THE War of the Spanish Succession had blasted the dream of making France the physical dominator of Europe. The Seven Years' War had almost destroyed her claim to be the first single Power in Europe, and yet, by a most curious paradox, never was French influence, throughout the civilized world, more potent than during this evil, degenerate reign of Louis XV. There had scarcely been a like instance since the distant day when Athens, overpowered in arms by Philip and Alexander and their unpolished Macedonians, saw her language, her letters, her art, and her philosophy imposing themselves upon an intellectually conquered world.
In the eighteenth century French was the invariable language of the diplomatist and the statesman. Frederick the Great spent much of his public energies in fighting the King of France; he spent much of his private energies in writing decidedly mediocre French verses. The world had its fashions for wigs, silk breeches, and ladies' gowns dictated from Paris. French dancing-masters ruled every ballroom. French novels lay on every great lady's table. French was chattered in preference to Russian by the great boyars and princesses of Czarina Catherine's showy and wicked court at St. Petersburg. The habits and ceremonies of Versailles were likewise slavishly copied by all the pretentious little "Highnesses, Graces, and Serenities" who ruled over and afflicted the hundred petty states of Germany. Things were about the same in the insignificant courts of Italy. Every young English nobleman would try to spend a year in Paris and Versailles to learn the language and to acquire the indefinable polish of what were admittedly the "politest" people in the world. This leadership of France was not merely confined to the realm of the dancing-master and the costume-maker, nor to the purveyors of risqués novels or vivacious comedies. A great intellectual contribution was being made to Civilization. A series of writers upon the most serious themes was coming forward, which was to dictate the thought of the nations. These writers were not to excel merely as literary artists. There was no Sophocles, no Cicero, no Shakespeare among them. Outside of France comparatively few save historical students read their works to-day; but in their generation they were to have an incalculable effect, first on all theories of physical science, moral philosophy, political science and government, and then upon the application of those theories to very practical life. "Liberty, equality, and fraternity," the great doctrine of the Revolution, was the direct product of ideas advanced by writers who in the days of Louis XV, frequented the fashionable salons, or were perhaps flung for a disagreeable interval into the Bastile.
It is also not quite correct to say that under this sinful monarch there was no change in the political life of France. On the contrary, there arose something which might be described in modern language as a regular "opposition party." This party came to center around the oft-discussed Parlement of Paris. After the unlucky wars of the Fronde the high law court of the capital had perforce been obliged to adhere pretty closely to merely legal business, and to refrain from political meddling. Louis XIV had been only sixteen when, probably at Mazarin's suggestion, he had appeared before that pretentious tribunal, "booted and spurred and with whip in hand, to tell the members roughly that he demanded an unquestioning obedience." Under the weaker rule of the Regent Orléans and of Louis XV this corps of hereditary "noble" judges grasped eagerly for its old authority. Especially did it claim the right of refusing at will to "register" (that is, enroll, promulgate, and put into effect) the royal edicts. This amounted to a veto upon the King's power of legislation, and the only method of overcoming the same was by means of a formal session called a "bed of justice," at which the King was present in person, where the monarch on his own direct authority commanded that the edicts should be registered.
The Parlement of Paris was far from containing men of unselfish and progressive ideas. Its members were quite ready to defend all kinds of old abuses so long as those abuses were profitable to themselves and to their class. Quite as many worthy edicts were refused registration as iniquitous ones; but when all was said, here was one body that was not absolutely at the mercy of King and favorites; that could interpose a very modest constitutional opposition to royal autocracy; and that could be a focus for something like real political life. The Parlement, therefore, often commanded an attention and a popularity which it did not always deserve.
The latent friction between royalty and the Parlement ex. pressed itself most characteristically in a struggle nominally centering about religion. As early as 1638, when Richelieu was lording it in France, a certain Catholic bishop, Jansenius, had died in Flanders. This prelate had written a theological work of wide acceptance in which he ventilated certain opinions about "grace" and "predestination." In the age of Louis XIV many distinguished Frenchmen had held these views, but they had awakened the angry criticism of the powerful Order of Jesuits The matter had seemed to end when the Jansenist opinions were condemned as heretical and squinting toward Protestantism, first by Louis XIV, and then in 1712 more officially by the Pope. But the Jesuits, by their arrogance and intrusion into worldly affairs, as well as by their influence at court, had rendered themselves extraordinarily unpopular with the French legal classes and with the upper bourgeoisie. It was claimed, not without plausibility, that the Pope had only condemned the Jansenist doctrines because of extreme pressure from the Jesuits, and consequently a friendliness toward this very mild form of religious dissent became one of the methods of registering disapproval of the whole decadent political régime.
The adherents of Jansenism enjoyed all the advertising which comes from a spasmodic and very unpopular persecution. In 1732 it was claimed that miracles were being wrought at the tomb of a certain prominent Jansenist at the cemetery of Saint-Médard in Paris. The Archbishop of the city gravely attributed the alleged wonders to the Devil and induced the Government to stop the scandal by closing the cemetery. A satirical epigram was soon spread all over France –
"By order of the King: it is forbidden to God To work miracles, in this place!"
The official clergy were ordered by their bishops to refuse the last sacraments, unless the dying man had accepted the Bull "Unigenitus" condemning Jansenism. Thence naturally arose scandals, contentions, bitterness, and finally lawsuits. The Parlement claimed that the much-disputed bull had never become legally part of the laws of France. Finally, in 1752, it ordered the Archbishop of Paris's excommunication of dissenters to be burned by the public hangman, seized his "temporalities," and issued an order, which American lawyers would call a "mandamus," commanding priests to administer the communion to the sick, even if suspected of Jansenism.
