destroying "New France" in North America. The friction between the two mighty colonizing powers in the Great Lakes region and at the head waters of the Ohio had already become acute before formal war was declared. The French, thrusting out from Canada, had nominally preëmpted vast regions in the Northwest and the Mississippi Valley, hemming in the British seaboard colonies by their line of forts and trading posts. But the inherent weakness of the French colonial system was already evident. There had been a vast deal of tactless interference and unintelligent regulation of Canadian affairs from Versailles; and above all French peasants had been as a rule very loath to quit their ancestral farms in sunny Touraine or Champagne to settle in a cold and utterly primitive country a thousand leagues away. At this very moment when Canada was trying to extend its boundaries so as to cramp its British neighbors, it barely reckoned 90,000 inhabitants to its rivals' 1,200,000 or more. Left to itself, therefore, Canada was bound to be cut off and destroyed, except as it was constantly sustained by men and supplies from France.
All this implied sea power and an intelligent policy at Versailles, things not to be expected in the days of Louis XV. The Government did, indeed, at the outset send to Canada an extremely able general, the Marquis of Montcalm, a leader of the best French type, also a small body of reliable regular troops to eke out the Indian allies and the Canadian militia; but from 1756 onward "New France" was practically left to shift for itself. No effective help was sent across the Atlantic, and superior British sea power was to throttle the French navy so effectively that a warship with the Bourbon colors was hardly able to show itself upon the great waters. In 1759 the battle of the Plains of Abraham, when Montcalm was slain gallantly fighting before Quebec, was to register a situation absolutely certain to have come to pass unless Louis XV made a great naval effort to relieve Canada – an effort under the circumstances simply impossible.
Formal war between England and France had been resumed in 1756. This was the once famous Seven Years' War, when by a reversal in alliance, Austria and Russia joined with the old foe of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbon Monarchy itself, in an attack on the upstart power of Frederick of Prussia – a prince who had thus to fight three great Powers at once with only England for a powerful ally. Not the slightest good reason really existed for this reversal of all diplomatic traditions by Louis XV. He was under no obligations to Maria Theresa of Austria to recover for her the Silesian province which Frederick had seized earlier. Every sign pointed to a desperate struggle with England that would consume the full resources of France, but Kaunitz, the clever Austrian Ambassador to Versailles, had worked successfully on the Pompadour to incline her favorably to his mistress, Maria Theresa, and Frederick had earned the bitter wrath of the royal favorite by his pungent criticisms of her frivolities.
In this war, although occasionally the French armies were sufficiently well led to live up to their old traditions, the national record was one of general incompetence and disaster. The Pompadour often took upon herself to name her favorites as generals. They were pitifully unequal to dealing with Frederick the Great, who ranks among the very first captains of modern times, barring only Napoleon Bonaparte. The French armies were wretchedly organized, munitioned, fed, and led into battle. If Frederick had possessed a greater kingdom, and if his Austrian and Russian enemies had been as incompetent as their ally, he would have been overwhelmingly victorious. As it was, with little more than financial and naval assistance from England, he fought the three greatest empires in Europe and held his own. In 1757 the French were not merely beaten but disgraced at Rossbach in Saxony, where the amazingly incapable Soubise, the nominee of the Pompadour, with 50,000 men was utterly routed by Frederick with 20,000. The French lost 7000 prisoners and 63 cannon. It was as great a disaster as Blenheim and far less honorable.
In the maritime struggle with England the French were at first aided by the mediocrity of King George II's Minister, but in 1757 the power passed to the elder Pitt, one of the mightiest war ministers ever known to history. Against the genius of his leadership the appointees of the Court of Versailles had pitifully slight chance. In 1759 Quebec was lost; the battle of Quiberon Bay destroyed the remnant of French naval power; and, if Pitt had continued in office, it is likely he would have enforced conditions utterly ruinous upon France. As it was, in 1761 he was forced out of the Ministry by the new King, George III, but his work was largely done. In 1763, completely at the end of his power to save his colonies or to accomplish the scheme for destroying Frederick of Prussia, Louis XV assented to the Peace of Paris. It was one of the most humiliating documents ever signed by an heir to Philip Augustus. France ceded Canada to England and part of her holdings on the African coast; she received back, indeed, her small factories in India, but under conditions which condemned her to look on helplessly while her rivals rapidly extended their power over the Hindu natives. The war both by land and by sea had exhibited the entire incompetence, not merely of Louis XV, but of the whole system for which he stood, and the pride of the French nation had been wounded to the quick by the unprecedented defeats and losses. When Wolfe won the battle before Quebec he had not merely decided that North America was to speak not French but English; he struck a deadly blow at the prestige and very existence of the Old Régime in France.
But as Louis XV had wickedly remarked, the old order "lasted through his time." After the treaty of peace there was a reasonable recovery of commercial prosperity, while a really patriotic, though not great, Minister, Choiseul, devoted himself not ineffectively to rebuilding the fleet, and succeeded so well that in the next war the French navy was to be able practically to hold its own upon the seas. He also was successful in 1768 in purchasing the island of Corsica from the decrepit Republic of Genoa. The consequence of this was that in 1769 a certain infant there born, who was christened Napoleon by his parents, came into the world as a French citizen. Various reforms were to be attempted in the judiciary and other half-hearted efforts were made to bring about better things. The Government continued, however, in its evil courses. The Pompadour was dead, but Du Barry, her successor, was even viler. Choiseul refused to cringe to her, and she united with his other foes to work on the King to dismiss him. In 1770 he was deposed as minister and banished to his estates. From this time until the end of the reign France was ruled by unprincipled and supple courtiers, whose one object was to keep office by pleasing the senile King.
Louis XV continued in his debaucheries to the end. When threatened with illness he would vehemently profess his penitence ("because his sole religion consisted of a fear of hell") only to resume his old usages when health returned. Suddenly in May, 1774, he was smitten with smallpox, and Du Barry's power vanished abruptly on the 10th of that month when with "a mighty noise absolutely like thunder" a crowd of courtiers rushed down the great staircase at Versailles to announce to his grandson that Louis XV had gone to his long account. The new rulers, Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, fell on their knees at the tidings: "God help and protect us," they prayed aloud, "we are too young to reign!"
They had need of the prayer. No great nation was ever more sorely in need of drastic reforms than was France in 1774; and for now over a generation there had been internal forces at work which might have warned any clear-sighted man that if her rulers could not give her reform they would themselves become the first victims of revolution.