All theological issues had now been utterly lost in a grievously secular political broil. The King stood unequivocally committed to defend the Archbishop and the Bull "Unigenitus." How the case would have been handled by Louis XIV admits not an instant of doubt. But Louis XV had inherited only the Grand Monarch's formal prerogatives, not his masterful energy. He indeed ordered the Parlement to refrain from interfering with the clergy; then in 1753, when its members proved recalci- trant and proceeded to resign office by way of protest, he commanded them to be exiled by lettres de cachet, and talked of abolishing their court altogether and substituting a more subservient tribunal. But on the side of the Paris Parlement were all the lesser provincial Parlements and the entire legal body of France. The King recoiled before the evident popular support for the dissidents. The Parlement was reinstated after consenting to register a decree ordering silence on all religious matters, and in 1756 the Vatican tactfully intervened with conciliatory counsels. While, therefore, in theory, the decisions against the Jansenists still stood, the whole affair had wrought harm alike to the King, the clergy, and their Jesuit backers.
In this same year (1756) the Parlement protested again – this time on a very vital political matter, the right of the King to impose new taxes to meet the expenses of the war. It required a very solemn "bed of justice" to make the obstinate lawyers give way. Their motives were actually selfish. They feared lest they were in danger themselves of being exposed to taxation, but their attitude took on the color of patriotism. "We demand our rights," they declared in their protest, "only because they are the rights of the people." This was an utterance calculated to call the very ghost of Louis XIV in horror out of its grave.
A little later the Parlement was also destined to win an unequivocal victory. Its old enemies the Jesuits were losing alike their popularity, their piety, and worst of all their astuteness. They still felt secure in the friendship of the King, but at the critical moment the all-powerful Pompadour turned against them, and allowed them to go down in ruin. The Jesuits had engaged extensively in trade in the West Indies. This decidedly secular occupation involved them in a bankruptcy proceeding which turned into a serious lawsuit that was brought before the Parlement of Paris (1760). The Parlement rejoiced in its chance to investigate the whole nature and organization of the Jesuit Order, and under the cover of a judicial decision gave the opinion that the Jesuits as a body should be suppressed in France, as dangerous to the good of the realm, that their schools should be closed and their great property confiscated to the Crown (1764). Pope Clement XIII vainly interceded in their behalf; so did the Queen, so did the Dauphin. All these dignitaries weighed far less with the King (with whom the final decision lay) than did the influence and enmity of the Pompadour. Besides, Louis XV was genuinely afraid of the Parlement, and did not wish to quarrel with it on what was to him no vital matter. In November, 1764 the once powerful Jesuit Order – the persecutor of heresy and of advanced opinions everywhere – was itself suppressed in France, and in 1774, largely at French instigation, it was to be temporarily suppressed by Pope Clement XIV throughout the entire Church.
The contest between royalty and Parlement, however, had only reached a truce. In 1770 there was again a bitter contest over the attempt of the King to interfere in an important trial then going on before the High Court. The Parlement loftily declared that "the exercise of absolute power, against the spirit and letter of the constitutional laws of France, revealed a design to change the form of government." Louis XV was a weakling, but some of his ministers were men of a certain bravery. When, early in 1771, most of the high judges resigned and closed their law court as a means of coercing the King, the latter struck back.
On the night of January 19, 1771, the royal musketeers routed all the Parlementarians out of their warm beds, commanding them to sign "yes" or "no" to the question, "Will you reënter the service of the King?" The tale is, that it was Du Barry who had worked Louis up to the striking point, by pointing to a portrait of Charles I of England and saying, "Your Parlement will also strike off your head!" Most of the high judges refused to sign "yes"; and all the malcontents were at once sent into various places of exile. The provincial Parlements sustained the senior body. "You are King," warned the Parlement of Dijon, "by virtue of the law, and without the laws you have no right to reign." There was even talk of "the States General." But Louis XV had for once plucked up courage. The entire system of parlements, greater and lesser, was declared abolished, and in their place were set up various "Superior Councils" which would transact legal business quietly without meddling in politics. By the end of 1771 fully seven hundred French magistrates were in exile, and a great blow seemed struck at the main source of opposition.
This change lasted only till Louis XV was dead and Du Barry was in helpless banishment from court. The new judiciary had been absolutely unpopular and its members were very mediocre men. Public opinion clamored for a return of the Parlements, and Louis XVI, the inexperienced new King, was anxious to have as few enemies as possible. The old high judges were all summoned back and their old tribunals reëstablished. They were ordered to abstain from "fatuous opposition to the decrees of the Crown," but the future was to show that their temporary suppression had taught them no meekness. They had really been champions of privilege, not of liberty, but their quarrels with the monarchy had been so many deadly blows to the existence of the Old Régime.
The Parlement of Paris had been able to defy the "absolute" authority of the King because of a profound intellectual change which had penetrated the minds of nearly all the intelligent elements in Europe and especially in France. This change is best summed up by stating that educated men came in the eighteenth century to accept (in name at least) the guidance of "reason, that is to say the affirmation of truth, evident or demonstrated. Reason could not fail to be revolutionary, be- cause it denied tradition and built on atabula rasa. It seemed at first to be entirely disinterested, lofty and serene, but very soon it stooped to regard life, manners, and politics. Finding these unreasonable, it began to wage war against unreason, and became the philosophy of the eighteenth century."
From 1517 down to say 1700, the efforts of human thought had been mainly directed to the attack or defense of the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation and all the struggles that came after it. By 1700 most of the Western world had settled down as either permanently Protestant or permanently Catholic. Neither by blows nor arguments could either side eliminate the other, and the zest of contest was therefore lost. Men were drifting away from the questions of admission to heaven or hell, and (even as in the Italian Renaissance) were reverting to the problems of this present world. The interest in natural science was intense, old mediæval notions were sloughed off, and the foundations were to be laid for nearly all the great achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; but the practical inventions and discoveries were to be often by Anglo-Saxons and not by Frenchmen. James Watt the Briton was to invent the steam engine. Benjamin Franklin the American was to demonstrate the connection of electricity and the lightning. Nevertheless, the French achievements are not to be slighted. Lavoisier (1743-94) was to lay many of the foundations of modern chemistry; and Buffon (1707-88), a man of enormous and curious learning, was to make notable contributions to the understanding of natural history, and was even to drive one of the wedges which led to the doctrine of evolution.
What the French writers of the eighteenth century excelled in was handling the literature of politics. For the first time in many centuries the relations of man to his government, the nature of that government, its claims to obedience and to mere existence, its various kinds of faults, and the expedients whereby it might be made better, were to be subjected to a violent, penetrating, and extremely skillful scrutiny, and the results of that scrutiny were told in such a striking literary form that they received instant attention. These writers "passed in review all the ideas hitherto accepted, criticized them, and in place of those which they judged vicious or false proposed new ones, which would serve as the basis for a general reorganization" of mankind.
It is needless to say that the instant the government and social organization of France was surveyed critically in the eighteenth century, the only question for a bold man of clear vision could be, "Which evil shall I first attack?" In government there was the absurdity of "divine right"; in society, the existence of outrageous "inequality"; in religion, a régime of abominable "intolerance." Everywhere also in minor matters there were relics of feudal barbarism, excessive and wrongful regulations and restrictions upon economic liberty – shackles, in short, on mind and on body repulsive to every intelligent, freedom-loving man. The precise evils of the Old Régime will be discussed a little later. It is enough here to say its armor was utterly penetrable.
These critics had the incalculable advantage that they wrote in the most lucid, animated language in Europe. The great authors of Louis XIV had been anything but champions of liberty, but they had at least evolved from the French tongue a magnificent literary vehicle, in which it was easy – even when dealing with very sober themes – to be brilliant and almost impossible to be dull. Furthermore, French seemed then in a fair way to becoming a universal language for all Christendom. A book by Voltaire needed neither translator nor lexicon before it could be read by almost every cultivated Englishman, German, Italian, or Russian. This literature, therefore, though primarily for Frenchmen, was to win its way quickly through all the world.
It is far easier to summarize the causes and results of a war than of a great intellectual movement. Between 1730 and 1789 the literary activity of France was to be intense and Paris became "the brain of Europe"; nevertheless, the spirit of the age may be summed up in four words – Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopædists. In them were to lie almost all of the Revolutionary law and the prophets.
Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a South Country nobleman, who became a "President" of the Parlement of Bordeaux. There was nothing of the revolutionist about this thoroughly worthy and responsible high magistrate. He was the least radical of the men we shall mention, but not the least to be responsible for pregnant ideas. In 1721 he wrote a brilliant satire, the "Persian Letters," which, under the guise of letters sent home by two Orientals traveling in France, forms a clever and really scathing criticism of the foibles and vices of the day. Subsequently he visited England, became acquainted with English leaders and institutions, and in 1748, after twenty years of meditation and composition, published his great work, "The Spirit of Laws," possibly the most important book on political science since Aristotle wrote his "Politics." Montesquieu was not a rabid iconoclast. He undertook to seek out the foundations for various types of laws and political institutions; he analyzes the different kinds of governments, so far as known in his day, and states their weaknesses and excellencies. He is bitter in his arraignment of "despotism," and although the most obvious type of despotism was found in the East – for example, in Turkey – he hardly conceals his opinion that France was a despotism also. He makes still less concealment of his admiration for the already well-developed constitutional liberties of England, which he pretty plainly commends to the French for a national example. Very calmly and deliberately also he attacked other evils of the day, such as religious intoler- ance (Protestants were still occasionally being executed in France) and slavery. The book produced a great effect "in a society which is sometimes described as wholly frivolous. In eighteen months there were twenty-two editions."
But Montesquieu was the mere forerunner before a more famous and loud-voiced prophet of the new liberalism. Not many persons to-day can realize the influence and prestige enjoyed in the second half of his life by François Voltaire. Certainly no other writer in modern times received half of the honors showered upon this "prince of philosophers" by contemporaries. Kings were presently to be his correspondents and patrons, and to tremble at his sarcasms. The Pope in the Vatican was to dread him like a second Mohammed. He was, it is fair to say, the most terrible personal foe the Catholic Church ever encountered, barring only that very different champion, Martin Luther, and on the political side he was the most formidable enemy the Old Régime ever encountered, barring none. To-day only a sprinkling of Americans and probably not very many Frenchmen read even a twentieth of his voluminous writings, yet in his day a new book or pamphlet by Voltaire would be on every parlor table in Europe. He was, in short, a man of his age, and with the passing of his age his influence declined correspondingly, for he was, when all is said, a propagandist, not a literary artist; and the worst evils he attacked are to-day as a rule buried in the limbo of history.
Voltaire (1694-1778), be it noted, came of a good bourgeois family and was duly sent to school at a Jesuit seminary, to be given the preliminary education for the bar. He became disgusted alike with the life of a lawyer and with his sanctimonious professors. By 1717 he had fallen into evil courses, quarreled with his family, and got himself clapped into the Bastile for a violent lampoon on the Regent. He was not imprisoned long, but for some years he led a struggling existence, writing plays which had only slight success. Then finally he had a personal quarrel with a member of the powerful Rohan family; was flung once more into the Bastile, and when again released was banished to England (1726). This banishment was to cost the champions of the Old Régime sorely. Voltaire made the acquaintance of many English rationalists and advanced thinkers, and became steeped in the more destructive parts of Locke's philosophy. When he came back to France in 1729, he had been equipped with a full battery of radical ideas about politics, philosophy, and religion, which his own versatile genius soon expanded, then used with terrific effect.
Voltaire had from the outset displayed a willingness to criticize Church and State, and to attack religious persecution as iniquitous and irrational. Now he became far more confessedly the champion of "reason" and "philosophy" as the true guides for intelligent men, as against "superstition," which it was clear enough was very concretely the Catholic Church. Christianity to Voltaire meant simply Catholicism, and that too the grievously worldly and unspiritual Catholicism of the French Church. How easy to hold up to ridicule a bishop who was clamoring for a new dragooning of the Huguenots, when the holy man himself enjoyed all the palaces, valets, and loveintrigues of a luxurious marquis! The Church was the cornerstone of all the traditionalism, mediævalism, intolerance, and political absolutism as it then existed in France. It defended the abuses of the monarchy, because the monarchy provided it with dungeons, fetters, and gallows to repress heresy, and also with revenues for its luxurious prelates. Therefore Voltaire turned loose his full batteries of ridicule, sarcasm, and direct criticism upon the Church. He was himself, he professed, not an atheist, but a "deist." To-day he would probably be found connected with some vague form of Unitarianism. Late in his life he was to fall out with the extremists who after attacking the Church were to attack the need of a deity also.
By almost every possible literary means Voltaire smote upon the old order, ecclesiastical and political. He had a long life and he was an astonishingly prolific writer. Satires, novels, epic poems, dramas all came from his pen, in unending succession. He wrote a "Treatise on Metaphysics," an historical sketch on "The Age of Louis XIV," risqué comediettas and also pompous tragedies. Soon after his death in 1778 there appeared a final edition of his works. It required seventy volumes. Voltaire was not a literary artist of the very first order, but he was a pastmaster of an extremely pungent style. His paragraphs cracked like a whip over the backs of hypocritical ecclesiastics and obscurantist defenders of old abuses. In their day many of his books and pamphlets were a delight to read. Even those who cringed and cried out at his attacks on themselves, were enchanted with his genius the moment he turned to attack some rival. Had he been living to-day he would doubtless have won fame as the editor of an incomparably audacious, widely read, hated, and popular newspaper.
This man's personal history cannot quite be ignored. His private-life gave no lessons in morality. After his return from exile in England, he lived in relations of notorious intimacy with a clever, licentious, married lady of quality, Madame du Châtelet. For a short time, about 1745, he made his peace with the court and was made royal historiographer at the instigation of none other than the Pompadour herself; but within a little over a year he outwore his welcome and was glad to quit Versailles. Madame du Châtelet died in 1749 ending a very sordid romance. In 1751 Voltaire visited Berlin at the pressing invitation of the other most distinguished European of the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great. The King of Prussia boasted that he was a philosopher and guided his state by the rules of enlightened reason. Why should he not patronize this second Plato? But the King was too masterful, and Voltaire, as a guest, did not prove well-mannered, discreet, or submissive. In 1753 the great Frenchman quitted Potsdam in high dudgeon, after having lost all his favor by publishing a satire upon Frederick himself. In 1758 he settled on a handsome estate near Geneva and there spent his old age, his pen busy up to the end, delighting in innumerable controversies, often in behalf of the oppressed Huguenots. Finally in 1778 he revisited Paris after an absence of twenty-eight years. The court gave him little welcome, but by the Academy, by distinguished foreigners, and by all men of science and letters he was hailed as the chief champion of "enlightenment" in the world. At the performance of his play "Irene," he sat in his box crowned with laurel amid the plaudits of a great audience; but the excitement of the celebrations were too great. On May 30 he suddenly sickened and died. The tale is that the priests thrust themselves to his bedside, but that he petulantly motioned them away, and the Church was denied the final capitulation of one of its most inveterate enemies.
From such a versatile writer it is impossible to expect any well-defined programme or philosophy. Voltaire's boast and aim was to dethrone "superstition" and to substitute "reason." He worked in the eighteenth century, when modern science was in its childhood, and when many solutions for natural problems, which as answers had seemed delightfully sound and plausible, had not yet been exploded. It was his constant puncturing of shams, his pitiless and ceaseless attacks on old abuses which stood merely because they were venerable, his ardent championing (sometimes at considerable personal risk) of individuals obscure and oppressed, that made his main impression on the life of the age. Full as he was of dreams for the future, he believed the world was about to reform itself without serious struggles and without bloodshed. He expected kings to learn to govern in the spirit of philosophy, and that these "enlightened despots" would render popular rights unnecessary. He was no believer in democracy. "We have never pretended to enlighten shoemakers and servants," he wrote. "What the populace wants is guidance and not instruction." Although he had quarreled with Frederick the Great, he recognized in that extraordinary Prussian all the benefits which a thoroughly efficient king could confer upon his people. Voltaire's ideal was simply of another Frederick with whom he could live in personal harmony! But the lesson which Voltaire impressed upon his age was not that of submission to a superior type of kings – it was to question or actually to deny every kind of existing authority.
The part of constructive philosopher for the new day fell to a very different genius. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) was the son of a Geneva watchmaker. He was therefore born in a small Swiss Protestant city that was not subject to France, but his whole influence lay in the greater country, and he there spent much of his life. In him again we meet an individual of deplorably vagabond and non-moral tendencies, whose life was a flat contradiction to very many of his famous dogmas and
preachments. By his own statement he had, during his life in Paris, five children by a certain mistress, all of whom were promptly consigned to the foundling hospital. Later he became famous as an author, received the patronage of the great, visited England, and although his later years were turbid, he died in a state of comparative reputability in 1778. In the final decade of his life he was certainly abnormal, and very likely was not quite sane; indeed, there is a tinge of abnormality running through all his writings, a fact which no doubt tended, within certain limits, to add to their effectiveness.
Rousseau's writings almost defy classification. They can hardly be called novels, though some are cast in a very thin narrative form. They are not poems, not even high-falutin prose poems. They are hardly formal essays. He is extremely, from a modern standpoint he is absurdly, sentimental, but this quality was received with far more sympathy and enthusiasm in the eighteenth than in the twentieth century. Above all, he is "a describer – a describer of the passions of the human heart and of the beauties of nature"; and able, it should be added, to apply this interest in the passions to the problems of economics, laws, and political science. In other words, with Rousseau political philosophy became intensely human – and consequently easy to understand by persons who would have been left numb by any formal treaties.
Rousseau's most famous work was the "Social Contract," in which his doctrine for the State was stated in extremely remarkable language. More than any contemporary he not merely denounces the abuses of the age, but argues that man has gone through a long process of degeneracy, thanks to the iniquitous developments of civil law, church authority, and social custom. Rousseau had read many travelers' tales, and he solemnly held up the unclothed islanders of Tahiti (about the most remote region he could think of) as unspoiled, virtuous, and happy beings, to whose innocence it would be no disaster for us to revert. "Man is born free," he declared in a most striking sentence, "and everywhere he is in chains." He goes on to examine the basis for all kinds of authority, and describes society as growing "out of an ideal primitive condition of individual independence, by means of a 'social contract' whereby all individuals consented to abandon their individual liberty, not into the hands of any King or Governor, but of the community." The corollary of this doctrine was very plain. Monarchs had usurped the authority which had once belonged to the sovereign people. But no length of time could make this usurpation valid. The right of the community to determine its own destinies was inalienable and inviolable, and "all the rulers of the earth were mere delegates of the people, who, when they are displeased with the government, have the right to alter or abolish it."
It requires little insight to see where such a theory left the power of Louis XV. The "Social Contract" naturally did not make pleasant reading for the royal censors. It was wisely published in Amsterdam in 1762, and its appearance was one of the reasons why Rousseau was obliged to depart very suddenly from France to Switzerland that same year. But it was beyond the power of King, censors, or Parlement of Paris, as things then went in the realm, to prevent the book's wide circulation. Government displeasure added to the reader's zest and drove home the argument. Rousseau did not stop at criticizing monarchy. He not merely attacked the Catholic Church (Voltaire was doing that): he proposed a kind of denatured "Civil Religion" with all dogmas about the supernatural omitted, and accent laid on the mere existence of the deity and the bare moralities. He denounced all forms of religious intolerance as great sins against the State, because the moment the priest began to make the civil magistrates do their bidding to punish heretics, "the sovereign is no more a sovereign even in temporal matters. From that time the priests are the true masters, the kings are only their officers."
Rousseau also expressed a marked distrust for what we should call "representative" political institutions. The best type of government for him was that in which all citizens participated very directly. He was thus the advocate of extreme democracy. He knew very little of the history of his own times. His examples were frequently drawn from old Athens and Rome as he imagined them from a reading of Plutarch, and as was later to be confessed of himself by one who accepted Rousseau's doctrine and followed it to the bitter end (Vergniaud), "he had dreamed they were in Rome, and he woke to find they were in France!" All this is simply saying that the acid tests of time and experience have made sore havoc with Rousseau's dogmas and theories. But their influence and effect in a feebly critical age were electric. The "Social Contract" and its associated and hardly less famous books, were passed out by the lending libraries, not by the day, but by the hour. To halfeducated young lawyers like Robespierre, to generous young girls like the one who became Madame Roland, they seemed a new gospel, an infallible interpretation of life, and a clear message of how to remedy its many evils. "They did not merely gain an intellectual adherence from many, but they inspired a fanaticism equal and closely akin to religious passion. The 'Social Contract' became the 'Bible of the Revolution.'"
These three writers were the moving personalities, but the spirit of the new age expressed itself also in a great literary work, the "Encyclopædia." There had been earlier compendiums of human knowledge, and in fact the work in question was directly inspired by "Chambers's Encyclopædia" in England. But the eighteen formidable tomes of the set which appeared in France between 1751 and 1772 were much more than a catch-all for what then passed as sound information. The moving spirit and editor was Diderot (1713-84), a profoundly iconoclastic philosopher, who could far exceed the skepticism of Voltaire, and he was assisted by a kindred spirit, the famous mathematician D'Alembert (1717-83).
Their famous "Encyclopædia" sought not only to give information, but also to guide opinion. The prospectus announced it as "a general tableau of the efforts of the human mind in all its variations and through all the ages." It was manifestly opposed to the Church and it committed the unpardonable crime of treating religious dogma historically. As it progressed, as the opposition to it and the vain attempts to suppress it increased, it developed into a regular "war-machine" attacking both the Church and the still more despotic Government in general, as well as the whole Christian religion. All this made the history of its publication very troubled. Repeatedly its issues were suspended, its editors harassed, the sheets and plates solemnly seized at the printers and carted to the Bastile, only to be released after anxious delays. But the best intelligence of France was supplying the subject-matter for the "forbidden" book. The non-controversial articles (of course an extremely large part of the work) were authoritative and admirably written. Voltaire encouraged the undertaking and was a considerable contributor. Kings and emperors were on the list of subscribers despite the censor's oft-repeated (and oft-remitted) bans. It was impossible in the end to suppress a work edited by such a man as Diderot whose fame was such that when he was in personal difficulties Catherine the Great, Czarina of Russia, helped to pay his debts; and when many of his colleagues and collaborators were of hardly less influence and prestige in Europe. The "Encyclopædia" popularized and made widely available the new science and the new philosophy. It supplied a perfect arsenal of well-assorted facts for every critic of the old institutions. The articles were alike clear and clever, and possessed readable qualities rare indeed in works of reference. The viewpoint of the new "philosophy" cropped out everywhere. At each turn of the pages there were arguments for freedom of person, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, as well as commercial and industrial freedom, coupled with a constant war on all religious institutions as forming an obstacle to liberty.
Space fails, to discuss the other intellectual leaders of the day, especially the "Economists" who added their pungent criticisms to the existing economic order. Quesnay, court physician to Louis XV, was supple enough to retain his important post, while constantly preaching a doctrine of non-interference by the authorities in ordinary human affairs, which would have seemed utter heresy to Colbert. "Not too much government: not too much regulation!" were his constant maxims.
And so these ardent "philosophers" wrote their books, spun their theories, or conversed in the salons of duchesses. As was said of the hospitality of one of them, Holbach, at his house "ten or twenty guests gathered to enjoy good fare, excellent wine, superior coffee, and the best talk in Europe. Religion, philosophy, and government, literature and science were discussed in their turn; there was no theory too bold to be advanced or to find supporters."
Only slowly, very slowly, was all this fine talk by the "enlightened" to penetrate outside of the circle of bag-wigs and silver buckles into the lesser nobility and lower bourgeoisie and then into that great vulgar mass of the unenlightened in whom these elegant gentlemen who started the movement took such great theoretical interest. Yet there is ground for saying that there was a great, if almost silent, penetration of a large fraction of the French people, at least of the population of Paris, between say about 1750, when Voltaire first displayed his ascendancy, and 1789, when the full results of the new gospel were to become astonishingly manifest. In the meantime these good philosophers went happily on their way, believing that merely by expounding correct theories society would painlessly reconstitute itself. As a distinguished historian, Lavisse, wrote of this age: "When, owing to the faults of its kings, the country detached itself from royalty, it raised itself all at once to the idea of humanity. French writers in the eighteenth century rediscovered this idea, which had been lost since the time of Plato, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, or, at least, had been replaced in the Middle Ages by the ecclesiastical idea of Christianity, and later on by the political idea of [a united] Europe."
It remains to see the events which preceded the hour when the new theories were to be translated into action.
Louis XVI (1774-92) was the grandson of Louis XV. If he had walked in the evil ways of his predecessors few might have blamed him, but thanks to a wise and pious mother he was a far more excellent man. Even as he himself protested, it was a misfortune that he came to the throne so young. He had been trained in paths of personal rectitude, but he had received no serious education in his "profession of king." Few rulers ever had better intentions, and few had greater difficulties in giving effect to honest desires. When he was proclaimed at the age of twenty, he is described as "a large boy, heavy, powerful, with a great appetite, very fond of physical exercises, of hunting, or of working as a lock- or black-smith." Such a personage would never make an effective "Sun King" or a "First Gentleman of Europe."
The real question was, of course, would he make a tolerable ruler? He was honest and high-minded, but he soon showed that he was without acute intelligence. He distrusted himself greatly, and was constantly weighed down by the fact that "every one of his actions influenced the fate of 25,000,000 human beings." This consciousness did not, however, spur him on to resolute action. It made him awkward, self-conscious, and very willing to lean on others, and those others were not usually the wisest men in France, but the King's own family and familiars who had the right of access to him. He was often painfully unstable. His own brother declared that the King's mind was like two oiled billiard balls, impossible to keep in the same place together. To Louis's own great hurt he was especially in the hands of his wife, the famous and unfortunate Marie Antoinette.
The Queen was the daughter of the puissant Maria Theresa of Austria, a sage lady who wrote the younger Princess many letters of excellent advice which she seldom followed. Marie Antoinette was one year younger than her husband. At first it had not been a very happy marriage – a vivacious, pleasureloving young Queen, and a King awkward, shy, and ponderous. Gradually, however, the two grew together the marriage was a really happy one; but the increasing influence of his wife was to bring no good to Louis.
Marie Antoinette had the saving qualities of being really a pure woman with good intentions and physical courage. If she hardly knew how to live, she in the end knew how to die. But she was destined to be the evil genius of the Old Monarchy in France. Thanks to her, more than to any other single culprit, the last chance of peaceful evolution was to be thrown away. She was ignorant, frivolous, impatient of all restraint. She let herself be involved in compromising positions, and she enjoyed compromising friends among the nobility. Her highborn confidants gained an evil fame for their rapacity, their defense of all kinds of abuses, and for their efforts to check any reform which threatened their own precious profits and pleasures. This Queen, who loved to whirl in masked balls at the Opera, could never view the political situation from other than a personal standpoint. She could be a gracious hostess at an extravagant court fête at Versailles, but could never discover wherein the public treasury really differed from the King's private purse. There is no real evidence that she looked on the widespread miseries of the French lower classes as calling for more than so much patronizing charity, or discovered that the crown of France was not given her husband for one form or another of kingly enjoyment. It was therefore a national calamity when this beautiful, versatile, strong-minded woman gained a mastery over the weaker mind of Louis XVI.
Her malific influence was directly supplemented by the King's two brothers, the Count of Provence and the Count of Artois. Both of these princes had views substantially as shortsighted as their sister-in-law's. They consistently opposed all reforms, and intrigued against every minister who threatened to show himself a reformer.
The reign of Louis XVI between 1774 and 1789, when the Old Régime ceased to control the destinies of France, revolved mainly about two things; they were very different theoretically in their nature, but both of them aided to topple down the Monarchy. These were the desperate struggle to put through certain reforms and to avert national bankruptcy, and secondly there was the war with England in behalf of America.
Louis XVI began his government admirably, by taking for his Finance Minister Turgot, one of the ablest and most enlightened statesmen in the kingdom, a man who had collaborated in preparing the "Encyclopædia," and who, as intendant of the great district of Limoges, had shown himself a first-class practical administrator and reformer. Turgot made a truly noble attempt to put a stop to the almost eternal deficit, to cut off the grosser forms of extravagance in the royal household, which ate up so much of the revenues, and most important of all, to uplift the economic prosperity of France by abolishing the absurd and famine-producing restrictions upon the free trade in grain throughout the kingdom, also to work to the same good end by destroying the hopelessly outworn trade corporations which had been strangling French commerce and industry. Finally he abolished the royal corvées upon the peasants; that is to say, the obligation to render a certain amount of unpaid labor upon the roads and other public works. In place of this forced labor for the peasantry alone was to be substituted a "territorial tax" to be spent for the same objects, but to be paid by all the proprietors of the district benefited – noble or non-noble.
These were not fundamental or revolutionary reforms, but they might have been the opening wedge for greater things. Turgot was not a democrat. What he did, he strove to accomplish only by means of the royal authority, or, as the age loves to call it, by "enlightened despotism"; but instantly all the beneficiaries of privilege, all the petty recipients of pickings and stealings, all the great magnates who battened upon the old abuses, were at him in wrath. The Parlement of Paris (just reëstablished over Turgot's protest) hastened to protest against his edicts, and finally the King, who had put him in power, and who had tried honestly for a while to sustain him, deserted Turgot when Marie Antoinette added her criticisms. "Only Monsieur Turgot and I really love the people," remarked Louis plaintively – but he let him depart May 12, 1776, not heeding the prophetic words his Minister had written him a little earlier, "Do not forget, Sire, that it was weakness which brought the head of Charles I to the block."
With the dismissal of Turgot went the last real chance – though men knew it not – that the Old Monarchy could reform the country and itself without a cataclysm. From 1776 to 1789 all that the royal ministers could do was to try to stave off the inevitable.
Turgot's successor was, however, in a narrower way, a really capable man – Necker. Being a Protestant and a citizen of Geneva, he was only given the title of "Director" of the King's finances, but he was in truth a most formidable minister. Necker was a financier pure and simple. His aim was not to reform rotten social institutions, but to administer in a business-like manner the King's resources such as they then were. Wealthy men trusted him and loaned the Government money on favorable terms; but constant loans are an unsatisfactory method of filling the treasury, and to make things worse, in 1778, France went to war with England to secure American independence. The cause was a good one, but modern wars are never inexpensive. The embarrassments of Necker were increased by the heavy demands for war funds. He had perforce to render himself unpopular at the court by constantly preaching "economy" to King, Queen, and satellites, even if less harshly than had Turgot. Finally in 1781 he published a formal official statement of the condition of the finances. For the first time it seemed possible to tell just where the public moneys went. The court favorites and pensioners were scandalized to have all the details of their great incomes from the treasury blazoned over France. Their rage against Necker was indescribable. In May, 1781, the King sent him the way of Turgot. The Old Régime had set its face, not merely against reforms, but even against a decent business administration.
After an unimportant interval, in 1783 there came a new Finance Minister, Calonne, who pleased the royal circle much better. Calonne was a supple courtier. He knew his post depended on the good graces of a rapacious cabal. He had an avowed philosophy which carried him a considerable distance. The only way to get money was to borrow it, "but a man who needs to borrow, must appear to be rich, and to appear rich one must dazzle by one's extravagance!" For the three years following life at Versailles had never seemed so gay, the court so luxurious, money so easy. It was as if Calonne was giving the royal and noble ladies and gentlemen their last brave fling before exile or the scaffold. Pensions, palaces, extravagant fêtes, every kind of lavish expenditure – Calonne found money for everybody and everything. Peace had been made with Eng land, but Calonne did not curtail expenses. In three years he borrowed the equivalent of $280,000,000 – more than Necker had borrowed to sustain the whole war for America. For a little while he succeeded in his policy: rich bourgeois bankers loaned him great sums. Then suddenly in August, 1786, the fact dawned on the court that the treasury was empty, that another loan was impossible, and that something desperate had to be done.
What followed is the mere succession of one stop-gap after another: a meeting of "Notables" (selected noblemen) to counsel with the King on the evil state of the nation; the dismissal of Calonne (1787); the assumption of the finance ministry by a worldly churchman, the Archbishop of Brienne; a fierce quarrel between the new minister and the Parlement over some proposed edicts, followed (1788) by an audacious decree of the Parlement declaring that " France is a monarchy governed by the King according to the laws," and asserting that only the States General could change the fundamental laws of France. Matters were obviously drawing to a climax.
Bankruptcy was not the only force, however, which was hurrying the Monarchy along to the precipice. The story of how France intervened in our behalf in the War for Independence is of course known to all Americans. The motives of Louis XVI and his ministers who took up arms against England in 1778 were not entirely those of sympathy for the struggling demo crats beyond seas, whatever might have been the enthusiasms of the young Marquis de Lafayette. Vergennes, the Foreign Minister, was a cautious and crafty old statesman who would not send more than money, munitions, and other indirect aid to America, until the surrender of Bourgoyne made it fairly evident that the colonists stood more than an even chance of victory. Then the opportunity to inflict a great humiliation on the old British foe, and to avenge the loss of Canada and India was not to be resisted. But it is not to be denied that France would never have entered upon an expensive and distant war, where the chances of direct gain were scanty, if the best intelligence of the nation had not been swept into sympathy with the ideals of the homespun colonials three thousand miles away. When Jefferson, inspired by the philosophy of Locke, wrote that "all men were created free and equal," he struck an answering chord in the hearts of the great intellectual class that had saluted Voltaire as a sage, and studied the books of Rousseau as those of a prophet.
In this war the French fought far better than they had twenty years earlier. There was little land fighting save in America where Rochambeau with a sturdy corps of French veterans rendered invaluable service in strengthening Washington's army, and delighted their allies both by their valor and their good discipline. It was on the sea that the French showed they had not lost the grim lessons of the Seven Years' War. Their navy had been largely rehabilitated. The English were put to the unwonted experience of having to fight several drawn naval battles; and, finally, in 1781 the crowning mercy for Americans at Yorktown would have been impossible save for the presence of the great blockading fleet of Comte de Grasse, which hemmed in Cornwallis by sea while Washington throttled him by land. De Grasse was indeed the next year to lose a considerable naval battle in the West Indies, but the whole course of the war showed clearly enough that it had not been national ineptitude, but sheer governmental inefficiency which in the past had kept the French navy from fighting the English squadrons on equal terms.
The war had ended in 1783. The English had not been beaten badly enough to warrant demanding severe terms, except, of course, the release of America, but France recovered several of her minor colonies which had been seized earlier and the whole struggle ought to have added to the prestige of Louis XVI. That this did not happen was partly due to the new strain upon the treasury, but still more to the inevitable reaction from contact with America. Thousands of young Frenchmen were to return home to tell of an unspoiled land, without privileged classes, artificial customs, or high taxes; and where seemingly all the more practical parts of Rousseau's theories were being put into execution most happily. In Paris itself, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, that canny Bostonian, who was American Envoy to France between 1776 and 1785, exerted an incalculable influence, not merely in behalf of his country, but of democratic ideals in general. Lofty monseigneurs and bejeweled countesses went into delight over this seemingly guileless Yankee, with "his bland face, his unpowdered hair, his gray clothes, and his general patriarchal simplicity which seemed like the incarnation of the 'natural man.'" And the envoy had received all the homage with never a smile upon his crafty old lips, doubtless glad of anything which might serve his country. He was innocently and probably unconsciously undermining the power of the very King from whom he was soliciting men, money, and ships.
Peace with England had been made in 1783. Five years later Brienne had been defied by Parlement when he tried to get it to register new laws, to give the King more money. After that events marched rapidly. In the provinces local parlements and estates (representatives of the three "orders") were calling for a "States General" – the representatives of the whole French nation – as the only authority entitled to cure the grievously diseased body politic. There had not been a States General since 1614, but its memory was not lost. It seemed the one thing possible and needful. The treasury was empty. New taxes might have meant a revolt. On August 8, 1788, Brienne an- nounced that the King would convene the States General of France on the 1st of May, 1789. In the meantime, to tide over the finances, the King soon dismissed the incompetent Brienne himself and restored Necker, at the magic of whose name trustful capitalists consented to arrange a new loan.
The fall, winter, and spring of 1788-89 were spent in intense political bustle and anticipation. A great nation, pathetically ignorant of free political life, was trying to hold a general election of popular representatives, to conduct an orderly discussion of public affairs, to make up a programme of reasonable reforms, and to set its face toward a changed future.
All Europe was watching France. She was confessedly the intellectual and cultural leader of the Continent, yet the kings and emperors beyond her borders were not greatly disturbed at happenings around Paris. Surely, they comforted themselves, their "brother" Louis XVI was in a perilous way with his subjects, and would be in no condition to attack his neighbors. That the ideas just penetrating the French masses would also penetrate and agitate the masses of Germany, Italy, and Russia entered no man's head. Governmental Europe heaved a sigh of relief when it saw the nation of Louis XIV seemingly engrossed with wholly domestic problems. Where was the prophet to tell them that eight years after 1789 a young man, born beneath the French flag in Corsica, would be dictating the Peace of Campo-Formio to the trembling Princes of the, House of Hapsburg, and that the world would be on the eve of another, and a most skillful and almost successful attempt, to found a new Roman Empire?